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posted by janrinok on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the got-to-have-my-MTV dept.

When power goes out in the rural town of Soroti in eastern Uganda, store manager Hussein Samsudin can only hope it won't go on so long it spoils his fresh goods.

Another shop owner, Richard Otekat, 37, has to pay a neighbour hourly to use his generator during blackouts as he can't afford to buy one himself, while others simply go without.

However residents of the town, surrounded by thatched huts, rivers and grasslands, hope a new solar plant, which went into operation last week, will bring an end to their electricity woes.

The $19 million (18-million euro), 33-acre solar plant—the first of its kind in East Africa—can produce 10 megawatts of power that is fed into Uganda's national power grid.

The project is crucial as Uganda seeks new ways to bring electricity to the 80 percent of its 40 million-strong population that does not have access to power.

Mud hut, solar panels.


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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday December 22 2016, @10:53PM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday December 22 2016, @10:53PM (#444863) Journal

    Would rather have a mud hut (probably more like some form of adobe--don't look down on these people, they're not savages!) with a clean, steady, reliable energy source than some 3,500 square foot vinyl-sided fuckbox running on hell knows what pumped out of the ground.

    Granted this stuff doesn't (yet?) scale well to a US-sized grid, but, one step at a time. This could be instrumental in freeing smaller nations from the proxy-warfare-waging grip of larger ones who use resources as an incentive/threat.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday December 23 2016, @01:02PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday December 23 2016, @01:02PM (#445022) Homepage
    Absolutely. This is literally a proving ground. I'm not sure scaling to national sizes is that important, as country boundaries are an artifiial concept anyway. Scaling to national levels in Estonia is a smaller task than something serving only half of California, for example. Provide to population centres, no matter what label(s) those populations attach to themselves.
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