Don't know about this, but I'm the last one (I think) to get involved in elbinario. Not currently, that's for sure. Can someone share about this? @elbinario
In 2005 the Spanish government encouraged citizens to build solar panels on their lands and guaranteed a fix price for the electricity produced. Then came foreign investors into Spain and build massive solar panel farms. Faced with an abundance of electricity the government rescinded the price guarantees to the involved citizens who then had problems to service the debts they had incurred to install the panels in the first place.
Maybe -only maybe- the fact that tons of politicians from the biggest political parties end working for electrical and gas companies has something to do with this. 😤
Corruption and nepotism are no reason to believe that otherwise renewables could somehow escape market dynamics. In fact, citing corruption and nepotism is a standard move by the environmental movement worldwide to deflect from certain underlying economic and infrastructure realities that make renewables incapable to properly power and decarbonize industrial societies. At least in my opinion.
Well, I don't know about the "environmental movement". I've witnessed how several groups of people put together completely off the grid solar systems, and they've been having their energy needs covered for years. I guess it is not a question of "escaping market dynamics", but escaping market as a whole. And by the way, good luck avoiding corruption and nepotism with any energy system you prefer...
... and good luck trying to run a steel mill, the chemical industry, or any larger form of industry with "off the grid" approaches. :-)
But true, the question becomes: Can industrial societies, their production hubs and infrastructures be run non-violently and collaboratively?
"Small is beautiful" doesn't mean that every collective has its own wind turbine and PV the panel of which which was assembled by slave labour in Xinjiang, but that each neighbourhood has its own SMR reactor. But even then I guess the groups you have in mind would lack the expertise to run them. At least for now.
Those people living "off the grid" presuppose what they aim to abandon.
>... and good luck trying to run a steel mill, the >chemical industry, or any larger form of industry >with "off the grid" approaches. :-) I know the approaches I'm talking about are not scalable, but FYI, *all* the material they use was recycled (maybe from the ones that believed that the government was "helping" them). Heck, they use thrown-away car batteries for storage. Can you imagine if serious research is invested into this?
>Can industrial societies, their production hubs and >infrastructures be run non-violently and >collaboratively? I guess no (and that's part of the point) unless we manage to decrease industrial massive need for energy, which leads to get rid of a huge part of it.
In a way, I think you and I agree, but maybe for different reasons :)
Oh, I sure think we agree, as we share the same motifs. I just think that localized attempts are a waste of time. Not to mention that "alternative projects" tend to ignore their own #ecocolonialism and are thus part of white middle-class privilege.
And while we were talking about it, this came in on virdsite:
« A single Tesla battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. At this rate, over the next thirty years we will need to mine more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the last 70,000 years. #GreenEnergy »
Well, I think the localized attempts I'm talking about are made by people not wanting to wait for the next "energy revolution" (whatever that ends being, as it will be dictated by the current energy oligarchs). And about the Tesla thing... well, I think the investigation efforts should be headed somewhere else. I'm afraid I don't have the knowledge to point where, but I know we could have it if we work towards it in a collective way.
I'm not sure if they still exist, but "Las Indias" was a collective of people running various small-scale companies. They were interested in gnusocial as an economic P2P production model. Around 2016 Manuel Ortega (one of them) got in contact with Hannes Mannerheim from quitter, even invited him to a "master class" in Spain on qvitter... One of his articles I find pretty interesting, is:
Yep, I've read about them, but I thought they were not active anymore. In fact, the second link looks like someone with bad intentions has taken over the domain...
Well, that page promotes Google, Twitter, Facebook analytics and "sharing economy" as a nice thing (omitting that it is nice only for the companies using it as a paradigm, and not for the workers: riders, for instance).
Ah, ok. I didn't look too closely into it as my Spanish is too cursory for skimming articles. But strangely, this link was put under Ortega's article in its English version as link to the Spanish original. Anyway, there are few more articles by Ortega in his original attitude on p2p: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/author/manuel-ortega
@administrator When Ortega in 2016 worked on gnusocial, his goal was to use it not just as a social media alternative but as a sharing tool for objects in a neighbourhood or local community.
Well, maybe it's me who misinterpreted their intentions. If they are for "sharing economy" and all that bullshit, that's just white(green?) washing exploitation.
"Sharing" still had a slightly different meaning back then in 2015, not just platform / surveillance capitalism with the exploitation of workers and environments. But you're right with regard to the possibility of "bad intentions" as all links in Ortega's articles now link to the same address ("lasindias") Or I may get the original "Las Indias" wrong and they have indeed been a collective of "neoliberals". I remember feeling them being kind of slick, but I didn't get the neoliberal vibe from them.
Way back in the 1970s and 1980s, first the US encouraged large solar and wind generation projects, then cut off the tax subsidies. Most of them were not economical without those subsidies, so this both eliminated new investment in the field for the next 20 years and caused a lot of existing projects to shut down.
In California, we've got "sell your excess power back to the utility company at full retail price" plus tax subsidies for homeowners who put solar photovoltaic generation panels on their properties. (There are some limitations, such as you can't sell back more than you use in a year. Which means you can lower your electricity bill to $0 per year, but the electric utility will never owe you any payment.)
I also notice that none of the popular advertisers talking about putting in solar generation ("rooftop solar") talk about putting in any kind of personally-owned storage (e.g., Tesla powerwall). So if there is an outage during a period when someone's solar panels are not receiving enough light, it affects them just as though they hadn't spent a whole lot of money on solar panels.
(When I was working in Sacramento a few years ago, a co-worker who lived in NorCal had just had rooftop solar and an electric car charging station installed. He realized that he needed storage, so he had a powerwall installed, along with the necessary switching equipment.)
Currently, thanks to the #RU versus #UA war and the related price changes for energy, the various price and tax subsidies are probably not going away any time soon, but they still could go away before people have paid off their equipment investment.
Adding the personally-owned on-site storage makes true "off the [electric power] grid" living possible.
Anyway, my point is, I've been watching #California and #US policies this area (but not closely enough) since the 1980s, and I can see a similar policy change against normal homeowners ahead of us when sufficient solar / wind / geothermal electricity generation comes online to threaten the financial viability of electric utility companies.
@simsa04 @administrator My impression at the time is that Manuel Ortega and Las Indias were trying to enable communities and their members to take care of their needs without dependence on big corporations. I seem to remember a strong thread of enabling indigenous communities to remain economically and socially self-sufficient.
I wish I knew why they suddenly stopped their GS related efforts and what happened to their group / organization. ( The https://lasindias.com/ site is definitely not the same kind of postings that I'm familiar with. Hootsuite and Google Analytics are topics that Las Indias would not have touched. My impression, anyway, is that they were trying to free people from such companies, not help the enslavers. )
That is my impression as well, with the same kind of bafflement what happened to them. See https://gnusocial.net/notice/11315232 for more articles by Manuel Ortega, definitely different from the style and vibe one gets from lasindias.com