The newly opened solar plant in Karbala will eventually be able to produce up to 300 megawatts of electricity at its peak, said Nasser Karim al-Sudani, head of the national team for solar energy projects in the Prime Minister’s Office. Another project under construction in Babil province will have a capacity of 225 megawatts, and work will also begin soon on a 1,000 megawatt project in the southern province of Basra, he said.
The projects are part of an ambitious plan to implement large-scale solar power projects in an effort to ease the country’s chronic electricity shortages.
This is cool as heck, for someone who has always lived in very temperate, rainy, cloudy places with long bouts of darkness Solar power generating technology has always been inspiring and exciting... but when I imagine growing up somewhere arid with brutally intense sun being the norm... solar technology must look like alchemy in being able to transform an ever present aspect of your existence into buckets and buckets of electrical power.
I hope that a future for arid places like the Middle East is not far away where there are solar panels everywhere and living in arid places becomes known for living among solar power instead of fossil fuel power.
There is also a direct benefit for Iraq here in that Iraq has historically been a battlefield for empires because of its geography and the behavior of other nations, living as a citizen in a place like this must be exhaustingly difficult from having to grapple with the regional power dynamics always collapsing and being replaced while locals try to just live their lives. The presence of distributed solar generation I think reduces some potential leverage of oppression, it makes it easier for more localized groups to take getting access to electricity into their own hands at whatever scale of governance is most actionable.
The international geopolitics of fossil fuels have dominated countries like Iraq for the past 100 years, but this is something different, this represents a material possibility to construct things more resiliently so they can't be as easily destroyed for no good reason by countries like mine.
I don't understand the basic mental model people deeply invested in trying to profit off Reddit have about this, if they think Reddit comments are valuable enough to make Google bargain with them doesn't that mean they acknowledge that it is the users not the company that creates the value? Do the current owners seriously think that a totally adhoc system of unpaid subreddit moderators moderating communities of content solely provided by users who are NOT employees, communities which sprung up around different topics organically from the contributions of users who are NOT employees can be misconstrued as somehow a product of value created and maintained by the current management of Reddit?
Reddit is valuable because of the things said on it, not because Reddit is a particularly well designed business, nor even a remotely sustainable one longterm at least in terms of the immense magnitudes of profits that larger investors demand.
I suppose Discord killed off so many independent, open niche communities that Reddit thinks they can really get away with it, but the problem for Reddit is that the best parts of Reddit don't need a corporation to muddle with them, introducing a corporation just makes it worse in every way...