this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Anarchism and Social Ecology

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Production of complex electrical components in a solarpunk society? (self.anarchism)
submitted 2 years ago by JustJack23 to c/anarchism
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Hello all, I was wandering how would a production of things like microchips, solar panels and motors (and other electrical components) be managed in a anarchist, solarpunk society?

Any ideas and further reading will be helpful.

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[–] perestroika 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Let's start with the easy:

  • motors: the simplest electrical motor (a brushed linear motor) can be made of coiled wire and a battery (a battery will "ride" like a tiny train when placed inside a conductive coil and supplied contacts to it)

I mean to say that motors are simple. It only gets hard when they get very big or very special (or when power density gets high). Some people recycle some metal (or mine new metal if they really need to). Some metals are drawn into wire (copper), others supplied in blocks and sheets (steel, aluminum), some place has a CNC lathe, some place has a ball bearing factory, and thus it goes. If it's a permanent magnet motor, someone needs to make magnets too.

Obviously, trade and industry must exist - some place has raw materials, some place has favourable locations for energy production and storage, some place is preferred by people for living.

  • solar panels: intermediate hardness, more precision is needed, but the manufacturing process is not impossibly heavy on machinery and knowledge... you need to cast silicon ingots, cut them into thin wafers, dope the wafers with other substances, deposit wires on them, assemble the cells into arrays with more wires, and seal them between glass or other transparent material, optionally adding a frame of aluminum or something else

...and if one doesn't have access to the tech to make solar cells, one can make solar concentrators and use solar power with heat engines. :)

  • microchips (not your old-school transistor but memory and processors): level 9000 hard, a complicated supply chain is needed, the first questions of an anarchist might be "what level of hierarchy does this supply chain impose upon us?" and "what tech level can I climb onto without appreciable hierarchy?"

The machines to make microchips require extreme precision, lots of complicated engineering and cost a fortune. Nobody will ever let a J Random Hacker tinker with them (risk of damage to the machine), but a great number of random hackers insisting on independence from the Great Chip Collective - they could build their own chip-making ecosystem. Maybe it won't make fast or tiny chips, but it will make some kind of chips - maybe not enough to model the planet's climate or predict protein folding - but enough to run most industrial machines.