The Joys of African (and other 3rd world) construction projects

On 2025-01-11, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

This is the truth. I have never seen the maintenance cost for sea-based wind, or
mega solar farms in deserts. I have never seen the cost of security to protect
the mega solar farms in deserts. Fun fact... when Ericsson built out cell phone
networks in africa, they quickly discovered that every base station needed
guards. If not, as soon as they were built, and the crew left, some local tribes
dismantled it and sold it as junk.

This was why they needed wireless telephones to begin with: Telephone
wires were stolen within days, only to reappear in the market as scrap
copper wire. Wireless networks greatly reduced the attack surface.

Wife and I just watched a Danish documentary movie about a restaurant
group that moved a Michelin starred restaurant from Torshavn (Faroes) to
a village in on the edge of the Disko Ice Fjord in West Greenland. The
challenges of building a larger kitchen were immense. Without full-time
on-site supervision, nothing happened for months. The kitchen equipment
sat in boxes on the dock for weeks, waiting for the kitchen building to
be built. The crew quarters had no indoor plumbing. There was no
electricity supply for the kitchen building, the electrical panel had
not been selected/ordered by the time the cooks arrived 4 weeks before
opening night. 5 days before opening, in the middle of wall framing for
the kitchen building, the carpenters failed to show up: A whale had been
killed (two allowed per year) and everyone in the village was down on
the beach cutting up the carcass.

My company does a fair amount of engineering support work for the CTBTO
(the Preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Organization) which maintains dozens of infrasound monitoring stations
in remote parts of the world. My business partner/boss likes to come
along on a site visit once in a while. Easter Island, Robinson Crusoe
Island, Alice Springs, Warramunga. (Not so keen on going to Djibouti,
Tristan da Cunha.) These maintenance/field upgrade visits are planned
years ahead of time. We supply radios for communications within a
station between sensor arrays. Towers are designed, tower sections
ordered and staged, cables are spec-ed to exact lengths. We do
predictions of radio signal strengths using Google Earth to review
line-of-sight issues. And field installation crews have carefully
planned spare parts, cable splice kits, power banks etc. There is no
BestBuy or Home Depot in the villages of Nunavut!

It is a fun part of our project portfolio. The CTBTO is a UN agency
headquartered in Vienna. The contractors are a diverse bunch, that get
rotated a bit. We have worked with groups from France, Ireland,
California and Alaska. We got in on this, because our radios are the
most reliable they could find. I don't know what they will do when we
retire in a couple of years, but I am sure they are working on it.