I would encourage people to go look at satellite view of random "rich" neighbourhoods in Pakistan, and note how many solar panels there are on rooftops. Here is the first one I scrolled to in Lahore [1], and one in Karachi [2]
Pakistan's grid prices tripled or more since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, because the extremely mismanaged and poorly designed electricity system+economy could not handle the energy price shock. This spiraled into rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
According to this interview [1] and a recent Economist podcast blackouts were a huge driver of the decision of those that could afford it to go for solar and batteries. Now the utilities are in a death spiral. Customers disconnect, prices rise, more incentive to go for solar and storage as prices continue to fall while price of unreliable grid energy rises.
Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable.
Price of Chinese PV panels and inverters and batteries have dropped so much and there has been financing schemes available where you get the installation for free and pay per usage cheaper than what the utility company charges and it is more realiable.
It appears that the recycled street numbers each appear on different blocks.
Street 6, for instance: I've found it twice so far.
But they're still distinct, in that one Street 6 is within Block M 3 B, and another is within Block M 7.
Which appears to suggest that blocks are more important at identifying an address than a street name is, and if that's the case then that works just fine.
And indeed, a distinct address appears to be something like this: Plot 15, Block M 7 Lake City, Lahore, Pakistan. Plug that into Google Maps and you'll see what I'm seeing (and note that the string doesn't include a street name at all).
It does seem weird to my wee little Ohio-trained brain to identify a building by what block it is on more than the street it is facing, but then: Canadian post codes and Hungarian addresses also look weird to me, and also work fine in the places where they're used.
You have an inbuilt assumption about the purpose of a street name. Compare it with addresses in Japan [1], where some streets don't even have names. I don't know anything about Pakistan, but i wouldn't be surprised if the street name is solely to differentiate within some small geographic area. Looking at street view[2] from a nearby real estate development supports this
I'm guessing: fewer people buying from the power companies/grid => the fixed costs of these companies are pushed onto the poorer customers, who already couldn't afford much.
Previously, pretty much everyone (not just 'rich people', although, well, 'rich' is relative here, of course...) had diesel generators, which were not connected to the grid, since that would be seriously expensive, plus syncing would be pretty much impossible anyway.
With solar, you can feed back into the grid much more easily, to the point that this is the default. This sort-of doubles the load on the grid (not exactly, but you get the idea), since both 'consumption' and 'production' need to cross the same wires.
This is a problem even in, like, Germany, where the grid operator can send a "kill signal" to local solar inverters to shut down. In Pakistan, I can't even imagine...
The following isn't a grid problem (more of a demand issue), but maybe they're referring to this:
> But 45 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, putting solar panel systems well beyond their reach. The pool of customers for the national grid has gotten smaller and poorer, and the costs of financing old coal-powered plants have increasingly been passed on to those who can least afford it. [1]
Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather).
Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources.
Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro.
But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time.
Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs.
Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception.
AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.
We switched to solar in 2021 expecting a 3.5-year payback. Electricity prices rose so fast that we recovered the investment in under two years.
Also the national grid is notorious for it's frequent blackouts (load-shedding) since the early ’90s. Solar allowed us to have uninterrupted supply in the mornings and longer backups during night.
We got roof top solar 1.5 years ago in Canada. Payoff will be 6-7 years, but we got an interest free loan to cover it.
So we’ll just pay what we would have for power for those years ~$1000 a year, then we’ll have free power for 20 more, saving something like $20,000 for $0 investment.
Excellent results, even if the source article is a bit government-optimistic-press-releasy. The less-good news is that, even with abundant solar, you still need a functional grid (even more so than in traditional top-down energy distribution schemes) in order for everyone to take advantage of it, but this is a problem that lots of rich nations are working through right now, so affordable off-the-shelf solutions are bound to appear in the near future.
And I wish Pakistan the best in taking advantage of those and/or their home-grown ingenuity!
What this shows is solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model. Even without net metering, demand destruction will cause the traditional model to stop working.
Will it? I’m not sure how the utilities structure their prices wrt the actual cost, but they definitely separate the baseline connection cost from usage on bills (at least in the US), so they may not be killed by people using very little power as long as the connection fee actually covers things.
The hardest possible demand to meet is random, reasonal, and spikey demand spread diffusely over a large area. Which is more or less homes.
Conversely the easiest possible demand to meet is localized constant and high demand. Basically AI datacenters or industrial users. These guys are basically paying for the grid and residential have it as a subsidy.
The supermajority of the price of electricity is fixed costs related to installing and maintaining capacity. The marginal problem of increasing generation or utilization is cheap. I believe it's like under 20% even for gas power where you have to buy gas. For grid solar it would be even crazier because marginally its basically free they really don't care how much you use it even goes negative but the fixed costs are everything.
So what causes a lot of social problems is when wealthy people get their own private solar because the whole current pricing structure revolves around wealthy people using a lot of electricity and paying down the connection costs for poor people. If they have solar the poor people are fronting the maintainence cost which destabilizes everything.
Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720
if the same solar also had enough battery capacity, sure. But they do not, they still need to buy at out of solar peak and that just causes problems for both sides.
I think grid should start moving into selling storage as a service. Just put a bunch of bulk storage at every transformer station and buy solar from consumers at solar peak, sell them back say 80% of it (or whatever margin is required to pay for it) off peak.
That way utility no longer have to haul megawatts all the way from the power plant all the time, any peak can be hauled from the batteries and let the other types of power plant more time to spool up, and the grid is more resilient to outages (assuming you were lucky and battery bank local to you still had some charge
LFP chemistries are approaching ~$50/kWh, and CATL's sodium chemistry is supposed to be ~$40/kWh (per CATL); soon it will be more expensive to ship the battery storage than the storage itself.
EVs have giant batteries - they can be connected via their DC ports and charged/discharged via solar inverters - technically. The current spec for CCS and NACS doesn't allow for this (Chademo did, but they lost the 'format war'). Giant effing oversight on manufacturers' part if you ask me.
Some people have managed to trick their cars into reverse charging via solar hybrid inverters and some custom hardware and it works as advertised - which is no surprise since its a lithium battery charge controller charging/discharing a solar battery.
If you could use your 60kWh EV battery on top of the 10-20 kWh you have at home, it would be a game changer, most people could power their homes for a week on that sort of capacity.
In most places in the developed world utility-scale solar is much cheaper to build than rooftop solar. And there's value in having a stable grid to fall back on. I think the demand destruction story is overrated.
Commercial and industrial use already makes up a large portion of demand. While the model will change to cater less to residential needs, overall demand for stable, high voltage generation is not going to go down.
If long term storage (like Standard Thermal) comes into play, I could see industrial users decide to just decouple from the grid too (or, use the threat to do so as a means to drive down what they are charged.)
We may see industrial users preposition themselves in locations with ample nearby PV potential. If I were building a factory in the US (or a data center) I would think twice before putting it in a higher population density area.
We may also see local microgrids develop. This would still have distribution costs, but not transmission.
Commercial properties often have enough roof area to meet most of their daytime demand on-site. And industrial consumption in Western countries has been flat or declining for years, so "stable, high-voltage generation" may face less demand than assumed.
The bill you pay for the grid in such cases typically doesn't cover the fixed costs, and would have to be much higher if solar demand destruction becomes big.
There’s a business model where distributed solar production and storage is the norm and central grid based generation and delivery is the minority.
Such a model is extremely resistant and there’s less system infrastructure necessary. It’s quite feasible to redesign the system around a “distributed first” model.
> solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model
The writing is on the wall that the electric utility business model is a dying business like the career of bus or truck driver. Some countries will take a while to realize due to head in the sand , tariffs and corruption.
I think I can answer that, though I'm not a Pakistani but as a Nigerian in a developing country, you might also have a petrol generator for night times. But for the majority of people just having your phone and power bank charged for the night is pretty ok, a plus if you can keep a handful of bulbs on also.
Visit Australia, plenty of people are! When the real paybacks are generally 4-8 years (depending on what we're talking about) why wouldn't people be? We have 4.2 million solar systems (for reference there are almost 11 million dwellings). Just this year the Federal Government started giving out grants for home batteries and over 55,000 people have already taken that up and at least 90,000 home battery installations exist so far according to these stats: https://cer.gov.au/markets/reports-and-data/small-scale-inst...
Even if people don't go to the lengths I do (I like to watch the current generation and will slightly delay my use big loads like the washing machine, dishwasher, dryer etc. to try and use as much as my solar as possible), it's still very common for people to choose to do things like set the dishwasher timer in the day to use solar - which is great because it's also taking load off the grid.
Most of the costs for residential solar are installation. Systems that you install yourself, e.g. balcony solar, have payback times below five years (even in less than ideal regions, like Germany). I would assume that labor in Pakistan is a bit cheaper.
A lot of people in my area are interested and it would be a net positive for them long term, but the area is poor so few can afford the initial costs despite knowing the money they would ultimately be saving.
> The south Asian nation is planning to introduce new tariffs for large solar users, as well as changes to fee structures to ensure businesses with panels share equally in the costs of grid upkeep, she said.
Of course. We wouldn’t want the benefit of a public good to accrue to the public now, would we.
Yeah but I think advanced economies can figure out to produce the same things if there's a strategic need - and absorb the cost - you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody, so China doesn't really have that much political leverage in how you use it.
There's also huge internal competition inside China between companies, so they have a harder time fixing prices.
Nope. A defining mechanism in energy markets is the cost to extract it. There's a reason Saudi Arabia dominates oil, if you can extract it with a shovel. And directly counter to your point, there's a reason, say, Germany can't just kick start a shell gas/oil industry even if it does have the deposits underneath.
> harder time fixing prices
Eh, it's not like the CCP didn't do heavy handed market interventions before, right? I mean some would even argue "fixing prices" is already embedded with the ruling party's name.
> you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody,
What is this even suppose to mean? Of course you can. That is the whole point of having geopolitical leverage.
There were similar comments on HN. The argument goes that since it takes energy to produce PV panels and wind turbines, China effectively is an energy exporting country. What’s even better is some of the PV and turbines are produced with renewable energy. And unlike oil and gas, which are used only once, PV panels and wind turbines generate power for many years.
The argument also has a geopolitical component: PV panels wear down, and by the time yours have too, the energy infrastructure around you will have shifted towards PVs. I.e. your (country’s) energy will be dependent on China.
That is another aspect of “the Saudia-Arabia of PVs”
Up to the locals in the US. Depends what their pain threshold is for falling behind and looking a bit behind the times. I think FOMO is going to be a big driver in a few years. This is not a left vs right topic. It's a money topic. And my impression of the US is that they love getting stuff on the cheap. Solar energy should be such a thing and it's getting painfully obvious that the US is paying a steep price where the rest of the world isn't. If I'm reading the situation correct, that is already annoying the hell out of a lot of traditionally republican leading states and not because they are tree-huggers.
The right question to ask is whether places like Mexico are going to politely wait for the US to get its act together or whether they'll just go ahead and start electrifying their country and industry and reducing their cost levels. The current isolationist policy works both ways. Very sunny place, Mexico. Great place for solar and batteries. And once you have those, Chines EVs produced locally might work very well. And they can export those further south.
Mexico could start producing synfuels with abundant solar energy and exporting them to the US, but that is far from the course plotted by President Sheinbaum, even though (or perhaps because) her doctorate is in the use of energy. Instead she's doubling down on oil drilling.
In California, grid-tied rooftop solar was putting energy prices into the negative so often that they reconfigured the NEM to discourage export back to the grid and encourage battery storage.
Batteries are the invisible change in the power business. They don't take up much land area. They're not visible to the public. Just being able to charge batteries during low power cost periods changes the whole economics of the industry.
Whether battery banks should be allowed to sell back to the grid is a tough question.
Texas says no.[2]
It's potentially "dispatchable" power, but only until the battery runs down.
And it's messing with our utilities in BC because we were buying the daytime oversupply in California and selling the hydro generated power back at night. They've had to adjust plans as battery storage comes online.
Already does in some cases but the utility companies have fought back and they can buy laws and regulations to slow down the process and protect profits.
I feel like this is disingenuous - I have solar, and peak power exceeds demand by a sizeable margin, but there are week long stretches with basically no solar. Given how cheap panels, are, it makes a ton of sense to oversize your system, and charge your batteries in the couple hour stretches where the sun does happen to shine.
Politicians need votes to remain in power. They lose votes if electricity is expensive. Lower demand and therefore low revenue in the face of fixed grid maintenance costs mean prices have to rise. Higher costs to voters terrifies politicians.
The politicians do get paid by captured corporate interests though. And some of those are energy generation interests. Until solar companies captured some of that interest, solar subsidies and cost remained high and unsupported by regulatory interests - when capture is there regulatory interest support the alternative power.
Sometimes these captured interests can even block and harm progress that's better for society. I'm sure I don't have to break this down for you further. Surely you can identify examples.
Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
It’s similar to how the British empire hated subsistence farming, and always wanted colonial subjects to be economically interacting with either trading companies or the state apparatus.
> Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
All well and good, provided the homeowner opts out of the system. Part of the problem comes when the grid connection is not severed. Using it as a backup option (at the same time as other people, for when the weather is bad) or demanding the grid takes their excess production are counter-productive to the system as a whole.
The payback periods get me confused. A relative set up solar a year ago in one of the sunniest places in Europe, the Canaries, cost €7,000 for 6KW. He just ran the math on it and found out that the payback period is 15 years. The only way to make it profitable is government subsidies. How can it be profitable to install solar in continental Europe where taxes and labor costs are much higher while having much less sun? Why are we using taxpayers' money to subsidize such negative NPV projects?
Your comment appears to be unrelated to Pakistan and, due to the confusion of units, has been reduced to nonsense. Moreover, your implied calculations don't work out.
If we assume that you meant €7000 for 6 kilowatts peak (not 6 kelvin wurtzite henries or 6 kilowatt hours, neither of which is sensible) the probable answer is that your relative paid 25× the current market price for their solar panels and therefore got 25× the payback time. However, if we assume €0.12/kWh and a 20% capacity factor, 6 kilowatts peak would average 1.2 kilowatts, which is 10520 kWh per year, which works out to €1260 per year, which would be a payback time of 6 years, not 15 years.
Moreover, another way of saying that the payback time on a durable investment is 15 years is that the investment returns 6.7% per year. That would be a highly profitable investment, even without government subsidies.
sorry yes. He told me, installation is 6,000 W and is about 91% efficient at peak. 12 460W panels. panels point in optimal direction. In spain he sells excess to grid at €0.04 per KHW. Lowest cost of importing is €0.085 for KHW at night, about €0.22 at peak hours. He ran the numbers on power not bought (self consumption) + power sold, over a year. He said it comes to about €500 for the year. He added this really surprised him and he started asking around, and this seems to be typical for rooftop solar in the Canarias.
In spain he pays more than that on average, and only gets €0.04 for sold KWH. If it was one-to-one credit offset, as you have in Canada, it would certainly be very profitable.
I would encourage people to go look at satellite view of random "rich" neighbourhoods in Pakistan, and note how many solar panels there are on rooftops. Here is the first one I scrolled to in Lahore [1], and one in Karachi [2]
Pakistan's grid prices tripled or more since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, because the extremely mismanaged and poorly designed electricity system+economy could not handle the energy price shock. This spiraled into rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@31.3611237,74.2493456,357m/data...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@24.8014179,67.0460688,415m/data...
According to this interview [1] and a recent Economist podcast blackouts were a huge driver of the decision of those that could afford it to go for solar and batteries. Now the utilities are in a death spiral. Customers disconnect, prices rise, more incentive to go for solar and storage as prices continue to fall while price of unreliable grid energy rises.
Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable.
[1] https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom
In other words poor people are being forced to subsidize luxury beliefs.
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Price of Chinese PV panels and inverters and batteries have dropped so much and there has been financing schemes available where you get the installation for free and pay per usage cheaper than what the utility company charges and it is more realiable.
Did whoever named those streets have a stroke?
20, 23, 25, 27, 28, MDR 7, 32, 33, no name at all, 39, 40
And they're not even unique...they recycle them a kilometer further. WAT
Reminds me of "Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" [0]
[0] https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
It appears that the recycled street numbers each appear on different blocks.
Street 6, for instance: I've found it twice so far.
But they're still distinct, in that one Street 6 is within Block M 3 B, and another is within Block M 7.
Which appears to suggest that blocks are more important at identifying an address than a street name is, and if that's the case then that works just fine.
And indeed, a distinct address appears to be something like this: Plot 15, Block M 7 Lake City, Lahore, Pakistan. Plug that into Google Maps and you'll see what I'm seeing (and note that the string doesn't include a street name at all).
It does seem weird to my wee little Ohio-trained brain to identify a building by what block it is on more than the street it is facing, but then: Canadian post codes and Hungarian addresses also look weird to me, and also work fine in the places where they're used.
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You have an inbuilt assumption about the purpose of a street name. Compare it with addresses in Japan [1], where some streets don't even have names. I don't know anything about Pakistan, but i wouldn't be surprised if the street name is solely to differentiate within some small geographic area. Looking at street view[2] from a nearby real estate development supports this
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/sfoKSP5yRU41yS8w5
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> rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
how it exacerbated problems exactly?..
I'm guessing: fewer people buying from the power companies/grid => the fixed costs of these companies are pushed onto the poorer customers, who already couldn't afford much.
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Previously, pretty much everyone (not just 'rich people', although, well, 'rich' is relative here, of course...) had diesel generators, which were not connected to the grid, since that would be seriously expensive, plus syncing would be pretty much impossible anyway.
With solar, you can feed back into the grid much more easily, to the point that this is the default. This sort-of doubles the load on the grid (not exactly, but you get the idea), since both 'consumption' and 'production' need to cross the same wires.
This is a problem even in, like, Germany, where the grid operator can send a "kill signal" to local solar inverters to shut down. In Pakistan, I can't even imagine...
The following isn't a grid problem (more of a demand issue), but maybe they're referring to this:
> But 45 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, putting solar panel systems well beyond their reach. The pool of customers for the national grid has gotten smaller and poorer, and the costs of financing old coal-powered plants have increasingly been passed on to those who can least afford it. [1]
1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-pakistan-s-solar-en...
I read that Pakistan told Qatar to sell off 24 containers of LNG next year. And there are abusive penalty clauses that get triggered when you do that.
I went an looked and it appears Pakistan imports ~110 containers of LNG a year. And their natural gas plants are running as 50% capacity.
Personal belief on big reason for a country to install solar, wind, and batteries to be able to tell the criminals at the IMF to go f' themselves.
Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather).
Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources.
Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro.
But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time.
Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs.
Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception.
AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.
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We switched to solar in 2021 expecting a 3.5-year payback. Electricity prices rose so fast that we recovered the investment in under two years.
Also the national grid is notorious for it's frequent blackouts (load-shedding) since the early ’90s. Solar allowed us to have uninterrupted supply in the mornings and longer backups during night.
We got roof top solar 1.5 years ago in Canada. Payoff will be 6-7 years, but we got an interest free loan to cover it.
So we’ll just pay what we would have for power for those years ~$1000 a year, then we’ll have free power for 20 more, saving something like $20,000 for $0 investment.
Where in Canada?
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Rough location (if you feel comfortable sharing ground truth)?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622584
South Africa - load shedding is a curse word here :).
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Excellent results, even if the source article is a bit government-optimistic-press-releasy. The less-good news is that, even with abundant solar, you still need a functional grid (even more so than in traditional top-down energy distribution schemes) in order for everyone to take advantage of it, but this is a problem that lots of rich nations are working through right now, so affordable off-the-shelf solutions are bound to appear in the near future.
And I wish Pakistan the best in taking advantage of those and/or their home-grown ingenuity!
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What this shows is solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model. Even without net metering, demand destruction will cause the traditional model to stop working.
Will it? I’m not sure how the utilities structure their prices wrt the actual cost, but they definitely separate the baseline connection cost from usage on bills (at least in the US), so they may not be killed by people using very little power as long as the connection fee actually covers things.
The hardest possible demand to meet is random, reasonal, and spikey demand spread diffusely over a large area. Which is more or less homes.
Conversely the easiest possible demand to meet is localized constant and high demand. Basically AI datacenters or industrial users. These guys are basically paying for the grid and residential have it as a subsidy.
The supermajority of the price of electricity is fixed costs related to installing and maintaining capacity. The marginal problem of increasing generation or utilization is cheap. I believe it's like under 20% even for gas power where you have to buy gas. For grid solar it would be even crazier because marginally its basically free they really don't care how much you use it even goes negative but the fixed costs are everything.
So what causes a lot of social problems is when wealthy people get their own private solar because the whole current pricing structure revolves around wealthy people using a lot of electricity and paying down the connection costs for poor people. If they have solar the poor people are fronting the maintainence cost which destabilizes everything.
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Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720
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if the same solar also had enough battery capacity, sure. But they do not, they still need to buy at out of solar peak and that just causes problems for both sides.
I think grid should start moving into selling storage as a service. Just put a bunch of bulk storage at every transformer station and buy solar from consumers at solar peak, sell them back say 80% of it (or whatever margin is required to pay for it) off peak.
That way utility no longer have to haul megawatts all the way from the power plant all the time, any peak can be hauled from the batteries and let the other types of power plant more time to spool up, and the grid is more resilient to outages (assuming you were lucky and battery bank local to you still had some charge
LFP chemistries are approaching ~$50/kWh, and CATL's sodium chemistry is supposed to be ~$40/kWh (per CATL); soon it will be more expensive to ship the battery storage than the storage itself.
"Watershed moment:" Big battery storage prices hit record low in China auction - https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/china-alread... - April 19th, 2024
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EVs have giant batteries - they can be connected via their DC ports and charged/discharged via solar inverters - technically. The current spec for CCS and NACS doesn't allow for this (Chademo did, but they lost the 'format war'). Giant effing oversight on manufacturers' part if you ask me.
Some people have managed to trick their cars into reverse charging via solar hybrid inverters and some custom hardware and it works as advertised - which is no surprise since its a lithium battery charge controller charging/discharing a solar battery.
If you could use your 60kWh EV battery on top of the 10-20 kWh you have at home, it would be a game changer, most people could power their homes for a week on that sort of capacity.
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In most places in the developed world utility-scale solar is much cheaper to build than rooftop solar. And there's value in having a stable grid to fall back on. I think the demand destruction story is overrated.
Utility-scale solar needs land and has to deal with line losses. Rooftop solar does not have to deal with either.
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Not necessarily - you have to pay for that infrastructure between the plant and your home.
Balcony solar is even cheaper to build than utility-scale solar.
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Commercial and industrial use already makes up a large portion of demand. While the model will change to cater less to residential needs, overall demand for stable, high voltage generation is not going to go down.
If long term storage (like Standard Thermal) comes into play, I could see industrial users decide to just decouple from the grid too (or, use the threat to do so as a means to drive down what they are charged.)
We may see industrial users preposition themselves in locations with ample nearby PV potential. If I were building a factory in the US (or a data center) I would think twice before putting it in a higher population density area.
We may also see local microgrids develop. This would still have distribution costs, but not transmission.
Commercial properties often have enough roof area to meet most of their daytime demand on-site. And industrial consumption in Western countries has been flat or declining for years, so "stable, high-voltage generation" may face less demand than assumed.
I think in most countrys, you already pay one bill for the grid and one for the used electric power.
The bill you pay for the grid in such cases typically doesn't cover the fixed costs, and would have to be much higher if solar demand destruction becomes big.
There’s a business model where distributed solar production and storage is the norm and central grid based generation and delivery is the minority.
Such a model is extremely resistant and there’s less system infrastructure necessary. It’s quite feasible to redesign the system around a “distributed first” model.
Where do the massive upgrades to the distribution system required for this kind of setup come from?
We simultaneously hate utilities and want them to redesign and pay for a distribution system that was not intended for bidirectional load flow.
Our municipal distribution systems are barely adequate. Net metering produces essentially no revenue but imposes a huge load on that infra.
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> solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model
The writing is on the wall that the electric utility business model is a dying business like the career of bus or truck driver. Some countries will take a while to realize due to head in the sand , tariffs and corruption.
What will people do at night?
I think I can answer that, though I'm not a Pakistani but as a Nigerian in a developing country, you might also have a petrol generator for night times. But for the majority of people just having your phone and power bank charged for the night is pretty ok, a plus if you can keep a handful of bulbs on also.
Shift usage to daytime and rely on battery storage.
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overprovision for their needs during the day and utilize battery power at night.
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At night, what people will do is wait until the morning to run the washing machine.
Most people aren’t interested in being responsible for their own electrical generation. Especially with payback still being on the order of decades
Visit Australia, plenty of people are! When the real paybacks are generally 4-8 years (depending on what we're talking about) why wouldn't people be? We have 4.2 million solar systems (for reference there are almost 11 million dwellings). Just this year the Federal Government started giving out grants for home batteries and over 55,000 people have already taken that up and at least 90,000 home battery installations exist so far according to these stats: https://cer.gov.au/markets/reports-and-data/small-scale-inst...
Even if people don't go to the lengths I do (I like to watch the current generation and will slightly delay my use big loads like the washing machine, dishwasher, dryer etc. to try and use as much as my solar as possible), it's still very common for people to choose to do things like set the dishwasher timer in the day to use solar - which is great because it's also taking load off the grid.
Most of the costs for residential solar are installation. Systems that you install yourself, e.g. balcony solar, have payback times below five years (even in less than ideal regions, like Germany). I would assume that labor in Pakistan is a bit cheaper.
My payback is 6-7 years in Canada with $0 invested.
“Responsible for my own power generation” = I do literally nothing. Nada.
I get $1000 a year for free.
Please show me someone who does not want $1000 per year for absolutely nothing.
A lot of people in my area are interested and it would be a net positive for them long term, but the area is poor so few can afford the initial costs despite knowing the money they would ultimately be saving.
#1 is correct. #2 is quite incorrect.
Most people don’t have the capital to be responsible for their own electricity generation, except the rich.
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> The south Asian nation is planning to introduce new tariffs for large solar users, as well as changes to fee structures to ensure businesses with panels share equally in the costs of grid upkeep, she said.
Of course. We wouldn’t want the benefit of a public good to accrue to the public now, would we.
Imagine being the CCP and you’ve managed to turn your industrial capacity into the world‘s single largest renewable energy source. PV‘s Saudi-Arabia.
Yeah but I think advanced economies can figure out to produce the same things if there's a strategic need - and absorb the cost - you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody, so China doesn't really have that much political leverage in how you use it.
There's also huge internal competition inside China between companies, so they have a harder time fixing prices.
> if there's a strategic need
Nope. A defining mechanism in energy markets is the cost to extract it. There's a reason Saudi Arabia dominates oil, if you can extract it with a shovel. And directly counter to your point, there's a reason, say, Germany can't just kick start a shell gas/oil industry even if it does have the deposits underneath.
> harder time fixing prices
Eh, it's not like the CCP didn't do heavy handed market interventions before, right? I mean some would even argue "fixing prices" is already embedded with the ruling party's name.
> you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody,
What is this even suppose to mean? Of course you can. That is the whole point of having geopolitical leverage.
There were similar comments on HN. The argument goes that since it takes energy to produce PV panels and wind turbines, China effectively is an energy exporting country. What’s even better is some of the PV and turbines are produced with renewable energy. And unlike oil and gas, which are used only once, PV panels and wind turbines generate power for many years.
The argument also has a geopolitical component: PV panels wear down, and by the time yours have too, the energy infrastructure around you will have shifted towards PVs. I.e. your (country’s) energy will be dependent on China.
That is another aspect of “the Saudia-Arabia of PVs”
https://archive.today/48P6c
Great, you can easily switch them off or even better, store heat under ground for the winter.
Lahore doesn't really have a winter as such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore#Climate
Air conditioning is, however, life-changing.
Thermal energy storage can potentially power air conditioning, but it isn't a very well developed technology.
How many years before this happens in parts of the United States?
Up to the locals in the US. Depends what their pain threshold is for falling behind and looking a bit behind the times. I think FOMO is going to be a big driver in a few years. This is not a left vs right topic. It's a money topic. And my impression of the US is that they love getting stuff on the cheap. Solar energy should be such a thing and it's getting painfully obvious that the US is paying a steep price where the rest of the world isn't. If I'm reading the situation correct, that is already annoying the hell out of a lot of traditionally republican leading states and not because they are tree-huggers.
The right question to ask is whether places like Mexico are going to politely wait for the US to get its act together or whether they'll just go ahead and start electrifying their country and industry and reducing their cost levels. The current isolationist policy works both ways. Very sunny place, Mexico. Great place for solar and batteries. And once you have those, Chines EVs produced locally might work very well. And they can export those further south.
Mexico could start producing synfuels with abundant solar energy and exporting them to the US, but that is far from the course plotted by President Sheinbaum, even though (or perhaps because) her doctorate is in the use of energy. Instead she's doubling down on oil drilling.
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In California, grid-tied rooftop solar was putting energy prices into the negative so often that they reconfigured the NEM to discourage export back to the grid and encourage battery storage.
It seems to have worked, too.[1]
Batteries are the invisible change in the power business. They don't take up much land area. They're not visible to the public. Just being able to charge batteries during low power cost periods changes the whole economics of the industry.
Whether battery banks should be allowed to sell back to the grid is a tough question. Texas says no.[2] It's potentially "dispatchable" power, but only until the battery runs down.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-17/califor...
[2] https://www.ercot.com/mktrules/keypriorities/bes/ktc8
And it's messing with our utilities in BC because we were buying the daytime oversupply in California and selling the hydro generated power back at night. They've had to adjust plans as battery storage comes online.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/us-electricity-2025...
Already does in some cases but the utility companies have fought back and they can buy laws and regulations to slow down the process and protect profits.
I feel like this is disingenuous - I have solar, and peak power exceeds demand by a sizeable margin, but there are week long stretches with basically no solar. Given how cheap panels, are, it makes a ton of sense to oversize your system, and charge your batteries in the couple hour stretches where the sun does happen to shine.
Unpopular opinion: this is so contentious because it’s more about control.
It's crazy to think that thanks to Starlink, EVs, renewables, a small-ish rural community could become almost independent.
Just missing water and sewage and garbage/recycling, but a rural community does gain some independence via those things you mentioned.
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Nah, it's about power (heh!).
Politicians need votes to remain in power. They lose votes if electricity is expensive. Lower demand and therefore low revenue in the face of fixed grid maintenance costs mean prices have to rise. Higher costs to voters terrifies politicians.
The politicians do get paid by captured corporate interests though. And some of those are energy generation interests. Until solar companies captured some of that interest, solar subsidies and cost remained high and unsupported by regulatory interests - when capture is there regulatory interest support the alternative power.
Sometimes these captured interests can even block and harm progress that's better for society. I'm sure I don't have to break this down for you further. Surely you can identify examples.
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Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
It’s similar to how the British empire hated subsistence farming, and always wanted colonial subjects to be economically interacting with either trading companies or the state apparatus.
> Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
All well and good, provided the homeowner opts out of the system. Part of the problem comes when the grid connection is not severed. Using it as a backup option (at the same time as other people, for when the weather is bad) or demanding the grid takes their excess production are counter-productive to the system as a whole.
The payback periods get me confused. A relative set up solar a year ago in one of the sunniest places in Europe, the Canaries, cost €7,000 for 6KW. He just ran the math on it and found out that the payback period is 15 years. The only way to make it profitable is government subsidies. How can it be profitable to install solar in continental Europe where taxes and labor costs are much higher while having much less sun? Why are we using taxpayers' money to subsidize such negative NPV projects?
Your comment appears to be unrelated to Pakistan and, due to the confusion of units, has been reduced to nonsense. Moreover, your implied calculations don't work out.
If we assume that you meant €7000 for 6 kilowatts peak (not 6 kelvin wurtzite henries or 6 kilowatt hours, neither of which is sensible) the probable answer is that your relative paid 25× the current market price for their solar panels and therefore got 25× the payback time. However, if we assume €0.12/kWh and a 20% capacity factor, 6 kilowatts peak would average 1.2 kilowatts, which is 10520 kWh per year, which works out to €1260 per year, which would be a payback time of 6 years, not 15 years.
Moreover, another way of saying that the payback time on a durable investment is 15 years is that the investment returns 6.7% per year. That would be a highly profitable investment, even without government subsidies.
sorry yes. He told me, installation is 6,000 W and is about 91% efficient at peak. 12 460W panels. panels point in optimal direction. In spain he sells excess to grid at €0.04 per KHW. Lowest cost of importing is €0.085 for KHW at night, about €0.22 at peak hours. He ran the numbers on power not bought (self consumption) + power sold, over a year. He said it comes to about €500 for the year. He added this really surprised him and he started asking around, and this seems to be typical for rooftop solar in the Canarias.
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> the probable answer is that your relative paid 25× the current market price
Where do I get 450W panels for $12 each?
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> You seem to have created this account just to troll
I find it fascinating that someone is willing to pay for accounts to swing opinions or seed FUD on a topics like solar panels.
It’s happening here, it’s clearly happening everywhere on every topic.
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Those numbers sound wrong.
I have 7.8kw in Canada, and if I paid out of pocket payback would be 6-7 years.
We pat $0.13 per kWh from the grid, get a one for one credit on anything we feed in. System makes 7.8Mwh in a year.
What are your friends numbers?
Grid price is also pre-approved to increase not less that 5% a year forever, so it will only go in my favour.
In spain he pays more than that on average, and only gets €0.04 for sold KWH. If it was one-to-one credit offset, as you have in Canada, it would certainly be very profitable.
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I got 1kW for my balcony for 250€. Did your friend pay 5000€ just for the mounting?