Comment by riku_iki
4 months ago
> rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
how it exacerbated problems exactly?..
4 months ago
> 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.
This is correct.
But there is a bit more. Almost all power plants in Pakistan are built with state-backed dollar-denominated loans (reason govt incompetence+corruption). This means if grid demand goes down, power plants don't go out of business like they would in a market based system. Instead, they keep collecting dollar-denominated interest paid by the state, even if they produce zero power.
The state mitigates this by increasing electricity prices (in rupees). I have forgotten how this helps.
The reason power plants in Pakistan probably require this kind of financing is because Pakistan doesn't have the industrial capability to make the equipment that you need to build a power plant, so, dollars are a requirement.
Power companies in Pakistan also don't have easy access to international money markets, and thus, it makes sense for the government to back those strong currency loans as a subsidy on infrastructure.
This is not exclusive to Pakistan, this is the routine of infrastructure financing on developing countries. J.P. Morgan is not really eager to lend money for PakiPower Incorporated, but it is willing to lend to the government.
It is unfortunate that the government of Pakistan and their investors (China and the IMF) made poor investment decisions. They should feel free to go back to debt holders to renegotiate the debt, or default on it and hand the stranded assets back to creditors. The death spiral is of their own making, and will only accelerate as solar PV and battery cost declines continue. Electricity consumers will simply go off the grid. Such is the risk of unsophisticated investors not understanding the market in which they invest. Capital being at risk is an inherent component of investment.
My condolences and sympathy to the people of Pakistan caught in the mess. The global energy transition will be volatile.
Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01356-y | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01356-y - May 26th, 2022
Rethinking Energy -- 100% Solar, Wind and Batteries Is Just The Beginning - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM2RxWtF4Ds - January 2021
Who owns the distressed fossil generation collateralized debt? China. Where is Pakistan importing cleantech from? China. There is some IMF debt in there as well, for accuracy.
How Chinese loans trapped Pakistan's economy - https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinese-loans-trapped-pakistans-ec... - August 2nd, 2024
Emeber Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (updated monthly)
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So the power plants lend dollars to the state so that they can pay to build the power plant?
Or else I don't see how the power plants are collecting the interest?
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Don't they charge a minimum just for keeping the wires connected?
I heard that they are trying to restructure the billing in this way for next fiscal year (July 2026- ), but its really difficult to find a non-regressive scheme. Electricity per-unit prices in Pakistan are set by the government, they vary depending on how much you consume [1], and they play a pretty significant role in government popularity.
[1] There is a price for the first 50 units you consume, then a higher price for the next 150 units, etc. Similar system to income taxes.
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When they start charging that way, the rich will buy batteries and disconnect from the grid entirely.
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I think most places the service is priced under the assumption that usage is enough to pay for the grid…
I’ve only ever rented though. Are connection fees something that homeworkers think about?
Possibly we will have to see changes to account for this sort of stuff at a more granular level, as the grid becomes more dynamic. But, that’s a future we should be actively looking to design for, as the energy supply mix is going to change whatever anybody thinks about that. Can’t beat energy falling from the sky, on price…
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Usually that’s included in per-kWh fee, so indeed usage dependent.
its easily fixable, utility company can charge fee for fixed cost those who connected to the grid, and if all rich decided to disconnect, then they disconnect neighborhood eliminating fixed cost.
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.
This is all true except for the fact that storage is not incredibly expensive anymore, which invalidates every single conclusion you reach. Storage is now reasonably affordable, and the trend suggests it will soon be incredibly cheap.
Not true.
The largest battery systems in operation are primarily designed for short-duration grid support rather than long-term, multi-day backup. They can even bridge a single windless night.
And this is talking about short term mismatch between supply and demand in a 24 hour cycle. If you consider the need to account for the yearly seasonal generation variation (which is far more dramatic as most of the developed world is situated on high latitudes) battery storage becomes even more problematic due to the absurd capital expenditures for a resource that you'd have to charge with a dramatic production supply during the summer months to slowly discharge during the winter.
People have been misled with the convenient lie of LCOE for too long, when what really matters are the true system costs. We don't even have in place the supply chain to sustain this, and I am not even talking about Lithium or Cobalt, I am talking about plain old Copper.
Then, there are the capital requirements for recycling and decommissioning, as the useful life of such systems is unfortunately not something to write home about.
Think about it. We have spent too much time and money on solar and wind, money that could have been spent on nuclear power. The clock is ticking, replacing our grid with solar may be the wet dream of big finance, but it is not a reasonable solution, it is about time we stop wasting our time with it.
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Which will make the problems of the rich disappear and the problems of the poor and the state ... worse. (because the costs of the state are paying off loans for expensive generation, costs which they recover from the poor)
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It’s not reasonably affordable by any real “middle class” metric and the impact a reliable grid has on the industrial and commercial base of an economy is being undervalued by an utterly laughable degree during these discussions. Westerners and rich folks take it for granted as a fact of life at this point.
The duck curve is a rounding error when discussing energy storage.
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All these problems become solved if you have realtime market pricing.
Nobody would bother to install rooftop solar if daytime power was super cheap on every sunny day, yet expensive at night when their solar isn't working.
Wouldn't this model price out poor people? Doesn't that mean the most vulnerable people cant afford the services when they need them most, ie max hot/cold?
Changing the utility to a market sort of defeats the point of trying to optimize the utility.
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My solar system has a battery than smooths out the generation over a day or two so that I can satisfy my night time demand too.
This exact issue lead me to follow the grid orchestration research out of the Oak Ridge Laboratory. The building blocks already exist to enable this. An interconnected smart network of renewables can become a stabilizing force in the overall grid. Off-peak storage would still be required, but would no longer need to be "stabilizing" (turbine or other similar generator), and can be simple batteries.