Comment by UltraSane

4 months ago

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.

  • For my experience a lot of installations really doesn't have much battery capacity cause batteries are pretty expensive at least here in Nigeria, but a lot of people are really happy with the system as long as they get electricity even if it's only during the day.

overprovision for their needs during the day and utilize battery power at night.

  • Solar panels are cheap but batteries are very expensive.

    • Batteries are dirt cheap already and getting cheaper all the time. Pakistan would be buying them at the Chinese prices without a lot of tariffs or nonsense that might be misleading you into believing otherwise.

      Think a bandwidth of 50-80$ per kwh cost levels for the manufacturer with a margin on top in a market where there's over production and prices are still trending down and margins are probably under quite a bit of pressure. That's the widely publicized cost levels for Chinese manufacturers that dominate the world supply currently. Some of the sodium ion batteries that are coming to market now are already at the lower end of that price bandwidth and could go to 10-20$/kwh over the next 5-10 years; maybe faster.

      At those prices, anyone can afford plenty of battery to survive the sun not shining for days/weeks. Which in places like Pakistan would be redundant. It's far south and you can count the number of days that you shouldn't be wearing sunglasses outside per year on the fingers of one hand. Even when it's cloudy, there's plenty of light filtering through in that part of the world..

      Prices you might be seeing in the US tell you more about the local politics there than the economics of batteries. The US has it self to blame for bad economics like that. Places like Pakistan aren't going to slow down because the US can't figure out all this new stuff. For them this is economic growth unlocked by vastly more energy than they've ever had access to. All they'll ever need basically.

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    • Battery modules (not home scale, but utility scale) are around $50/kWh in China. If we assume a 20 year lifespan and 50% charge/discharge once a day, that adds (ignoring interest) $0.013/kWh to the energy cycled through the batteries (plus a small add from efficiency being not quite 100%).

      This is quite cheap compared to (say) the fully loaded cost of energy from a nuclear power plant.

      Smaller units will be more expensive per kWh, but not so enormously so as to render them impractical. And they will get cheaper quickly like all electronics do.

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    • You can order 2kWh of plug-in-ready battery for 400€ or so on Amazon. That's single digit cents per kWh over the lifetime of the battery. Bigger systems are cheaper.

    • They can be depending on your needs. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are pretty cheap for their capacity. If you build your own power station with them you'd be surprised how far your money goes.

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At night, what people will do is wait until the morning to run the washing machine.