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In Lebanon, solar power is booming

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Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#91

Post by pja »

shapefrog wrote: post #72
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Halved our water heating bill. I don't care about water usage, it's extremely cheap here and highly recyclable. That's why I framed my comment with the energy conservation context.

A shower heat recovery system would be better, which seems like such low hanging energy saving I am unsure why it isnt more of a thing.

A neighbour has one of these. What surprised me was that it didn’t bother (as far as I could see) pulling the heat out of the waste water - it was setup to pull the heat out of the air in the bathroom.

I guess this makes at least some sense though? A sizable proportion of the heat from shower water must go into water vapour that evaporates into the air as the droplets fall from shower head to floor drain. If you go into an unventilated room where someone has had a shower & you’ll find the air both very warm & very damp!

Using a heat recovery system like this also means you don’t need to pull cold dry air into the bathroom from outside in order to avoid condensation problems - the heat recovery also pulls the water out of the air - so it saves a considerable amount of energy that way too.

Whether these are enough to offset the installation cost I don’t know.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#92

Post by mijamo »

darkwater wrote: post #86
xiphias2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the previous classification it was A/B/C as well, they had to learn it.

Yeah, but at least they did learn. In Europe they keep adding the A/B/C/D/E/F/G scoring system to more and more things with the excuse - I guess - that people are now already used to it.

On the other hand if you had "8" how would you know if it's good or bad? It is not intuitive, especially if you keep adding more.

And the scale needs to be changed regularly anyways because the criteria are not the same, so a 8 now would not even be guaranteed to be a 8 tomorrow.

The European system already resets the scales after a while (for instance the new ones don't have a + yet) and it is not just about changing min and max but many things are reevaluated based on new knowledge, so an item that was B can no be D while another one that was C stays C. Be it number or letters it is a breaking change so you might as well go with the intuitive system that matches most people's intuition

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#93

Post by oblio »

DFHippie wrote: post #85
oblio wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess? Not. They probably have AC, but heat pumps are expensive and the lower the income the less interest in the "environment" or "pollution". People just use whatever's cheapest upfront.

Off topic, but... Why do you put "environment" and "pollution" in quotes? My guess is you don't believe, or mean to convey that you believe, that these are phony concepts or issues, but that lower income people treat these as someone else's concern. I find this linguistically interesting. Someone could write a paper about this. Perhaps someone has.

Because poor people don't care about them if their lives become worse.

That's the sad truth.

I mean, they do care about them, but their lives already suck a ton so distant doom is not really on their radar when faced with constant, present doom.

Simple example: EVs are arguably less polluting. So there might be a need for a policy to ban ICEs, which are much, much less expensive monetarily. That would mean poor people wouldn't be able to buy and use cars, at all. So poor people will obviously vote against that. It both makes sense and it's sad at the same time.

Oh, to clarify: rich people also pollute a ton and don't care about the environment, but they have the luxury of not caring if environmentally sound but more expensive policies are adopted (they can go "whatever" and do the right thing with no major personal loss for them).

On top of that, it is the rich people's responsibility to find environmentally sound policies which are acceptable to everyone, since they're the ones with most of the power.

Edit: Oh, you don't have to believe me. Go talk to 100 low income people (construction workers, cooks, waiter, nannies, agricultural workers, etc) about the environment, it will be quite eye opening for ivory tower folks.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#94

Post by jefftk »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #90
fnbr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike Lebanon, though, one cannot legally operate their solar panels to power a home while the electric grid is down in Israel. That’s fascinating! Can you say more?

I have a phocos anygrid 5kwh solar inverter. It is a regular grid tie inverter but once grid goes down, it continues in off grid mode even without batteries so this inverter would be perfect without breaking any laws

I have this kind of system too, but when I wanted to get solar for the other side of our roof after our neighbors took down a tree I learned that they're no longer allowed in MA for new installs. Starting with the 2014 National Electrical Code (NEC) you need to have some form of rapid shutdown to protect firefighters in an emergency, and in the 2017 revision it got much stricter to where the SPS functionality would have to be completely redesigned to qualify. The only option now, as far as I can tell, is the recently released Enphase IQ8 Sunlight Backup. It's very expensive: I got some quotes and it added about $7k (23%).

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#96

Post by mschuster91 »

jcbrand wrote: post #69
qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not only south africa. Its england, its europe, the concept of failing state services via lobbyism, then privatization of basic services, seems to be part of the us colonial model. Cant argue with it being good for buisness, its just bad for the people living in such a society.

Eskom in South Africa provides about 90% of the electricity and is a state owned enterprise. It's not privatized at all, it's a state-owned monopoly. So basically the exact opposite of what you're complaining about. Privatization, i.e. selling off individual power plants to private entities and allowing private entities to generate more power is probably the best way out of their electricity crisis.

Europe and in particular Germany or the US shows just how bad that can end up as well. When private companies seize control of utilities - water, electricity, gas, internet, railway, streets - they inevitably end up cutting corners, deferring or ignoring maintenance, firing support staff and generally reducing service quality while keeping to raise rates to make the money back for the banks that backed the loans. Or, in the worst case, prioritize the rich and privileged in case of under-supply over the poor masses, and not doing anything to expand the supply because it works well enough for those who pay better and those who end up shafted don't have seats in the lobby.

That's not to say that nationalized or majority-government-owned companies can't fuck up either, France's EDF or Germany's Deutsche Bahn prove that, but at least the government there can be held accountable by the general public in elections.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#97

Post by mschuster91 »

raesene9 wrote: post #56
IcePic wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden the same applies, at least if you have panels that can feed back excess into the grid for payment. In case the main grid goes off, your equipment is supposed to stop working so that it doesn't feed power backwards into the grid while some person is trying to fix whatever broke, so unless you have a battery/UPS and a large switch to flip, your solar panels "die" along with the grid. The alternative would be…

Adding a battery and switch is the obvious solution to the problem. I'm in the UK and ended up going for the Powerwall 2 and Tesla Gateway, alongside our panels. The installation had to be certified by the electricity company to ensure that it operates safely in the event of a grid power outage, but (in theory as we've not had a power cut since installation) it should all work fine.

Nevertheless you should regularly test it, at least once a year.

Many a datacenter outage could have been prevented had there been more regular testing of all the components involved.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#98

Post by LatteLazy »

Solar is lovely and all but the far more concerning thing here is that 30 years on from it's civil war, Lebanon still does not have a functioning government. More and more places seem to be ending up in this state, both in places like Lebanon AND in the West (looking at you Texas, or here in the UK). It's nice that at least some people are finding ways to work around these failures. But let's not pretend that that is a viable solution. We should address the actual core issue here.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#99

Post by mschuster91 »

Arnt wrote: post #67
pmezard wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what with France rationing power this winter Said like that it sounds like rolling blackout and the state enforcing energy consumption at gun point. There was a lot of noise because the government planned some of these things. But in practice it meant reducing the temperature of public swimming pools a bit, reducing/shutting down public lighting deep in the night, reducing temperatures in office building by one or…

The maintenance plans weren't bad. "Inspect [x] thoroughly every [y] years": Good. "Take plants offline for repairs immediately if problems on [long list] are seen": Good. "Build a few extra plants because some will be down for maintenance": Good. "Arrange for gas-fired power in case lots of plants are down": Good. IMO what's bad is some people's expectations. One of the countries within the power grid is at war. Som…

Ukraine wasn't even on the power grid when the war began, they took IIRC 2-3 months to sever the ties to Russia and integrate the Ukrainian power grid.

The problem, at least for the sorry state of electricity prices, isn't that Ukraine was at war... it was/is that the French did an absurdly large bet on nuclear power while at the same time tying at least 40% of heating to resistive heating, but failed to have a backup plan other than "hope the rest of Europe has excess capacity" once it became clear that Flamanville was under massive delays, and on top of that they massively neglected maintenance of their aging nuclear fleet even before Covid hit and prevented maintenance. They also did not plan ahead for climate change-induced massive droughts that led to an almost complete lack of cooling water for the plants.

They were essentially closing their eyes to the pile-up of delays at Flamanville and as a result they had a "perfect storm" event in the summer.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#100

Post by dotancohen »

anovikov wrote: post #47
dotancohen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike Lebanon, though, one cannot legally operate their solar panels to power a home while the electric grid is down in Israel. From what I understand, the Lebanese are used to working around the failings of their government in all aspects of life: work, shopping, now banking, and even education where possible. I don't know about water supplies or roads, but from what I heard the Lebanese view their government more…

I think you can by simply disconnecting from the grid. This is a obvious prohibition, same reason why male-to-male electrical cables are prohibited and not sold: doing so will electrocute anyone trying to fix the grid.

The solar power inverter needs the grid sine wave to sync to. Without seeing that sine wave, it will not produce power.

The naive solution would be to have a small 12v automotive battery and 240v inverter to generate the sine wave, and to use it only after fully disconnecting from the grid. However the sine wave that 240v inverters create are "digital" sine waves - they are easily discerned from the real analogue sine waves that a power station produces with spinning armatures and flywheels.

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