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In Lebanon, solar power is booming

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Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#121

Post by PenguinCoder »

oblio wrote: post #93
DFHippie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

Agreed, hard to give a thought to the plights of the world when you're busy just trying to survive and afford basic necessities. The big picture environment doesn't matter to the person trying to find food _now_.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#122

Post by berkes »

mschuster91 wrote: post #99
Arnt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 backu…

Which is to be expected when you build a massively centralized, both physical and organisational, power system.

And which is my main issue with nuclear power: it isn't distributed, but centralized and heavily dependent on governments and extreme long-term-planning. Which is a recipe for disaster. The chance that Flamaville would be delivered late is about 100%. Reacting to rapid changes like a war (spiking fuel prices or making NG unattainable) always slow, and always late if possible at all.

So, aside from all the other arguments against nuclear power, it is slow, expensive, centralized and heavily dependent on governments; it's the closest you'll get to a government-ran electricity production. All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite.

The entire opposite is solar: heavily distributed, privately owned and immensely fast. Wind is somewhere in-between, cheaper and faster to build than a CHP, but obviously more centralized than solar.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#123

Post by reacharavindh »

It is liberating to be able to produce one's own energy for residential needs. Can't wait for the energy storage technologies to catch up fast such that it becomes sensible to set up solar panels wherever possible, and wire them to a cheap enough battery storage such that the grid becomes a backup connection and solar + battery is the primary source.

I have resisted the idea of Li-ion battery in the house because of fire risks and costs. If Na-ion battery tech or one of the many promising battery tech being talked about every week comes to life soon, I'd jump on it.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#124

Post by boeingUH60 »

ycombinete wrote: post #51
anonu wrote: post #13

Basically, Lebanon had 30 years to figure out how to build basic infrastructure like a proper electrical grid and production (from 1990, the end of the civil war to present). Instead, crooks, thieves and fraudsters figured out how to bilk the nation of billions while leaving subpar services in their wake. My parents have had solar thermal collectors for hot water on their roof in Lebanon for 3 decades now... other th…

This is exactly the same situation in South Africa, where "solar power is [also] booming". We had world class infrastructure that not only wasn't updated, but has been looted, or left to rot. Now the water systems are also failing. Expect bore-holes and home-filtration to be "booming" in South Africa too in the near future.

Same in my country (Nigeria). Electricity infrastructure is grossly unreliable. Most houses have their backup generators and personal bore hole and water filtration systems because relying on the government is a sure path to get frustrated.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#125

Post by antisthenes »

reacharavindh wrote: post #123

It is liberating to be able to produce one's own energy for residential needs. Can't wait for the energy storage technologies to catch up fast such that it becomes sensible to set up solar panels wherever possible, and wire them to a cheap enough battery storage such that the grid becomes a backup connection and solar + battery is the primary source. I have resisted the idea of Li-ion battery in the house because of…

> I have resisted the idea of Li-ion battery in the house because of fire risks and costs.

The vast majority of battery backup solutions in 2022 and forward are LFP tech, which is much safer than cylindrical Li Ion cells.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#126

Post by mschuster91 »

berkes wrote: post #122
mschuster91 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 backu…

Which is to be expected when you build a massively centralized, both physical and organisational, power system. And which is my main issue with nuclear power: it isn't distributed, but centralized and heavily dependent on governments and extreme long-term-planning. Which is a recipe for disaster. The chance that Flamaville would be delivered late is about 100%. Reacting to rapid changes like a war (spiking fuel price…

> All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite.

That one is actually easy to answer: Most of the European left does not like nuclear because of cost externalization - let's be real: it's not today's rate payers that are going to fund the decades worth of work needed to dismantle the plants (e.g. the AKW Greifswald in Germany has already been taking 30 years with at least 15 more years planned [1]) or to safely store all that nuclear waste for likely hundreds if not thousands of years, it's the tax payers of the future. On top of that come the enormous and un-insurable financial risks of disasters: Chernobyl happened 35 years ago and still you can't eat game or shrooms in Bavaria without running them in front of a Geiger counter (not to mention that Chernobyl is in an active war zone with radiation-releasing disruptions having happened as a part of the war, as are about a dozen other plants that are, to make it worse, even being actively shot at), the cost of the Fukushima cleanup is estimated to run into 200 billion dollars.

In contrast, the European right wing loves nuclear precisely because it is so "cheap" on paper with ~13 ct/kWh... it's their usual playbook of conveniently ignoring the above-mentioned externalities.

[1] https://www.zeit.de/2021/42/rueckbau-kernkraftwerke-atomauss...

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#127

Post by Roark66 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #52
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…

From what I gather, it's not just France. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine the price of gas and electric power in the European Union has gone up enormously. https://jacquesmattheij.com/drastically-reducing-our-powerbi...

Indeed, here in Poland there have been state subsidies for replacing individual household heat sources from coal to gas(and heat pumps etc) for quite some time. This year a lot of people were scrambling to find those old coal burners and reinstall them in the heir homes again.

You can actually smell a difference. I live in non-industrial North of the country basically in the country side. Nearest town has 5k people and even here when temperatures dropped I could smell shitty coal being burned when I went to town. I know the smell because I have a hobby forge and I use (good) coal sometimes. I have to say this is the first time in my life I could actually smell it in the air used by other people here. This is a heavily forested region and most people used wood as fuel. However with current prices and availability, coal (and shitty one too) is back.

As for prices I can assure you it could've been much worse if not for the state subsidies that were put in place very quickly and the state bringing in coal on massive ships from abroad. I heat my house with wood pellets and a "smart" furnace that has very high efficiency. Also I have a benefit of good insulation. In previous years I would pay about $500 for a year's supply of fuel (this is just house heating, water for bathrooms is heated with electricity). This year I bought before the majority of the price increases hit and I paid $1200 (this is for 2.5 tons of the "premium" version of the stuff). Then I got $800 back from the state as heating subsidy. So overall it cost me less than in an usual year.

Then there is the state sanctioned freeze on the price of gas for private people (not businesses) and same for electricity until you use up 2MWh.Imagine how bad it would be without it. Still this cost is well worth it.

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#128

Post by realworldperson »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #20

Solar + cheap storage should be the new default for the entire second/ third world. Basically, you can't rely on your central corrupt government? Well, you don't have to! With starlink the third world will have options for internet too. Now, starlink probably can't serve billions of people, but it can still be an option, especially for rural.

[dead]

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#129

Post by lioeters »

DFHippie wrote: post #115
oblio wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

My point was just that it's an interesting use of quotation marks. People once had no writing system at all. Then they had no way to represent speech sounds. Then they had no way to represent individual phonemes. They had to invent spaces between words, punctuation, capital letters. I expect the Egyptians had no way to represent what was represented here with quotation marks. I'm curious how long and how widely quota…

You'll like this: Irony punctuation. It includes "scare quotes".

> The use of a graphic symbol on an expression to indicate irony or dubiousness goes back much further: Authors of ancient Greece used a mark called a diple periestigmene for that purpose.

> In certain Ethiopic languages, sarcasm and unreal phrases are indicated at the end of a sentence with a sarcasm mark called temherte slaqî, a character that looks like the inverted exclamation point (U+00A1) (¡).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

> Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes, sneer quotes, and quibble marks) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense.

> Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression "so-called"; they may imply skepticism or disagreement, belief that the words are misused, or that the writer intends a meaning opposite to the words enclosed in quotes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) wrote in his Etymologiae that the diple was used to mark quotations from the Bible. He mentions how diple periestigmene (dotted diple) were used to mark dubious passages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diple_(textual_symbol)

Re: In Lebanon, solar power is booming

#130

Post by shapefrog »

pja wrote: post #91
shapefrog wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

The ones I designed in my head, that it turns out exist in the real world, exchange heat from the drain water to warm the cold water flowing to the shower, reducing the usage of hot water (https://zypho.uk/ for example - turns your 10 deg C cold flow to 20 C from the 40C waste flow)

In winter one would like the hot humid air from the bathroom to be heat exchanged and heat dumped back into the property. In summer perhaps feed the input airflow for a water heat pump and again dump out the humid air.

Either way, we leave a lot of efficieny the table.

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