Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages • Hacker News Board

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#21

Post by rippercushions » Mon, May 15, 2023, 2:04 AM UTC

photochemsyn wrote: post #14

DoreenMichele wrote: post #5

Indonesia has brought electricity to millions of people in recent years, going from 85% to nearly 97% coverage between 2005 and 2020, according to World Bank data. But there are still more than half a million people in Indonesia living in places the grid doesn’t reach. While barriers still remain, experts say off-grid solar programs on the island could be replicated across the vast archipelago nation, bringing renewa…

The unstated statistic in this article is that Indonesia's reliance on coal has grown from 20% of national energy production to 40% of energy production over the 2005-2020 period, which accounts for most of that 85% to 97% growth factor. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indonesia-clings-coa... The slow growth of renewables particularly in remote locations is certainly a good thing, but the actual nation-wide p…

This is particularly sad since Indonesia is volcanically very active and has tons of potential for geothermal power. Many of its islands are also quite dry, which couples with the equatorial location makes them great for year-round solar.

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#22

Post by rippercushions » Mon, May 15, 2023, 2:06 AM UTC

gpm wrote: post #10

bryanlarsen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are small islands. More storage is almost certainly cheaper than inter island connections.

All the pictures in the article are Sumba island, which has an area of 11k km^2 and roughly 800k people (slightly less population density than the state of California), I'm not sure that really counts as small. Yes island interconnects seem reasonably unlikely. Similarly Hawaii has no interconnects between the main islands [0] despite being a first world locale. A different geography leading to a different grid struc…

Indonesia has around 10,000 inhabited islands, although around half the population is on Java and most of the rest on the next big five (Borneo/Kalimantan, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Bali, Papua).

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#23

Post by sdenton4 » Mon, May 15, 2023, 2:13 AM UTC

hedora wrote: post #12

seb1204 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since there is a limit with what the solar system can provide the user/community will work with that. No need to say it can't accommodate a wasteful western way to use the energy.

Wasteful is relative. Our house produces 250-300% of our usage most days, but 5-50% of our usage some weeks. Heating and cooling (and the computers that manage the batteries, which draw about 200W, including internet!) is hard to timeshift, but everything else is easy to move to sunny days. Anyway, on those sunny days, electricity is literally free. I wish I could just dump it into a magic box that pulled charcoal ou…

At some point I got an itch and looked into what it would take to run such a magic box myself.

The lightbulb moment was realizing that of I did manage to pull a ton (or 15) of carbon out of the air by whatever method, I would then have to move that carbon... Somewhere. I had been looking especially at algae bio reactors, which leave you with a particularly soupy waste situation. :)

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#24

Post by jltsiren » Mon, May 15, 2023, 2:18 AM UTC

ronnier wrote: post #16

What’s going to happen when the haves can afford to buy solar and go off grid leaving the have-nots left on a grid increasingly void of people who can pay for it? I suspect off grid users will be taxed heavily and/or it’ll be illegal to not pump back into the grid. Will probably be illegal to go off grid in the future

I find it more likely that the poor will want to disconnect from the grid, because the grid is fundamentally about reliability. When your own systems fail, you still want power while you are waiting for repairs. At least if you can afford it.

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#25

Post by cschmid » Mon, May 15, 2023, 2:19 AM UTC

Unfortunately, despite panels and batteries getting cheaper every year, not every rural household has the financial means to access these solutions. I'm really excited about initiatives creating microgrids with peer-to-peer payment systems, like solshare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v33ERl42VYM

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#26

Post by latchkey » Mon, May 15, 2023, 2:28 AM UTC

rektide wrote: post #20

quechimba wrote: post #13

Many families in the nearby village run generators at night. They can't afford solar panels so they pay 5 soles for gasoline just to have lights on when it gets dark. If they could afford solar they could have lights on every night for a one time cost. Most family don't have the luxury of running generators though. This project sounds really cool. I wonder if this can be done in the Peruvian Amazon. I'm sure several…

I can get quite a lot of night time light out of a $65 100Whr lipo and a $50 inverter. That sounds much better to me than a generator.

You can get quite a of of it, at that price. Shipping to a remote island in the middle of nowhere, is more expensive.

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#27

Post by rektide » Mon, May 15, 2023, 2:35 AM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #26

rektide wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can get quite a lot of night time light out of a $65 100Whr lipo and a $50 inverter. That sounds much better to me than a generator.

You can get quite a of of it, at that price. Shipping to a remote island in the middle of nowhere, is more expensive.

In my mind I was comparing versus the alternative stated of buying a generator & fuel for it. The generator will be up-front pricier, weightier, and bulkier, by far on each count. So it still seems like a huge win to me versus what's available now, if the use case is as described.

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#28

Post by epistasis » Mon, May 15, 2023, 2:52 AM UTC

gpm wrote: post #4

epistasis wrote: post #2

For years (decade? decades?) this has been the promise of distributed solar and storage, and been analogized to how developing countries leapfrogged to wireless telecom without the expensive wired last-mile telecom stage. The grid is very valuable, but it's also very expensive, and as storage and solar get really cheap, while grid costs stay stagnant, we may arrive at a future for which decentralized, disconnected mi…

I'm not convinced that this is a case of leapfrogging. Off grid solar+storage is great when you and everyone around you is using very little electricity. It lets you go from "nothing" to "lightbulb at night" very cheaply, which is a huge improvement. Once you're using tons of electricity, list a 1st world home does (refrigeration/ac/microwaves/electric ovens/electric stoves/washing machines/vehicles/...), storage wou…

That sort of lifestyle is really feasible on solar. Rooftops alone are likely enough, or at worst some bit of agrovoltaics.

The vast majority of Western energy is wasted, rejected as waste heat. Solar electrification skips over a wasteful thermodynamic conversion of heat to electricity. Even the rare case where fossil fuels seem at first glance as efficient, such as for heating water and homes, it turns out that 99% efficiency of conversion of fossil fuel energy to heat still requires 3-4x as much energy as a heat pump to get the same result. And don't get me started on how incredibly wimpy and inefficient ICE cars are.... unreliable bad machines.

And the only, literally the only time I have seen somebody come up with napkin math to say that solar would be hard to install in sufficient quantity to meet existing lifestyles in countries with normal insolation, it has been using total energy, rather than the actual useful amount of energy.

Solar and storage are gigantic technological marvels compared to the tech that delivered energy to us in the 20th century. Unless one's earning are tied directly to spreading FUD about these new technologies, it makes no sense not to acknowledge both the amazing tech curve of the past decades, and to speculate won the wonderful places that solar and storage in future will take us.

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#29

Post by gpm » Mon, May 15, 2023, 3:13 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #28

gpm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced that this is a case of leapfrogging. Off grid solar+storage is great when you and everyone around you is using very little electricity. It lets you go from "nothing" to "lightbulb at night" very cheaply, which is a huge improvement. Once you're using tons of electricity, list a 1st world home does (refrigeration/ac/microwaves/electric ovens/electric stoves/washing machines/vehicles/...), storage wou…

That sort of lifestyle is really feasible on solar. Rooftops alone are likely enough, or at worst some bit of agrovoltaics. The vast majority of Western energy is wasted, rejected as waste heat. Solar electrification skips over a wasteful thermodynamic conversion of heat to electricity. Even the rare case where fossil fuels seem at first glance as efficient, such as for heating water and homes, it turns out that 99%…

> That sort of lifestyle

As I said in another comment, once people can afford a better lifestyle, they aren't remotely likely to choose to keep living the worse one.

On the other hand, I too am a fan of solar and electricity. I completely buy the solar + storage + grid is sufficient for a western lifestyle. I'm not arguing against solar, I'm arguing against lack of grid, that connecting houses, towns, and cities together can save more money on storage than it costs to run the wires. You want to plan for very-close-to-worst generation + storage >= very-close-to-worst-case load over all time frames, and grids smooth over variations in both generation and load, which makes the worst cases go way down, which means that that equation requires a lot less storage (not none, but less).

Incidentally I also think that "solar + wind + storage + grid" is an even better combination... and that wind power only works with a grid (because the scaling rules around them mean you want giant wind turbines that put out enough power for many houses)... but even with only solar grids just make too much sense.

Re: Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

#30

Post by quechimba » Mon, May 15, 2023, 3:19 AM UTC

rektide wrote: post #20

quechimba wrote: post #13

Many families in the nearby village run generators at night. They can't afford solar panels so they pay 5 soles for gasoline just to have lights on when it gets dark. If they could afford solar they could have lights on every night for a one time cost. Most family don't have the luxury of running generators though. This project sounds really cool. I wonder if this can be done in the Peruvian Amazon. I'm sure several…

I can get quite a lot of night time light out of a $65 100Whr lipo and a $50 inverter. That sounds much better to me than a generator.

That's half the monthly minimum wage, most people here make even less, and everyone has at least a few kids to feed.

Also everything is more expensive because it's so remote. There are no roads so everything has to be brought here by airplane or boat. If you order something from Amazon (the website) to the Amazon (the rainforest) shipping is at quite expensive and then there's import fees too...