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

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

#101

Post by nasmorn »

euroderf wrote: post #51
twelvechairs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly 60% of indonesias population and most of its industry are on Java, the most densely populated island in the world. 150m+ people on a place the size of Pennsylvania or Mississippi. Its absolutely not easy to find space for solar at scale in such a space constrained environment it would really require some massive infrastructure to a solar farm in the sea or another island. Singapore is a good comparison - a muc…

It sounds like there's going to be an ideal density where there is room for solar (not blocked by neighbors) and for trees, yet still with walk-to-able neighborhood services.

The solar does not need to be interspersed in the neighborhood apart from what fits on the roofs

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

#102

Post by epistasis »

pyrale wrote: post #57
epistasis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

You kind of completely skipped your fellow commenter's point, which was not about production method, but about the benefits of a grid when you have important storage needs.

Yes, I misunderstood, which his other comment really drove home.

But I think that storage is not the bottleneck here, there's a wide array of cheap options coming online. And even at today's prices it's quite possible to get $100-$150/kWh LFP that plugs right into the inverter.

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

#103

Post by danhor »

mindslight wrote: post #99
arrrg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas from the ground can never be clean. Electricity can. That’s why electrification is key to getting where we want to get. We need to both electrify and get electricity generation carbon emissions to zero. Also: electrification additionally offers efficiency gains in many places. Heat pumps and EVs, for example, are both (in general) more efficient than gas stoves and ICE cars.

> electrification additionally offers efficiency gains in many places. Heat pumps and EVs, for example, are both (in general) more efficient than gas stoves and ICE cars This is the kind of comment that makes the "electrification movement" look bad. You can't use a heat pump for a stove - the very high delta-T means maximum efficiency (COP) approaches 1, and you might as well use resistive. And generating cooking hea…

I'm guessing the original commenter was confused between heating with gas and cooking.

Using electricity for cooking is much more efficient when using induction heating (which is the only kind of electric cooking anyone should use). Cooking with gas might be very efficient in converting gas to heat, but more than half of the heat gets lost without heating the pot/food and escapes by the side (approx. 40%), so using induction is about twice as efficient as using a gas stove (and conventional electric stoves aren't much worse). With the typical efficiency of a combined cycle gas plant, this cancels out to be approx. the same but gets better when more renewables are used (and, of course, worse with coal).

Gas stoves still do have a lot of other valid issues and I am kind of amazed a culture war broke out over it (when e.g. in germany less than 10% of households use gas stoves without a massive demand for new gas stoves).

> and allowed for propane tanks at new single family homes that really want a gas stove

As far as I can tell from the reporting [1] this is stopping new gas hookups (maybe including the equipment at the time of construction?) but there seems to be at least nothing stopping you from adding a gas stove and powering it from propane. I was unfortunately unable to find the text in the bill (or the exact bill), but as far as I can tell nothing suggests otherwise and if that is the case:

> That would have preempted 90% of the valid criticism.

That doesn't seem to have happened

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-state-bans-natural...

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

#104

Post by mindslight »

danhor wrote: post #103
mindslight wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> electrification additionally offers efficiency gains in many places. Heat pumps and EVs, for example, are both (in general) more efficient than gas stoves and ICE cars This is the kind of comment that makes the "electrification movement" look bad. You can't use a heat pump for a stove - the very high delta-T means maximum efficiency (COP) approaches 1, and you might as well use resistive. And generating cooking hea…

I'm guessing the original commenter was confused between heating with gas and cooking. Using electricity for cooking is much more efficient when using induction heating (which is the only kind of electric cooking anyone should use). Cooking with gas might be very efficient in converting gas to heat, but more than half of the heat gets lost without heating the pot/food and escapes by the side (approx. 40%), so using i…

Point taken about heat getting into food versus going up the side of the pot, but the break even still ties into my point that the real gains are still forward-looking rather than immediate.

> I am kind of amazed a culture war broke out over [gas stoves]

Hah. I am very not surprised. A seemingly-harmless everyday item in people's homes that the "big government" is "taking away"? There's certainly valid top-down arguments about the indoor air quality in the inefficient rental market, but they don't apply to single family homes (in the US paradigm it's fundamentally a personal choice).

> I was unfortunately unable to find the text in the bill (or the exact bill)

Same here, which is doubly unfortunate with all of these more-heat-than-light topics where the "news" articles drown out the primary sources. Some of my digging did indicate that propane was included, but it's hard to know if that was just a hallucination (in the large language model sense, regardless of whether the articles were written by silicon LLMs).

I know personally if I just had to have a gas stove in new construction, I'd get a few 20 pound propane tanks and plumb it myself. I actually considered doing this if I wanted a gas stove (versus paying a monthly fee for municipal gas), but ultimately decided against gas because the less flammable stuff in the house the better (moving appliances with those flex lines always gives me the willies as I think about metal fatigue). But solving your own problems isn't really relevant in the culture war...

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

#105

Post by arrrg »

mindslight wrote: post #99
arrrg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas from the ground can never be clean. Electricity can. That’s why electrification is key to getting where we want to get. We need to both electrify and get electricity generation carbon emissions to zero. Also: electrification additionally offers efficiency gains in many places. Heat pumps and EVs, for example, are both (in general) more efficient than gas stoves and ICE cars.

> electrification additionally offers efficiency gains in many places. Heat pumps and EVs, for example, are both (in general) more efficient than gas stoves and ICE cars This is the kind of comment that makes the "electrification movement" look bad. You can't use a heat pump for a stove - the very high delta-T means maximum efficiency (COP) approaches 1, and you might as well use resistive. And generating cooking hea…

That was just a vocabulary issue, sorry. I’m not a native speaker. I meant heating with gas vs. heat pump, obviously not cooking with a heat pump, that‘s absurd.

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

#106

Post by mindslight »

arrrg wrote: post #105
mindslight wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> electrification additionally offers efficiency gains in many places. Heat pumps and EVs, for example, are both (in general) more efficient than gas stoves and ICE cars This is the kind of comment that makes the "electrification movement" look bad. You can't use a heat pump for a stove - the very high delta-T means maximum efficiency (COP) approaches 1, and you might as well use resistive. And generating cooking hea…

That was just a vocabulary issue, sorry. I’m not a native speaker. I meant heating with gas vs. heat pump, obviously not cooking with a heat pump, that‘s absurd.

That had not occurred to me because the rest of your comment was so clear. "Boilers" and "furnaces" refer to heating, and "stoves" generally refer to cooking. Exception: "wood stoves" are generally used for heating (indoor cooking with wood isn't common any more).

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

#107

Post by nonethewiser »

arrrg wrote: post #78
nonethewiser wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes this a great time to observe that electricity != clean. That’s a non-sensical conclusion because electricity doesnt have the capacity to be clean nor dirty. Its a storage format. Stored energy in gas just sitting in your gas tank doesnt really emit either. It’s ridiculous to conclude energy is clean by simply ignoring its emissions. Replacing an ICE vehicle with electricity isn’t necessarily lowering emis…

Gas from the ground can never be clean. Electricity can. That’s why electrification is key to getting where we want to get. We need to both electrify and get electricity generation carbon emissions to zero. Also: electrification additionally offers efficiency gains in many places. Heat pumps and EVs, for example, are both (in general) more efficient than gas stoves and ICE cars.

No, electricity can’t be clean nor dirty. It can be generated cleanly. But it does not follow that it IS generated cleanly because it CAN BE generated cleanly.

Thats all I'm saying. If you drive an electric car and you know the energy mix that generated the electricity then maybe you can conclude its cleaner (although that’s not the only factor). If you dont, then you are definitely just guessing.

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

#108

Post by euroderf »

nasmorn wrote: post #101
euroderf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like there's going to be an ideal density where there is room for solar (not blocked by neighbors) and for trees, yet still with walk-to-able neighborhood services.

The solar does not need to be interspersed in the neighborhood apart from what fits on the roofs

That is true. I guess I was thinking of agrovoltaics, which also would not be a bad idea for a medium-density mixed-use area. Oh and chickens.

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

#109

Post by rektide »

mft_ wrote: post #94
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.

Genuine question: isn't an inverter an unnecessary cost and relatively inefficient versus a lower voltage light (i.e. roughly matching the battery)?

An inverter is an inefficiency & a cost, yes.

Yet. It's daunting to me to imagine replacing well known infrastructure with something custom & different. You could try to get a bunch of automotive 12 & 24 lights but there won't be great fixtures. You also need 12v versions of most appliances; fans, fridges, others.

Your upgrade capabilities also seem limited. If grid power does come, you might be stuck with a bunch of abornal choices. Your wire loss is much much higher with 1/10th the voltage or 10x the amps per wire, which limits scaling out on DC, is a counter-inefficiency that grows the bigger your system gets.

I think it's a good idea. Personally if I built a small off grid home or RV I'd probably do 48vdc. But it'd be much more work & require a ton of expertise.

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

#110

Post by mft_ »

rektide wrote: post #109
mft_ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: isn't an inverter an unnecessary cost and relatively inefficient versus a lower voltage light (i.e. roughly matching the battery)?

An inverter is an inefficiency & a cost, yes. Yet. It's daunting to me to imagine replacing well known infrastructure with something custom & different. You could try to get a bunch of automotive 12 & 24 lights but there won't be great fixtures. You also need 12v versions of most appliances; fans, fridges, others. Your upgrade capabilities also seem limited. If grid power does come, you might be stuck with a bunch of…

Sure - agree that for a whole house, it’s far more complicated. I was more interested in you running “a light” at night with a LiPo and an inverter.
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