Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
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Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
#2Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
#3What this shows is solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model. Even without net metering, demand destruction will cause the traditional model to stop working.
Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
#4Excellent results, even if the source article is a bit government-optimistic-press-releasy. The less-good news is that, even with abundant solar, you still need a functional grid (even more so than in traditional top-down energy distribution schemes) in order for everyone to take advantage of it, but this is a problem that lots of rich nations are working through right now, so affordable off-the-shelf solutions are bound to appear in the near future.
And I wish Pakistan the best in taking advantage of those and/or their home-grown ingenuity!
Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
#5What this shows is solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model. Even without net metering, demand destruction will cause the traditional model to stop working.
Will it? I’m not sure how the utilities structure their prices wrt the actual cost, but they definitely separate the baseline connection cost from usage on bills (at least in the US), so they may not be killed by people using very little power as long as the connection fee actually covers things.
Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
#6I would encourage people to go look at satellite view of random "rich" neighbourhoods in Pakistan, and note how many solar panels there are on rooftops. Here is the first one I scrolled to in Lahore [1], and one in Karachi [2]
Pakistan's grid prices tripled or more since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, because the extremely mismanaged and poorly designed electricity system+economy could not handle the energy price shock. This spiraled into rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@31.3611237,74.2493456,357m/data...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@24.8014179,67.0460688,415m/data...
Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
#7What this shows is solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model. Even without net metering, demand destruction will cause the traditional model to stop working.
Most people aren’t interested in being responsible for their own electrical generation. Especially with payback still being on the order of decades
Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
#8What this shows is solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model. Even without net metering, demand destruction will cause the traditional model to stop working.
There’s a business model where distributed solar production and storage is the norm and central grid based generation and delivery is the minority.
Such a model is extremely resistant and there’s less system infrastructure necessary. It’s quite feasible to redesign the system around a “distributed first” model.
Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
#9How many years before this happens in parts of the United States?
Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
#10I would encourage people to go look at satellite view of random "rich" neighbourhoods in Pakistan, and note how many solar panels there are on rooftops. Here is the first one I scrolled to in Lahore [1], and one in Karachi [2] Pakistan's grid prices tripled or more since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, because the extremely mismanaged and poorly designed electricity system+economy could not handle the energy pri…
> rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
how it exacerbated problems exactly?..