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Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

reuters.com

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Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#131

Post by kragen »

magicalhippo wrote: post #122
kragen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pvXchange, but they're €23 because you fucked up the math: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... €12 would be 44× cheaper (7000/6000/(12/450) ≈ 44). Maybe in a couple of years.

I assumed 7k installed, so roughly half for the panels. So how many do you need to buy to get that €23 price?

A twenty-foot container, I imagine? Retail for onesies seems to be about 4× that.

Typically panels account for about a third of the cost of a turnkey solar power system, but that's largely because of historical design features that are no longer necessary.

Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#132

Post by sphericalkat »

SECProto wrote: post #127
Havoc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did whoever named those streets have a stroke? 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, MDR 7, 32, 33, no name at all, 39, 40 And they're not even unique...they recycle them a kilometer further. WAT

You have an inbuilt assumption about the purpose of a street name. Compare it with addresses in Japan [1], where some streets don't even have names. I don't know anything about Pakistan, but i wouldn't be surprised if the street name is solely to differentiate within some small geographic area. Looking at street view[2] from a nearby real estate development supports this [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_add…

This was a bit painful for me when I first moved to Tokyo, since the building I was supposed to move into was newly build, and not on Google Maps yet. I had to ask a very nice old lady where １９番１５号 was supposed to be, and it took 20 minutes of us searching to find the place.

First thing I did upon finding it was to add it to the map lol

Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#133

Post by darkteflon »

> The south Asian nation is planning to introduce new tariffs for large solar users, as well as changes to fee structures to ensure businesses with panels share equally in the costs of grid upkeep, she said.

Of course. We wouldn’t want the benefit of a public good to accrue to the public now, would we.

Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#134

Post by markdown »

mannanj wrote: post #114

Unpopular opinion: this is so contentious because it’s more about control.

Nah, it's about power (heh!).

Politicians need votes to remain in power. They lose votes if electricity is expensive. Lower demand and therefore low revenue in the face of fixed grid maintenance costs mean prices have to rise. Higher costs to voters terrifies politicians.

Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#135

Post by catlover76 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #129
ssl-3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears that the recycled street numbers each appear on different blocks. Street 6, for instance: I've found it twice so far. But they're still distinct, in that one Street 6 is within Block M 3 B, and another is within Block M 7. Which appears to suggest that blocks are more important at identifying an address than a street name is, and if that's the case then that works just fine. And indeed, a distinct address…

That's correct. In Pakistan, typically cities are broken up into housing societies. Each society is broken up into sectors/blocks, which are typically indexed by the alphabet(A, B, C, ...), but occasionally, one will see block M7 or sector B2 etc. In each such sector, each house has a unique numbered address. Some larger societies are first broken up into "phases" and then into sectors/blocks. Street numbers are typi…

[dead]

Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#136

Post by catlover76 »

kragen wrote: post #86
bofadeez wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State capitalism like you described totally undermines the price system by replacing profit-and-loss–guided entrepreneurial calculation with political allocation of resources, thereby rendering economic calculation increasingly impossible and eroding the coordinating function of the market process.

Yes, but nobody has found a more effective way to build infrastructure in poor countries. State capitalism as described is how infrastructure development happened in Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.

[dead]

Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#137

Post by throwaway2037 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. But there is a bit more. Almost all power plants in Pakistan are built with state-backed dollar-denominated loans (reason govt incompetence+corruption). This means if grid demand goes down, power plants don't go out of business like they would in a market based system. Instead, they keep collecting dollar-denominated interest paid by the state, even if they produce zero power. The state mitigates thi…

It is unfortunate that the government of Pakistan and their investors (China and the IMF) made poor investment decisions. They should feel free to go back to debt holders to renegotiate the debt, or default on it and hand the stranded assets back to creditors. The death spiral is of their own making, and will only accelerate as solar PV and battery cost declines continue. Electricity consumers will simply go off the…

    > default on it and hand the stranded assets back to creditors
I doubt the debt is secured by the power assets. If anything, maybe China can assume ownership of the entire powerplant if Pakistan cannot pay. They have done that many times in Africa. See: "debt-trap diplomacy". Also, it is terrible advice to tell a country to default on external debt. See: Argentina!

Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#138

Post by spacebanana7 »

kryogen1c wrote: post #62
londons_explore wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these problems become solved if you have realtime market pricing. Nobody would bother to install rooftop solar if daytime power was super cheap on every sunny day, yet expensive at night when their solar isn't working.

Wouldn't this model price out poor people? Doesn't that mean the most vulnerable people cant afford the services when they need them most, ie max hot/cold? Changing the utility to a market sort of defeats the point of trying to optimize the utility.

It’s better to give welfare / benefits directly to help poor people in that situation, rather than fix prices to make energy appear artificially scarce during daylight and abundant at night.

Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#139

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #86
bofadeez wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State capitalism like you described totally undermines the price system by replacing profit-and-loss–guided entrepreneurial calculation with political allocation of resources, thereby rendering economic calculation increasingly impossible and eroding the coordinating function of the market process.

Yes, but nobody has found a more effective way to build infrastructure in poor countries. State capitalism as described is how infrastructure development happened in Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.

Catlover76 asks in a [dead]ed comment, "And China, right?" It's a reasonable question. It's debatable whether the infrastructure of the parts of China I didn't mention was built by state capitalism or by a straightforwardly Communist system of production, so I only mentioned the more clear-cut cases.

Re: Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year

#140

Post by spacebanana7 »

mannanj wrote: post #114

Unpopular opinion: this is so contentious because it’s more about control.

Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.

It’s similar to how the British empire hated subsistence farming, and always wanted colonial subjects to be economically interacting with either trading companies or the state apparatus.

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