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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

#141

Post by elzbardico »

gpm wrote: post #61
elzbardico wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather). Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control th…

This is all true except for the fact that storage is not incredibly expensive anymore, which invalidates every single conclusion you reach. Storage is now reasonably affordable, and the trend suggests it will soon be incredibly cheap.

Not true.

The largest battery systems in operation are primarily designed for short-duration grid support rather than long-term, multi-day backup. They can even bridge a single windless night.

And this is talking about short term mismatch between supply and demand in a 24 hour cycle. If you consider the need to account for the yearly seasonal generation variation (which is far more dramatic as most of the developed world is situated on high latitudes) battery storage becomes even more problematic due to the absurd capital expenditures for a resource that you'd have to charge with a dramatic production supply during the summer months to slowly discharge during the winter.

People have been misled with the convenient lie of LCOE for too long, when what really matters are the true system costs. We don't even have in place the supply chain to sustain this, and I am not even talking about Lithium or Cobalt, I am talking about plain old Copper.

Then, there are the capital requirements for recycling and decommissioning, as the useful life of such systems is unfortunately not something to write home about.

Think about it. We have spent too much time and money on solar and wind, money that could have been spent on nuclear power. The clock is ticking, replacing our grid with solar may be the wet dream of big finance, but it is not a reasonable solution, it is about time we stop wasting our time with it.

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

#142

Post by jahnu »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #6

I 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…

According to this interview [1] and a recent Economist podcast blackouts were a huge driver of the decision of those that could afford it to go for solar and batteries. Now the utilities are in a death spiral. Customers disconnect, prices rise, more incentive to go for solar and storage as prices continue to fall while price of unreliable grid energy rises.

Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable.

[1] https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom

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

#143

Post by triceratops »

kragen wrote: post #89
triceratops wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most places in the developed world utility-scale solar is much cheaper to build than rooftop solar. And there's value in having a stable grid to fall back on. I think the demand destruction story is overrated.

Balcony solar is even cheaper to build than utility-scale solar.

It's limited to 800W in Germany and 1200W in Utah. It isn't about to replace utility-scale generation anytime soon.

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

#144

Post by triceratops »

cheema33 wrote: post #109
triceratops wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most places in the developed world utility-scale solar is much cheaper to build than rooftop solar. And there's value in having a stable grid to fall back on. I think the demand destruction story is overrated.

Utility-scale solar needs land and has to deal with line losses. Rooftop solar does not have to deal with either.

Utility scale is 2x cheaper despite all that.

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

#145

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #98
bofadeez wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that infrastructure was built under state capitalism does not demonstrate the superiority of central planning, only that capital accumulation occurred despite intervention, often financed by prior scarcity, foreign savings, or coerced transfers; absent market prices and entrepreneurial profit-and-loss, the state cannot know whether the infrastructure created was the most value-productive use of scarce resour…

I think it demonstrates the increased variance of central planning. The Congo Free State was also centrally planned, and so was the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian Genocide, Suharto's mass murder of suspected PKI sympathizers, etc. But the expected outcome for poor countries is that they stay poor and don't develop into industrialized export giants the way my laundry list of countries did.

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by chickenbig »

namibj wrote: post #118
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate. It's still much closer to the real costs for the grid operator than $/kWh. The fundamental problem that rooftop solar has revealed is that people think they are paying for the electricity, but they are not. Electricity is dirt cheap. Most of what they are paying for is the maintenance of the grid, and simple usage bas…

Actually the local cost is not the fuse size, but how much smaller the first transformer after you could be if you weren't there. Though it's often more fair to determine such for each user; then take those as a relative scale, then split the transformer's actual TCO by the determined share sizes between the users. Because the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-ad…

> the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size

Of course, how does the electricity company determine which user was first in this situation. A tariff that depends on the order of connection may not be practical for domestic situations, although it may be OK for very large users, e.g. factories, data-centres.

Using fuse size seems a more reasonable and fair proxy for cost, assuming the same load patterns as the rest of the users. Then again, consumers with EVs might argue that their load pattern is different to the average user (e.g. filling up with off-peak electricity). Also consumers with air conditioning might argue for special treatment given their usage correlates with solar output (except where it does not).

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

#147

Post by bofadeez »

kragen wrote: post #98
bofadeez wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that infrastructure was built under state capitalism does not demonstrate the superiority of central planning, only that capital accumulation occurred despite intervention, often financed by prior scarcity, foreign savings, or coerced transfers; absent market prices and entrepreneurial profit-and-loss, the state cannot know whether the infrastructure created was the most value-productive use of scarce resour…

I think it demonstrates the increased variance of central planning. The Congo Free State was also centrally planned, and so was the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian Genocide, Suharto's mass murder of suspected PKI sympathizers, etc. But the expected outcome for poor countries is that they stay poor and don't develop into industrialized export giants the way my laundry list of countries did.

Higher variance isn’t a redeeming feature when the mechanism that generates it lacks rational calculation in the first place. Central direction can occasionally coincide with growth in poor countries because initial scarcity leaves many wasteful paths that still raise output, but that doesn’t establish a positive expected value

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #137
toomuchtodo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by toomuchtodo »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #137
toomuchtodo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Argentina has defaulted nine times in its history. One or two times is not material, based on historical observations.

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

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

#150

Post by gpm »

elzbardico wrote: post #141
gpm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all true except for the fact that storage is not incredibly expensive anymore, which invalidates every single conclusion you reach. Storage is now reasonably affordable, and the trend suggests it will soon be incredibly cheap.

Not true. The largest battery systems in operation are primarily designed for short-duration grid support rather than long-term, multi-day backup. They can even bridge a single windless night. And this is talking about short term mismatch between supply and demand in a 24 hour cycle. If you consider the need to account for the yearly seasonal generation variation (which is far more dramatic as most of the developed w…

Absolutely true.

I don't know why you're even talking about nuclear when that's not something an individual can do at their scale. It's not relevant to this conversation. But everything you've just said about it is wrong.

LCOE, when LCOE is calculated correctly, is absolutely the right measure and absolutely includes the true system cost including storage to bring it up to a similar level of availability and decommissioning (incidentally decommissioning is way higher cost for nuclear than batteries so it's weird that you try to cite it).

Even if we switch gears from talking about individual generation to grid scale generation nuclear done safely is simply too expensive. Solar and battery storage are cheaper than it in sunny places today, they were cheaper than it in sunny places a year ago, and their price is and has been consistently falling exponentially while nuclear's price stays about constant.

Those prices are including the absolutely massive subsidies that are given to nuclear, in every form from government investment in the technology to government absorbing the vast majority of the insurance cost by not requiring they are insured to anywhere close to even a small fraction of the full amount of damage they could cause in a worst case disaster.

The only fantasy here is that nuclear is somehow going to suddenly buck the trend of staying at about constant price and start falling in price even more exponentially than solar and batteries have been to catch up. Spending money on nuclear only serves to prolong the climate crisis by taking away money from actual scalable solutions like solar that can outcompete with fossil fuels on cost.

You don't build storage for yearly cycles, you build it for daily cycles (which is affordable today) and overbuild solar to account for seasonal variation in generation and demand. Note that even things like nuclear have to be overbuilt for seasonal variation in demand, and to account for the fact that there is maintenance and sometimes some of your plants are down.

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