151–160 of 262 posts
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Solar panels are cheap but batteries are very expensive.
Batteries are cheap in developing world prices, cheap in rich country prices. They continue to become cheaper every year.
What 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
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> 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
Argentina doesn’t make a habit of hosting its creditors’ troops [1].
[1] http://eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114/TopStories/16353167.htm...
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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…
In Calgary, the streets are numbered and it's super easy to navigate between "16th St NW" and "18th St NW". Certainly easier to understand than "Go from St. Catherine's Street to Peel" in Montreal.
Where they are not numbered, they at least have the name of the community. Edgemont, for example, has no numbered streets but the name usually starts with "Edge", making it clear what part of the city you are going to.
I don't think it is perfect but I have also lived in Tokyo where the system is literally impossible without a GPS because the locations are not as neatly arranged as here.
Imagine being the CCP and you’ve managed to turn your industrial capacity into the world‘s single largest renewable energy source. PV‘s Saudi-Arabia.
There were similar comments on HN. The argument goes that since it takes energy to produce PV panels and wind turbines, China effectively is an energy exporting country. What’s even better is some of the PV and turbines are produced with renewable energy. And unlike oil and gas, which are used only once, PV panels and wind turbines generate power for many years.
That is another aspect of “the Saudia-Arabia of PVs”
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 wher…
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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.
How many years before this happens in parts of the United States?
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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 wher…
In other words poor people are being forced to subsidize luxury beliefs.