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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

#161

Post by calvinmorrison »

ghiculescu wrote: post #157
jahnu wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pakistan has the highest per capita slavery except for communist countries with forced labor regimes, in the world. Their country is built on the backs of slavery.

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

#162

Post by shelled »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #161
ghiculescu wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words poor people are being forced to subsidize luxury beliefs.

Pakistan has the highest per capita slavery except for communist countries with forced labor regimes, in the world. Their country is built on the backs of slavery.

As someone from India — who has written this kind of comment against India and Pakistan in forums, with poor reception, and later realised it was rightly so — some more detail and nuance, possibly with some easily readable sources, would help a great deal - mostly for the people who want a picture of that because slavery is a very evocative term.

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

#163

Post by shkkmo »

ghiculescu wrote: post #157
jahnu wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#164

Post by JBlue42 »

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…

Two questions:

- What is a 'society'? Is it like a community that pays for upkeep and has other advantages or just a name for an area?

- Do tell about Calgary!

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

#165

Post by torginus »

I feel like this is disingenuous - I have solar, and peak power exceeds demand by a sizeable margin, but there are week long stretches with basically no solar. Given how cheap panels, are, it makes a ton of sense to oversize your system, and charge your batteries in the couple hour stretches where the sun does happen to shine.

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

#166

Post by chickenbig »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #140
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.

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

All well and good, provided the homeowner opts out of the system. Part of the problem comes when the grid connection is not severed. Using it as a backup option (at the same time as other people, for when the weather is bad) or demanding the grid takes their excess production are counter-productive to the system as a whole.

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

#167

Post by torginus »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #53
pfdietz wrote: post #3

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.

if the same solar also had enough battery capacity, sure. But they do not, they still need to buy at out of solar peak and that just causes problems for both sides. I think grid should start moving into selling storage as a service. Just put a bunch of bulk storage at every transformer station and buy solar from consumers at solar peak, sell them back say 80% of it (or whatever margin is required to pay for it) off p…

EVs have giant batteries - they can be connected via their DC ports and charged/discharged via solar inverters - technically. The current spec for CCS and NACS doesn't allow for this (Chademo did, but they lost the 'format war'). Giant effing oversight on manufacturers' part if you ask me.

Some people have managed to trick their cars into reverse charging via solar hybrid inverters and some custom hardware and it works as advertised - which is no surprise since its a lithium battery charge controller charging/discharing a solar battery.

If you could use your 60kWh EV battery on top of the 10-20 kWh you have at home, it would be a game changer, most people could power their homes for a week on that sort of capacity.

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

#168

Post by chickenbig »

gus_massa wrote: post #113
phkahler wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they start charging that way, the rich will buy batteries and disconnect from the grid entirely.

It's good until a Wednesday afternoon your home system dies and you have no electricity until Monday. I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case.

> I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case.

The grid becomes an insurance policy. In that case it is justified to ask for the insured party to pay their share of the system costs; both an energy fee and transmission/distribution/generation capacity fee.

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

#169

Post by torginus »

sagarm wrote: post #125
toomuchtodo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LFP chemistries are approaching ~$50/kWh, and CATL's sodium chemistry is supposed to be ~$40/kWh (per CATL); soon it will be more expensive to ship the battery storage than the storage itself. "Watershed moment:" Big battery storage prices hit record low in China auction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504630 - July 2025 (4 comments) IEA: The battery industry has entered a new phase - https://www.iea.org/com…

Sodium batteries have significantly lower round-trip efficiency, so they have to be cheaper to win against LFP.

That's because of the huge range of voltages in the charge curve - resistive losses in wiring scale with the square of current. When the voltage drops, the current needs to increase for the same power.

If you can accept low power/current output (which EVs cant, but homes can), this isn't so bad.

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

#170

Post by torginus »

triceratops wrote: post #78
pfdietz wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Not necessarily - you have to pay for that infrastructure between the plant and your home.
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