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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

#191

Post by phil21 »

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.

It’s not reasonably affordable by any real “middle class” metric and the impact a reliable grid has on the industrial and commercial base of an economy is being undervalued by an utterly laughable degree during these discussions. Westerners and rich folks take it for granted as a fact of life at this point.

The duck curve is a rounding error when discussing energy storage.

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

#192

Post by abdullahkhalids »

JBlue42 wrote: post #164
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

A society is a business entity. They have some control over all houses in an area. Most societies are large. Hundreds or thousands of houses/buildings.

The administration of the society is usually done by the original developers. They decide how big the plots of land are, decide the rules houses must follow in their design. The houses themselves are built by the owners of the plots.

They society collects monthly fees typically. It is usually responsible for trash pickup. Richer societies will arrange water supply and even backup electricity plants. Larger societies create commercial areas and parks within their bounds as well.

They are not always gated as the parent states. Only the ones rich enough to hire security.

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

#193

Post by adrianN »

triceratops wrote: post #143
kragen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Balcony solar can still satisfy a significant portion of a household's demand.

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

#194

Post by adrianN »

UltraSane wrote: post #37
peppersghost93 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

overprovision for their needs during the day and utilize battery power at night.

Solar panels are cheap but batteries are very expensive.

You can order 2kWh of plug-in-ready battery for 400€ or so on Amazon. That's single digit cents per kWh over the lifetime of the battery. Bigger systems are cheaper.

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

#195

Post by pfdietz »

UltraSane wrote: post #37
peppersghost93 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

overprovision for their needs during the day and utilize battery power at night.

Solar panels are cheap but batteries are very expensive.

Battery modules (not home scale, but utility scale) are around $50/kWh in China. If we assume a 20 year lifespan and 50% charge/discharge once a day, that adds (ignoring interest) $0.013/kWh to the energy cycled through the batteries (plus a small add from efficiency being not quite 100%).

This is quite cheap compared to (say) the fully loaded cost of energy from a nuclear power plant.

Smaller units will be more expensive per kWh, but not so enormously so as to render them impractical. And they will get cheaper quickly like all electronics do.

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

#196

Post by pfdietz »

UltraSane wrote: post #171
jillesvangurp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries are dirt cheap already and getting cheaper all the time. Pakistan would be buying them at the Chinese prices without a lot of tariffs or nonsense that might be misleading you into believing otherwise. Think a bandwidth of 50-80$ per kwh cost levels for the manufacturer with a margin on top in a market where there's over production and prices are still trending down and margins are probably under quite a bit…

"Batteries are dirt cheap already" they absolutely are not.

Multiple people have now explained you are in error here. I expect you will not repeat this falsehood going forward.

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

#197

Post by rstuart4133 »

triceratops wrote: post #181
rjdj377dhabsn wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those limits are just arbitrary regulations. It's easy to install 10x that on a residential roof.

And we come back to my original point. Residential roof installation is the most expensive way to install solar power. Utility scale solar is easily haf the cost of residential.

> Utility scale solar is easily half the cost of residential.

If it's only half, the problem it's not going to stop residential installs. By the time that utility power gets to them here in Australia it costs about 3 times as much, so they are going to install their rooftop systems anyway.

I can't speak for elsewhere, but here in Australia residential installs tend to be over provisioned. A small'ish install is 5kW. That generates about 20kWh per day. Typical household consumption is 1/2 that. Newer builds like mine tend to have far more - upwards of 20kW of panels. That's to cater for charging EV's. The result is grid solar installs are getting hammered by roof top solar: https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-hit-record-share-...

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

#198

Post by adrianN »

SoftTalker wrote: post #7
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.

Most people aren’t interested in being responsible for their own electrical generation. Especially with payback still being on the order of decades

Most of the costs for residential solar are installation. Systems that you install yourself, e.g. balcony solar, have payback times below five years (even in less than ideal regions, like Germany). I would assume that labor in Pakistan is a bit cheaper.

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

#199

Post by gpm »

phil21 wrote: post #191
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.

It’s not reasonably affordable by any real “middle class” metric and the impact a reliable grid has on the industrial and commercial base of an economy is being undervalued by an utterly laughable degree during these discussions. Westerners and rich folks take it for granted as a fact of life at this point. The duck curve is a rounding error when discussing energy storage.

The storage needed to turn solar into a reliable (as any comparable fossil fuel power plant) dispatchable source of power, plus the cost of the solar in the first place, costs less than other sources of dispatch-able power (like gas) in sunny places per kwh.

It also scales down better (though not perfectly).

Either you can afford it (both storage and solar), or you can't afford power at all, or you don't live in a sunny place.

Ignoring sunk capital costs into other energy infrastructure of course. If you already have a working nuclear power plant you're not going to save money by randomly turning it off and switching to something else, for instance.

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

#200

Post by adrianN »

SackSolStr wrote: post #80

The payback periods get me confused. A relative set up solar a year ago in one of the sunniest places in Europe, the Canaries, cost €7,000 for 6KW. He just ran the math on it and found out that the payback period is 15 years. The only way to make it profitable is government subsidies. How can it be profitable to install solar in continental Europe where taxes and labor costs are much higher while having much less sun…

I got 1kW for my balcony for 250€. Did your friend pay 5000€ just for the mounting?
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