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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

#211

Post by Gibbon1 »

riku_iki wrote: post #10
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…

> rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more. how it exacerbated problems exactly?..

I read that Pakistan told Qatar to sell off 24 containers of LNG next year. And there are abusive penalty clauses that get triggered when you do that.

I went an looked and it appears Pakistan imports ~110 containers of LNG a year. And their natural gas plants are running as 50% capacity.

Personal belief on big reason for a country to install solar, wind, and batteries to be able to tell the criminals at the IMF to go f' themselves.

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

#212

Post by rjdj377dhabsn »

kragen wrote: post #205
rstuart4133 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

In the US it's typically about a quarter.

It shouldn't be that expensive. I had 10x 500w installed and wired on my 7-8 meter high roof in 1/2 day.

I only paid $50 where I ljve, but even with 10x higher labor costs in the US, it should be under $1000.

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

#213

Post by kragen »

rjdj377dhabsn wrote: post #212
kragen wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US it's typically about a quarter.

It shouldn't be that expensive. I had 10x 500w installed and wired on my 7-8 meter high roof in 1/2 day. I only paid $50 where I ljve, but even with 10x higher labor costs in the US, it should be under $1000.

It shouldn't be, I agree. And eventually it won't be. But SEIA's report https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight... said that, in Q1 of 02024, utility-scale fixed-tilt installations in the USA averaged 98¢ per peak watt, of which 40¢ was the PV modules; and residential installations averaged 325¢ per peak watt, of which 20¢ was the PV modules, which is an atypically low share, historically speaking.

Where do you live?

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

#214

Post by scheeseman486 »

UltraSane wrote: post #172
scheeseman486 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia, if you have the space for rooftop solar, it's far cheaper in the long run to buy solar+battery. We did the math for our household and even if grid prices are stable (which they aren't, they're fast increasing) we're still going to make money back on the investment in less than 4 years. Granted this includes a government rebate for the battery, but overall the prices have plummeted. Any government that i…

Does that take into account the free electricity?

No, and once the Solar Sharer scheme kicks in it'll be very helpful in avoiding leaning too hard on the grid in the evening after rainy or overcast days.

It's a fantastic way to solve oversupply; give it to everyone, including those who have batteries in areas where the weather restricts solar output.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-03/energy-retailers-offe...

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

#215

Post by SackSolStr »

kragen wrote: post #112
SackSolStr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need more information to calculate the ROI. I gave you the peak efficiency, Which comes from clean panels and no clouds. The average efficiency is closer to 70%. While the canaries are pretty sunny, the panels get dirty very quickly (fine dust from Sahara), Actually, if you count cleaning costs, the ROI goes down even more. And also consumptions is at its peak in the evening when there is no sun. He was thinking…

That isn't the efficiency, which is a number somewhere under 23%, dividing the number of joules of light into the panel by the number of joules of electrical power out of it. Maybe you mean that at peak he gets 91% of the advertised 6kW, i.e., 5500W? Anyway, you said they paid €7000 and get back €500 per year, which is enough to calculate the ROI at 7.1% per year. Powerwalls are indeed extremely overpriced. But batte…

yes 7% ROI if no depreciation, but neither panels nor inverter are expected to last much beyond ten years. I was actually chatting with him just now since I got into this discussion, and he said he also needs a maintenance/emergency callout and cleaning contract, thats about €250 a year. In spite of this, he was still happy with doing this, good for the planet, even if not for this wallet. He also put up a large screen with the relevant numbers to train others in the house to use appliances at optimal times.

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

#216

Post by jillesvangurp »

kragen wrote: post #95
jillesvangurp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up to the locals in the US. Depends what their pain threshold is for falling behind and looking a bit behind the times. I think FOMO is going to be a big driver in a few years. This is not a left vs right topic. It's a money topic. And my impression of the US is that they love getting stuff on the cheap. Solar energy should be such a thing and it's getting painfully obvious that the US is paying a steep price where t…

Mexico could start producing synfuels with abundant solar energy and exporting them to the US, but that is far from the course plotted by President Sheinbaum, even though (or perhaps because) her doctorate is in the use of energy. Instead she's doubling down on oil drilling.

It's going to be more expensive than the fuel the US digs up for quite some time. Synthetic fuels don't really make economic sense without the massive subsidies the US uses to keep e.g. it's agriculture going. There is a lot of discussion around aviation fuels currently. Targets for SAF boil down to mixing in a small percentage of bio fuels with regular fuel. This smooths out the 10x or so price difference of SAF to regular fuel a bit. But it also means it's not all that effective as a way to reduce emissions because only a tiny percentage of the fuel is "clean". And of course producing SAF isn't all that clean either. For example, agriculture is carbon intensive.

The US importing synthetic fuels is not going to be a huge market for economic reasons. There's no logical reason for tax payers to pay Mexicans to make really expensive fuel for them. Just so they can pretend battery electric doesn't work north of the border.

Synthetic fuel at scale is just really expensive. And battery electric is going to take a sledge hammer to any misguided plans around that topic. It's going to get progressively more awkward to build a case for that. All those things where people still hang on to the believe that "surely batteries will never work here" are going to melt away over time. Batteries are going to get a lot cheaper and better over the next decades. And they are pretty good already.

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

#217

Post by tibbydudeza »

kragen wrote: post #68
toomuchtodo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great to hear about the fast payback period, wishing you reliable power :)

tibbydudeza didn't post about a fast payback period. Maybe neebz is his wife?

Payback - I never factored that in or even thought about that.

I was more concerned about having reliable power and reducing my electricity bill.

The daily 2-hour power cuts were getting out of hand, and I was running my business from my home office, so the tax incentives helped slightly.

The grid is more stable now as new power units became available but a big chunk of middle-class consumers using solar are using way less power now, so the local town councils are having problems balancing their books (town councils re-sells electricity from the national operator).

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

#218

Post by UltraSane »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #214
UltraSane wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that take into account the free electricity?

No, and once the Solar Sharer scheme kicks in it'll be very helpful in avoiding leaning too hard on the grid in the evening after rainy or overcast days. It's a fantastic way to solve oversupply; give it to everyone, including those who have batteries in areas where the weather restricts solar output. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-03/energy-retailers-offe...

The free electricity seems ideal to charge batteries with.

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

#219

Post by metalman »

shkkmo wrote: post #163
ghiculescu wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

You are very defintly confused here,;) or there, in Pakistan where some of the rulling class will brag about never getting utility bills, but the reality is that every built thing, down to the roads is there for them, but at root the main concepts of fuedal societies are intact, and going solar, fits in quite well, as it can be set up as distributed systems that will literaly conect into a larger grid, based on alliegences. The adoption of electric cars and especialy trucks/tractors/farm/industrial will follow quickly and allow fossil fuels to be reserved for strategic use. The real kicker will be batteries that have decadal life spans allowing for predictable, "one time" infrastructure investments that can the become self supporting through use "fees"

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

#220

Post by woodpanel »

torginus wrote: post #174
woodpanel wrote: post #42

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.

Yeah but I think advanced economies can figure out to produce the same things if there's a strategic need - and absorb the cost - you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody, so China doesn't really have that much political leverage in how you use it. There's also huge internal competition inside China between companies, so they have a harder time fixing prices.

> if there's a strategic need

Nope. A defining mechanism in energy markets is the cost to extract it. There's a reason Saudi Arabia dominates oil, if you can extract it with a shovel. And directly counter to your point, there's a reason, say, Germany can't just kick start a shell gas/oil industry even if it does have the deposits underneath.

> harder time fixing prices

Eh, it's not like the CCP didn't do heavy handed market interventions before, right? I mean some would even argue "fixing prices" is already embedded with the ruling party's name.

> you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody,

What is this even suppose to mean? Of course you can. That is the whole point of having geopolitical leverage.

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