I’ve heard a few stories of panels not being installed properly and flying off roofs and hitting cars below.
Unfortunately most lebanese live in apartments, and if a resident or two already called dibs on the roof, you’re out of luck.
Tangent, price of fuel/diesel used to be fixed by gov subsidies. Most of our (very tiny) amount of money left has been smuggled across the border to Syria. Same applies to bread, flour etc..
Is there a precedent for this happening in the US, i think insulin is way cheaper in mexico but I dont hear stories about it being smuggled to the states
> Abbott Labs recently obtained a preliminary injunction prohibiting numerous pharmacies, wholesalers, and other distributors from importing or otherwise using in the U.S. Abbott’s FreeStyle® blood glucose test strips that are intended for sale internationally. Chief Judge Amon of the Eastern District of New York found that Abbott is likely to succeed on the merits of its Lanham Act claim that consumers will likely be confused by the sale of “gray market” FreeStyle test strips in the U.S.
Actual prescription drugs being imported wholesale is rare because the penalties are pretty high for that. There is a somewhat related "diverted drugs" industry which is basically where people who get HIV medications for free from the government/insurance sell for them like 5 cents on the dollar for cash only for those to be resold a bunch of times to "wholesalers" before ultimately ending up in a pharmacy again - these kinds of sketchy secondary wholesalers are where counterfeits/illegally imported drugs would probably end up though. Nothing on the scale of what happens in Lebanon but if you read https://www.drugchannels.net / the WSJ it shows up every now and then.
Same for South Africa. Thanks to the grid being severely mismanaged upper middle class and beyond are installing home solar where possible to maintain some semblance of normalcy
That a pretty common thing, the last to modernize have more modern tech. Kind of like skipping levels in CIV. Interesting to think that the USA is bring back and build out nanoscale chip fabs, speculation is that we will be at this nanoscale for a long time.
In Africa for sure. People kept digging up phone lines and phone infrastructure to sell the copper. Service was always down, or spotty at best. Cell sites were easier to secure (they're defended like military installations, razor wire and all) from scavengers, and you need a lot less of them to service a large number of people.
We are visiting family for Easter. My wife’s mom bought a generator as well, so we should at least have enough power to keep the fridge running through stage 4 (I think?) load shedding (= planned rolling blackouts).
Fridges are fine during loadshedding...just need to be careful not to open them - they hold temp long enough. The compressors in them don't always like generators though fyi.
I would suggest bringing a decent powerbank though to keep the phone charged.
This article kind of has the: “Obesity rates are plummeting as cancer rates increase” feel to it.
Basically, a really shitty situation is driving something that you are seeing as good. Lebanon at this point is pretty close to a failed state. The solar power boom is basically the populace losing faith in the government to provide basic infrastructure.
Hey, it's better than burning coal. The thing I would celebrate here is that the technology is cheap enough and available enough to enable people to work around their government's failings.
What you write is certainly not wrong, but it's also not the complete picture: unlike their contemporaries in non-failed states, those people learn electricity usage patterns that are adapted to supply. And that will also transfer well from the insular home battery to a grid with supply-dependent pricing, something which will come to every grid sooner or later. Grid addicts like us will be much less capable of adapting to that change, we will pay while those better at adapting enjoy the spoils of efficiency they deserve. To them, our inability will look like the trouble car-addicts who have never experienced walkability have with adapting to increasing fuel prices.
Nearly half of Lebanon's national debt of $85 billion has been spent on the electricity sector and the state can now only provide 2 hours of electricity per day, thus the solar power boom.
A much more interesting piece than I expected, though I will note that some European countries have been hard hit in the energy sector of late as well, what with France rationing power this winter, for example.
Edit: Let me once again suggest we rely too much on generated electricity and should shoot for a return to passive solar design and daylighting to help stabilize the world economy.
Said like that it sounds like rolling blackout and the state enforcing energy consumption at gun point.
There was a lot of noise because the government planned some of these things. But in practice it meant reducing the temperature of public swimming pools a bit, reducing/shutting down public lighting deep in the night, reducing temperatures in office building by one or two degrees.
I would even say this "stressor" will be beneficial, at least at a local level.
The real downside is the increased energy bill for people.
Finally, a large part of this issue is self-inflicted as a failure to plan power plants maintenance.
Yes but we should have been effectively immune because we have so much nuclear power and we were brought to this situation by a combination of several things: lack of will to continue building new power plants, maintenance schedules being behind due to Covid, and the way regulations are retroactively applied means the technical challenges are substantial in the more aged plants leaving France well below optimal nuclear capacity when it is most needed, even with that our share of gas usage to generate electricity is small and the price of electricity should be largely decoupled from gas in a normal situation.
We still use too much gas to heat our homes, but I believe if we had had the capacity expected we could have reduced that substantially by having people use electric heaters without raising everyone’s electricity bill hugely .. but alas not enough plants online have lead to France feeling the pain like everyone else.
Indeed, here in Poland there have been state subsidies for replacing individual household heat sources from coal to gas(and heat pumps etc) for quite some time. This year a lot of people were scrambling to find those old coal burners and reinstall them in the heir homes again.
You can actually smell a difference. I live in non-industrial North of the country basically in the country side. Nearest town has 5k people and even here when temperatures dropped I could smell shitty coal being burned when I went to town. I know the smell because I have a hobby forge and I use (good) coal sometimes. I have to say this is the first time in my life I could actually smell it in the air used by other people here. This is a heavily forested region and most people used wood as fuel. However with current prices and availability, coal (and shitty one too) is back.
As for prices I can assure you it could've been much worse if not for the state subsidies that were put in place very quickly and the state bringing in coal on massive ships from abroad. I heat my house with wood pellets and a "smart" furnace that has very high efficiency. Also I have a benefit of good insulation. In previous years I would pay about $500 for a year's supply of fuel (this is just house heating, water for bathrooms is heated with electricity). This year I bought before the majority of the price increases hit and I paid $1200 (this is for 2.5 tons of the "premium" version of the stuff). Then I got $800 back from the state as heating subsidy. So overall it cost me less than in an usual year.
Then there is the state sanctioned freeze on the price of gas for private people (not businesses) and same for electricity until you use up 2MWh.Imagine how bad it would be without it. Still this cost is well worth it.
The maintenance plans weren't bad. "Inspect [x] thoroughly every [y] years": Good. "Take plants offline for repairs immediately if problems on [long list] are seen": Good. "Build a few extra plants because some will be down for maintenance": Good. "Arrange for gas-fired power in case lots of plants are down": Good.
IMO what's bad is some people's expectations. One of the countries within the power grid is at war. Some people expect that to have no impact on the grid.
Ukraine wasn't even on the power grid when the war began, they took IIRC 2-3 months to sever the ties to Russia and integrate the Ukrainian power grid.
The problem, at least for the sorry state of electricity prices, isn't that Ukraine was at war... it was/is that the French did an absurdly large bet on nuclear power while at the same time tying at least 40% of heating to resistive heating, but failed to have a backup plan other than "hope the rest of Europe has excess capacity" once it became clear that Flamanville was under massive delays, and on top of that they massively neglected maintenance of their aging nuclear fleet even before Covid hit and prevented maintenance. They also did not plan ahead for climate change-induced massive droughts that led to an almost complete lack of cooling water for the plants.
They were essentially closing their eyes to the pile-up of delays at Flamanville and as a result they had a "perfect storm" event in the summer.
Which is to be expected when you build a massively centralized, both physical and organisational, power system.
And which is my main issue with nuclear power: it isn't distributed, but centralized and heavily dependent on governments and extreme long-term-planning. Which is a recipe for disaster. The chance that Flamaville would be delivered late is about 100%. Reacting to rapid changes like a war (spiking fuel prices or making NG unattainable) always slow, and always late if possible at all.
So, aside from all the other arguments against nuclear power, it is slow, expensive, centralized and heavily dependent on governments; it's the closest you'll get to a government-ran electricity production. All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite.
The entire opposite is solar: heavily distributed, privately owned and immensely fast. Wind is somewhere in-between, cheaper and faster to build than a CHP, but obviously more centralized than solar.
> All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite.
That one is actually easy to answer: Most of the European left does not like nuclear because of cost externalization - let's be real: it's not today's rate payers that are going to fund the decades worth of work needed to dismantle the plants (e.g. the AKW Greifswald in Germany has already been taking 30 years with at least 15 more years planned [1]) or to safely store all that nuclear waste for likely hundreds if not thousands of years, it's the tax payers of the future. On top of that come the enormous and un-insurable financial risks of disasters: Chernobyl happened 35 years ago and still you can't eat game or shrooms in Bavaria without running them in front of a Geiger counter (not to mention that Chernobyl is in an active war zone with radiation-releasing disruptions having happened as a part of the war, as are about a dozen other plants that are, to make it worse, even being actively shot at), the cost of the Fukushima cleanup is estimated to run into 200 billion dollars.
In contrast, the European right wing loves nuclear precisely because it is so "cheap" on paper with ~13 ct/kWh... it's their usual playbook of conveniently ignoring the above-mentioned externalities.
All of the long-lasting waste generated by nuclear plants can be used as fuel in breeder reactors. Newer generation reactors are also immune to the kind of meltdowns that afflicted Chernobyl and Fukushima.
It took decades of massive government subsidies for solar panel production to scale up and advance enough to make solar as affordable as it is today. The same could be achieved with nuclear, with the additional benefits of not having the additional costs of storage and transmission infrastructure, which push up the real cost of solar to "$472 per MWH":
Solar is only the opposite of nuclear if you ignore storage requirements. There is potential for use of distributed battery storage, but we're decades away from being able to build that out economically at scale. Installing some home battery backup or EV reverse charging systems won't be sufficient; we have to be able to keep heavy industry running through multiple days of little sunshine.
I'm not saying one is better than the other, nor am I commenting on it's value for [electricity consumer].
They are opposites on "centralisation" vs "decentralisation". With solar, I, a private citizen, can generate electricity, store it, sell it, expand it, mine bitcoin with it, and so fort. With Nuclear, I'm completely at the whims of a government and a semi-private monopolist. "Free-market-nuts" should therefore hate Nuclear and love solar. Yet the opposite is true. And I find that remarkable.
The planning started in 2005 and physical work started 2017. It finished months ahead of schedule, but Ukraine would have been connected today even if work had finished on schedule.
Basically, Lebanon had 30 years to figure out how to build basic infrastructure like a proper electrical grid and production (from 1990, the end of the civil war to present). Instead, crooks, thieves and fraudsters figured out how to bilk the nation of billions while leaving subpar services in their wake.
My parents have had solar thermal collectors for hot water on their roof in Lebanon for 3 decades now... other than a few days in winter when you need to use the electric heater, its been a near perfect fit for purpose.
Unlike Lebanon, though, one cannot legally operate their solar panels to power a home while the electric grid is down in Israel.
From what I understand, the Lebanese are used to working around the failings of their government in all aspects of life: work, shopping, now banking, and even education where possible. I don't know about water supplies or roads, but from what I heard the Lebanese view their government more as a siphon of their earnings and resources than as a provider of services and order.
It's likely a safety issue in the case of grid-connected solar installations. These panels are designed to send excess electricity to the grid, and if the grid is down, the utility needs to make sure that busted cables are not carrying electricity... for the safety of the repairmen.
Yes, but the most common way they do this is just by shutting down completely and not accepting any input from the solar panels.
You need to move up to more expensive models that support “islanding” to be able to use solar power while the grid is down. For some reason it appears that this type of inverter isn’t legal in Israel?
In Sweden the same applies, at least if you have panels that can feed back excess into the grid for payment.
In case the main grid goes off, your equipment is supposed to stop working so that it doesn't feed power backwards into the grid while some person is trying to fix whatever broke, so unless you have a battery/UPS and a large switch to flip, your solar panels "die" along with the grid.
The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up.
>The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up.
Totally separated solar panels would also mean you barely have any electricity on that circuit for half of the year.
Another option is an inverter that can sense the net and switch that flip automatically, but they are more expensive and still not legal everywhere because it's not really needed in Western European countries.
Adding a battery and switch is the obvious solution to the problem. I'm in the UK and ended up going for the Powerwall 2 and Tesla Gateway, alongside our panels.
The installation had to be certified by the electricity company to ensure that it operates safely in the event of a grid power outage, but (in theory as we've not had a power cut since installation) it should all work fine.
> The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up.
AFAIK the latter part is now less and less true in Germany because the price for selling excess back is only a fraction of the cost of getting power out of the grid, so people are installing batteries, heat storage and controllers that switch heavy consumers like their heat pump according to other loads in their house.
I have a phocos anygrid 5kwh solar inverter. It is a regular grid tie inverter but once grid goes down, it continues in off grid mode even without batteries so this inverter would be perfect without breaking any laws
I have this kind of system too, but when I wanted to get solar for the other side of our roof after our neighbors took down a tree I learned that they're no longer allowed in MA for new installs. Starting with the 2014 National Electrical Code (NEC) you need to have some form of rapid shutdown to protect firefighters in an emergency, and in the 2017 revision it got much stricter to where the SPS functionality would have to be completely redesigned to qualify. The only option now, as far as I can tell, is the recently released Enphase IQ8 Sunlight Backup. It's very expensive: I got some quotes and it added about $7k (23%).
I think you can by simply disconnecting from the grid. This is a obvious prohibition, same reason why male-to-male electrical cables are prohibited and not sold: doing so will electrocute anyone trying to fix the grid.
The solar power inverter needs the grid sine wave to sync to. Without seeing that sine wave, it will not produce power.
The naive solution would be to have a small 12v automotive battery and 240v inverter to generate the sine wave, and to use it only after fully disconnecting from the grid. However the sine wave that 240v inverters create are "digital" sine waves - they are easily discerned from the real analogue sine waves that a power station produces with spinning armatures and flywheels.
My guess? Not. They probably have AC, but heat pumps are expensive and the lower the income the less interest in the "environment" or "pollution". People just use whatever's cheapest upfront.
Why do you put "environment" and "pollution" in quotes? My guess is you don't believe, or mean to convey that you believe, that these are phony concepts or issues, but that lower income people treat these as someone else's concern.
I find this linguistically interesting. Someone could write a paper about this. Perhaps someone has.
Because poor people don't care about them if their lives become worse.
That's the sad truth.
I mean, they do care about them, but their lives already suck a ton so distant doom is not really on their radar when faced with constant, present doom.
Simple example: EVs are arguably less polluting. So there might be a need for a policy to ban ICEs, which are much, much less expensive monetarily. That would mean poor people wouldn't be able to buy and use cars, at all. So poor people will obviously vote against that. It both makes sense and it's sad at the same time.
Oh, to clarify: rich people also pollute a ton and don't care about the environment, but they have the luxury of not caring if environmentally sound but more expensive policies are adopted (they can go "whatever" and do the right thing with no major personal loss for them).
On top of that, it is the rich people's responsibility to find environmentally sound policies which are acceptable to everyone, since they're the ones with most of the power.
Edit: Oh, you don't have to believe me. Go talk to 100 low income people (construction workers, cooks, waiter, nannies, agricultural workers, etc) about the environment, it will be quite eye opening for ivory tower folks.
My point was just that it's an interesting use of quotation marks.
People once had no writing system at all. Then they had no way to represent speech sounds. Then they had no way to represent individual phonemes. They had to invent spaces between words, punctuation, capital letters. I expect the Egyptians had no way to represent what was represented here with quotation marks. I'm curious how long and how widely quotation marks have been used this way.
You'll like this: Irony punctuation. It includes "scare quotes".
> The use of a graphic symbol on an expression to indicate irony or dubiousness goes back much further: Authors of ancient Greece used a mark called a diple periestigmene for that purpose.
> In certain Ethiopic languages, sarcasm and unreal phrases are indicated at the end of a sentence with a sarcasm mark called temherte slaqî, a character that looks like the inverted exclamation point (U+00A1) (¡).
> Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes, sneer quotes, and quibble marks) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense.
> Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression "so-called"; they may imply skepticism or disagreement, belief that the words are misused, or that the writer intends a meaning opposite to the words enclosed in quotes.
Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) wrote in his Etymologiae that the diple was used to mark quotations from the Bible. He mentions how diple periestigmene (dotted diple) were used to mark dubious passages.
Agreed, hard to give a thought to the plights of the world when you're busy just trying to survive and afford basic necessities. The big picture environment doesn't matter to the person trying to find food _now_.
This is exactly the same situation in South Africa, where "solar power is [also] booming". We had world class infrastructure that not only wasn't updated, but has been looted, or left to rot. Now the water systems are also failing. Expect bore-holes and home-filtration to be "booming" in South Africa too in the near future.
South Africa’s infrastructure failures have little to do with privatization or “the West,” and far more to do with self-inflicted brain drain, a general lack of expertise and project management skills, theft, crime, and corruption:
Its not only south africa. Its england, its europe, the concept of failing state services via lobbyism, then privatization of basic services, seems to be part of the us colonial model.
Cant argue with it being good for buisness, its just bad for the people living in such a society.
You're imposing a completely inappropriate explanation.
South Africa is not falling victim to US lobbying. Its problems in this area are as listed by previous poster.
As for the other countries: it's very difficult to keep any state services running well. They have to constantly resist bloat; budget defence strategies; policies that make it impossible to remove low-performing employees; and they have little or not incentive to do any of those things. The only way they ever worked was when run by personally motivated leaders who wanted to run them leanly, or (more often) on fabulously wealthy economies that can afford them. Sadly those economies have taken huge strain for various reasons.
There's no need to invoke silly anti-US conspiracy theories.
Eskom in South Africa provides about 90% of the electricity and is a state owned enterprise.
It's not privatized at all, it's a state-owned monopoly. So basically the exact opposite of what you're complaining about.
Privatization, i.e. selling off individual power plants to private entities and allowing private entities to generate more power is probably the best way out of their electricity crisis.
Europe and in particular Germany or the US shows just how bad that can end up as well. When private companies seize control of utilities - water, electricity, gas, internet, railway, streets - they inevitably end up cutting corners, deferring or ignoring maintenance, firing support staff and generally reducing service quality while keeping to raise rates to make the money back for the banks that backed the loans. Or, in the worst case, prioritize the rich and privileged in case of under-supply over the poor masses, and not doing anything to expand the supply because it works well enough for those who pay better and those who end up shafted don't have seats in the lobby.
That's not to say that nationalized or majority-government-owned companies can't fuck up either, France's EDF or Germany's Deutsche Bahn prove that, but at least the government there can be held accountable by the general public in elections.
South Africans would be overjoyed to have stable electricity and clean water to the extent that Germans have.
The problems Europeans complain about are on a much higher level and can't be compared to having 2 to 4 hours blackouts every day for the majority of the year, or to having the water cut off regularly or various other examples of state failure.
> but at least the government there can be held accountable by the general public in elections.
This is tenuous at best in advanced democracies and practically non-existent in many developing countries, like South Africa.
South Africa has had rolling blackouts since around 2007, and the same government that's caused this mess is still in power.
> South Africans would be overjoyed to have stable electricity and clean water to the extent that Germans have.
Not disputing that - but I fear that allowing private/venture capital to intervene will further solidify existing discrimination issues in the long term, even if it may show quick improvements short term.
> I fear that allowing private/venture capital to intervene will further solidify existing discrimination issues in the long term, even if it may show quick improvements short term
South Africa's discrimination issues are largely due to the state and not private capital or the private sector.
The private sector on the whole would be happy to hire and provide services to any race or ethnicity, but the state has always aggressively intervened in favor of certain ethnic groups. During Apartheid it was intervening in favor of white people, today it's in favor of black Africans.
Many of the current discrimination issues are a result of the (Apartheid) state actively impeding the economic development of black people.
The current electricity crisis is in no small part due to the current state actively discriminating against skilled white employees (forcing them into early retirement, hiring based on race and not skills, forcing Eskom to procure from black-owned companies who are often just middle-men adding huge markups due to their regulatory capture).
I’m not sure what you mean when you say “discrimination issues”, as there are a plethora of overlapping discrimination issues happening in South Africa.
But I can tell you that the current situation is only making the divide between rich and poor greater. The worse it gets the greater the divide will grow as basic things like water and electricity become more scarce.
It’s not about allowing private/venture capital to intervene. People are going off grid because it’s the only choice. Unless you’re talking about allowing private companies to provide power to the grid? I’m not sure what the solution is there.
> Its not only south africa. Its england, its europe, the concept of failing state services via lobbyism, then privatization of basic services, seems to be part of the us colonial model.
> Cant argue with it being good for buisness, its just bad for the people living in such a society.
You've taken a sliver of truth and ran away with it into the abyss.
Same in my country (Nigeria). Electricity infrastructure is grossly unreliable. Most houses have their backup generators and personal bore hole and water filtration systems because relying on the government is a sure path to get frustrated.
> Basically, Lebanon had 30 years to figure out how to build basic infrastructure like a proper electrical grid and production (from 1990, the end of the civil war to present). Instead, crooks, thieves and fraudsters figured out how to bilk the nation of billions while leaving subpar services in their wake.
This is all true but it also did not help matters that Israel perpetually bombed power plants and related infrastructure in the country over the same period of time.
Solar + cheap storage should be the new default for the entire second/ third world. Basically, you can't rely on your central corrupt government? Well, you don't have to!
With starlink the third world will have options for internet too. Now, starlink probably can't serve billions of people, but it can still be an option, especially for rural.
For new cells, probably the best option is to try and find a good deal on LFP cells, though in the U.S. at least they tend to be really overpriced. A BMS will be needed too.
I did mathhs on it. To cope with daily peaks of generation and usage, a family that spends modest 100-150 kW*h/mo will need a 30-meter tall tower and a 5*5*5 meter cube of concrete inside as a load. Not to mention mechanisms to drive this up and down. Just one household! Which is completely unfeasible for an apartment building.*
Pareto principle - optimize for 80% of the load and you probably can get by with 20% of the effort.
Connect a few V2G cars to the apartment building as well to soak up the excess supply in the daytime and demand at night, and pretty soon we have a robust solution.
> Connect a few V2G cars to the apartment building as well to soak up the excess supply in the daytime and demand at night, and pretty soon we have a robust solution.
V2G (or generally, electric) cars are absurdly expensive even in Western countries.
Fully agree, but if we put in the groundwork now to be able to connect these cars to give back to the grid now, they can already help in peak load situations.
I don't have a good answer today, but IMO it is coming.
The advent of the sodium ion 150 wh/kg (CATL in mass production this year) should drop the price and increase availability without the Lithium supply issue. Also, LFP / LMFP will hit 200+ wh/kg this year in production (CATL as well, and others) ... needs lithium, but don't require cobalt or nickel as I understand it.
The first world smug answer is that the second and third world will tolerate less reliability. They apparently already do, but they gain more control with the panels.
Gravity based storage (flywheels or heck, pulleys) may be good enough for non-first-world expectations as well. Generally it won't work for first world expectations. Flywheels would probably be sufficient.
The market should be huge though, in the billions of people. Again, a smug first world answer is that the "decarbonization" problem needs to be prioritized, so as much solar/wind/storage needs to be focused on the first world grids to get consumer transportation and power generation on BEVs and solar/wind as quickly as possible.
But again I like to think that solar (home panels on roof) + wind (in the sense of a village megawatt turbine in a rural village) + personal BEVs (electric scooter, e-bike) + starlink terminal should be so empowering to a rural second/third world community.
Heck, think about Australia, a "first world country" but basically a bunch of cities and very very rural surroundings. It has all the infrastructure / distance / spreadout issues that America has but on steroids.
Now, I don't live there and don't know the terrain beyond the fact that it is grassland / desert in the middle of the country, and a lot of it. You know what that's perfect for? Solar and Wind. Australia could likely start to economically develop more of its interior without huge infrastructure projects like transmission lines and huge amounts of cell towers and the like: starlink for communications relays, some local 5g towers for distributing the bandwidth to villages, solar for homes, a village wind turbine for more "local grid" power, and that leaves: storage and uh... water.
And roads.
I really do view this as a very empowering opportunity for tribal and indigenous populations which almost always exist in minority political positions in central governments. What is the primary means of denial of opportunity and resources to these political minorities? Infrastructure.
The fact that power and communications can be so effectively decentralized and locally controlled for wind / solar / battery / starlink is a fundamental game changer to these people. Look at our native american populations: the poverty in these communities (if they don't have the casino deal) is striking, and they are far away from centralized infrastructure.
I'm not saying having your own wind/solar/starlink comms will solve all the problems, but it is empowering to a community and individual people that may live there.
The tragedy of the strong Republican character of rural America is that the same thing effectively goes for almost all rural communities: cheaper and better power, cheaper and better communications, improve the appeal of moving urban and suburban workers to more remote rurals and improve their economic quandry of aging populations and population loss. At the same time, increase housing availability and affordability to more people by making the rural areas more accessible.
Wow, that was meandering, but anyway, I think the focus on alternative energy is getting too far towards grid centric just because it is a bit cheaper on cost/kwhr. There should be strong focus on home / community solar/wind/battery storage and development.
And home storage is a key aspect to it. IMO, it is largely solved technologically for the 1-2 days of storage with sodium ion batteries, you just need the scaling. Maybe you have a gas generator for rea...
It really does look like we need two forms of infrastructure in our society just like software, central and distributed. Atleast in the less developed parts of the world.
I grew up in that part of the world too and our government completely failed to provide basic electricity and everyone resorted to either solar or generators.
> How do I use as much electricity as Elon musk does running the Twitter servers?
Start your own cryptocoin and promote it. Then other people will spend megawatts of their own electricity to make you money. Er, make themselves money.
I hail from a Tier 3 city in India [a]. Due to mismgmt. or exorbitant electricity prices, several folks would end up stealing electricity from the main line.
Electricity distribution companies would keep on increasing prices to make up for lost revenue from stealing. On other hand, stealing kept on increasing.
In recent years, huge chunk of public have pivoted to installing solar panels for water heater etc. When I was a kid, solar water heater was found only on upper middle and politician's home. Now it's very common. This is welcome progress and inadvertent good for environment since the real motivation is to free self from manipulation of electricity companies.
a. Tier 1 would be state capitals, Tier 2 would be prominent cities in that state, Tier 3 would be rest of district headquarters.
I have never heard that before, cities like Ranchi can hardly be described as "Tier 1". The HRA classification given on the Wikipedia page[1] is much better guide to what my intuitions are on what people mean by tier 1-3.
Finally someone starting from the bottom of the latin alphabet to categorize something that can grow over time (i.e. Delhi becomes even bigger, much more bigger than other X cities, it will move to a W category).
Yes, I'm looking at you, European energy classes system and yours A+++++++++ classes.
Yeah, but at least they did learn. In Europe they keep adding the A/B/C/D/E/F/G scoring system to more and more things with the excuse - I guess - that people are now already used to it.
On the other hand if you had "8" how would you know if it's good or bad? It is not intuitive, especially if you keep adding more.
And the scale needs to be changed regularly anyways because the criteria are not the same, so a 8 now would not even be guaranteed to be a 8 tomorrow.
The European system already resets the scales after a while (for instance the new ones don't have a + yet) and it is not just about changing min and max but many things are reevaluated based on new knowledge, so an item that was B can no be D while another one that was C stays C. Be it number or letters it is a breaking change so you might as well go with the intuitive system that matches most people's intuition
> On the other hand if you had "8" how would you know if it's good or bad? It is not intuitive, especially if you keep adding more.
You will know that, when measuring something, the higher, the better, for whatever definition of "better" applies (less CO2, less Watts, more good nutrients etc). If the scale changes, or the definition of "better", you now have "9" appliances, which will be better than "3" appliances with their 15 years old label still attached to them.
With the current system you have to check "oh, it's A+ from 2017, I need to check the actual numbers anyway".
And yes, I understand that those labels are mainly directed at new items bought right now, and only as "local" comparison. And that if you sell a "new" appliance today manufactured 5 years ago and the labels have changed, you need to update the labels on it. Still, it's cumbersome. You either update the scale ever 2 years or keep adding "+" for a while.
EDIT: also, houses. those fuckers tend to last for tens of years while being sold and bought all the time in the meanwhile.
On the other hand, today's system you're led the believe that A is good, when in fact A++++ is good and for certain things A is fairly bad.
Further when you change the scales you can't compare old and new. Is my A+ rated fridge better or worse than a new A rated fridge. Is it worth me updating it?
A system of 1 to 5 can scale upwards. Alternatively set A as the best possible score as allowed by the laws of physics.
Yeah, no. There is no state in India that has exorbitant electricity prices for domestic consumers. Virtually every state discom sets the base tarrif below cost. People steal electricity because they can, not because they can't afford it.
I disabled our shower by forcing the taps shut with spanner, the tap washers I prefer are ok for this.
Attached a shower head hose to the bath tap, so now all we have is a shower head you have to hold and mostly sit or squat to use it.
This has eliminated certain individuals from emptying the hot water system while washing their hair, and my own tendency to use a fair bit of hot water while standing in the shower.
Vs alternatives like using a flash boiler, or convincing your government to reduce the water that the agriculture industry can use, or adding a timer on the shower?
A neighbour has one of these. What surprised me was that it didn’t bother (as far as I could see) pulling the heat out of the waste water - it was setup to pull the heat out of the air in the bathroom.
I guess this makes at least some sense though? A sizable proportion of the heat from shower water must go into water vapour that evaporates into the air as the droplets fall from shower head to floor drain. If you go into an unventilated room where someone has had a shower & you’ll find the air both very warm & very damp!
Using a heat recovery system like this also means you don’t need to pull cold dry air into the bathroom from outside in order to avoid condensation problems - the heat recovery also pulls the water out of the air - so it saves a considerable amount of energy that way too.
Whether these are enough to offset the installation cost I don’t know.
there's probably also the benefit that condensing the water out of a post-shower bathroom will dehydrate the air, reducing mold/rot issues in the house.
The ones I designed in my head, that it turns out exist in the real world, exchange heat from the drain water to warm the cold water flowing to the shower, reducing the usage of hot water (https://zypho.uk/ for example - turns your 10 deg C cold flow to 20 C from the 40C waste flow)
In winter one would like the hot humid air from the bathroom to be heat exchanged and heat dumped back into the property. In summer perhaps feed the input airflow for a water heat pump and again dump out the humid air.
Either way, we leave a lot of efficieny the table.
As for the hot humid bathroom air, that also exists in the form of ERV (energy recovery ventilators). For well sealed houses you route all the exhaust and intake for the home to one place where there is a heat exchanger to minimize the losses from getting fresh air into the house.
There are a couple reasons waste heat recovery has not been adopted in the US anyway. The designs up to this point have been adaptations of industrial designs, not specific designs for residential use.
So basically, one can blame the entirety of the political class for how dire the situation in Lebanon is, but more so than others is a tiny schmuck that goes by the name of Gebran Bassil.
This is one of the less obvious reasons solar will dominate. No grid or government to rely on. Russian gas and foreign wars no longer matter. And as battery technology improves it will be 24x7 independence.
Solar and batteries are not a long term solution that will bring energy independence to everyone. It's not that simple.
In western countries, and especially in the USA, people mostly want to live in a private house, with two or more cars. If those vehicles are electric (and that's the future we're pointed to), I think solar panels would provide a tiny share of the electricity required for this way of life.
When living in a large city building, the energy required for each family is much smaller since cars are not needed and since heating etc is lower than in individual houses. In that case, solar panels are more useful, though not enough to be independent.
Lebanon is located next middle east and north Africa. It has 10.72% arable land, water being a scarce resource, and dust storms being one of the natural hazards. The average number of days with rain for months between May and September is between 0 and 2. Solar is an obvious choice for that climate.
The economics of that when you have to include storage is different than places with almost no cloudy weather. There isn't much interest to invest in solar + storage solutions without subsidizes.
Solar/wind in combination with natural gas is very profitable in the UK as long the natural gas is cheap enough. Right now that is not the case so the cost of the energy grid in UK is extremely high, and much higher than in solar heavy countries located next to deserts that don't need to use natural gas to cover all those rainy and snowy days.
Solar is going up all over northern Europe and is profitable without government subsidies. Cloudy is just fine for today's solar panels. The technology improves on an almost yearly basis.
Just got myself an electric motorbike. I feel like the days of gas hegemony are well and truly on the way out. Of course, its bias on my part, but I can't imagine going back to ICE transportation now that I've had a taste of just how delightful full-electric can be.
I'll be investing in solar powers and portable generators next. Me and my motorbike are gonna go full-solar this year .. and I live in a wealthy nation that is in relatively good stance, energy-sector -wise.
The benefits outweight the disadvantages and effort required. There is nothing quite so satisfying as to navigate traffic silently, not contributing to everyones' lung disease as I pass by ..
A bit too late for that, we picked the wrong road in the 80's and the debt is starting to come due...
I expect the worst of it to be when (former) middle class residing in suburban sprawl realise they cannot afford a car any more : think yellow vests (aka "roundabout folks"), but worse.
Oh on that one, there's no problem, gas powered cars are going to be extinct very soon so gasoline will be cheap for those still willing to use them due to low demand, and electric cars are already mainstream.
It will be hard because of how technology works. There is some leeway in re-tuning them to produce more % of one product and less of others, but it's limited.
Of course it's cool that people can use solar in these kinds of environments like Afghanistan or now Lebanon, but at the same time I wonder: why do they pay so called anthropologists big bucks to live in upscale neighborhoods and gawk at people in difficult circumstances like it's a zoo. To me it seems a little disrespectful.
Not sure what they are doing, but that web page is incredibly sluggish and requires an incredible amount of time to render and scroll for such a simple layout.
Solar is lovely and all but the far more concerning thing here is that 30 years on from it's civil war, Lebanon still does not have a functioning government. More and more places seem to be ending up in this state, both in places like Lebanon AND in the West (looking at you Texas, or here in the UK). It's nice that at least some people are finding ways to work around these failures. But let's not pretend that that is a viable solution. We should address the actual core issue here.
The actual core issue is piss-poor governance in politics, but in the US, UK and Lebanon the governments are entrenched in a way that it will require an actual revolution to get rid of them - and the only place of these where a revolution seems likely is Lebanon.
The civil war never ended. The same factions just moved to politics.
It also doesn’t help when political class is protected by foreign governments (USA & Iran) so change is unlikely also dangerous.
Our problem is that we’re too diverse and fixated on religion. I worry about America if they continue fixating on identity politics with race and genders
It is liberating to be able to produce one's own energy for residential needs. Can't wait for the energy storage technologies to catch up fast such that it becomes sensible to set up solar panels wherever possible, and wire them to a cheap enough battery storage such that the grid becomes a backup connection and solar + battery is the primary source.
I have resisted the idea of Li-ion battery in the house because of fire risks and costs. If Na-ion battery tech or one of the many promising battery tech being talked about every week comes to life soon, I'd jump on it.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] thread* due to political instability and mismanagement the economy is unstable and unable to support fuel imports for the grid
* the same economic instability makes it hard for private actors to import fuel for generators as well
* Solar doesn’t require ongoing imports of fuel priced in foreign currency
Unfortunately most lebanese live in apartments, and if a resident or two already called dibs on the roof, you’re out of luck.
Tangent, price of fuel/diesel used to be fixed by gov subsidies. Most of our (very tiny) amount of money left has been smuggled across the border to Syria. Same applies to bread, flour etc..
Is there a precedent for this happening in the US, i think insulin is way cheaper in mexico but I dont hear stories about it being smuggled to the states
Plenty of cases like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/03/06/this-cou...
Alot of local government health plans started using it, but it is now illegal for most purposes.
https://www.healthcarelawinsights.com/2015/11/court-strips-i...
Actual prescription drugs being imported wholesale is rare because the penalties are pretty high for that. There is a somewhat related "diverted drugs" industry which is basically where people who get HIV medications for free from the government/insurance sell for them like 5 cents on the dollar for cash only for those to be resold a bunch of times to "wholesalers" before ultimately ending up in a pharmacy again - these kinds of sketchy secondary wholesalers are where counterfeits/illegally imported drugs would probably end up though. Nothing on the scale of what happens in Lebanon but if you read https://www.drugchannels.net / the WSJ it shows up every now and then.
Wind loading is often very large. Structural engineers are aware of this, the general population isn't.
Source: I've spent a lot of time in West Africa.
This became a bigger problem in South Africa with its reliable load shedding schedules.
But if you can't get the energy to the consumer because of theft, then only people who can afford it and have space can use it.
I also suspect one needs grid scale to balance out the fluctuations of renewables to be honest
I would suggest bringing a decent powerbank though to keep the phone charged.
Basically, a really shitty situation is driving something that you are seeing as good. Lebanon at this point is pretty close to a failed state. The solar power boom is basically the populace losing faith in the government to provide basic infrastructure.
A much more interesting piece than I expected, though I will note that some European countries have been hard hit in the energy sector of late as well, what with France rationing power this winter, for example.
Edit: Let me once again suggest we rely too much on generated electricity and should shoot for a return to passive solar design and daylighting to help stabilize the world economy.
Said like that it sounds like rolling blackout and the state enforcing energy consumption at gun point.
There was a lot of noise because the government planned some of these things. But in practice it meant reducing the temperature of public swimming pools a bit, reducing/shutting down public lighting deep in the night, reducing temperatures in office building by one or two degrees.
I would even say this "stressor" will be beneficial, at least at a local level.
The real downside is the increased energy bill for people.
Finally, a large part of this issue is self-inflicted as a failure to plan power plants maintenance.
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine the price of gas and electric power in the European Union has gone up enormously.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/drastically-reducing-our-powerbi...
We still use too much gas to heat our homes, but I believe if we had had the capacity expected we could have reduced that substantially by having people use electric heaters without raising everyone’s electricity bill hugely .. but alas not enough plants online have lead to France feeling the pain like everyone else.
You can actually smell a difference. I live in non-industrial North of the country basically in the country side. Nearest town has 5k people and even here when temperatures dropped I could smell shitty coal being burned when I went to town. I know the smell because I have a hobby forge and I use (good) coal sometimes. I have to say this is the first time in my life I could actually smell it in the air used by other people here. This is a heavily forested region and most people used wood as fuel. However with current prices and availability, coal (and shitty one too) is back.
As for prices I can assure you it could've been much worse if not for the state subsidies that were put in place very quickly and the state bringing in coal on massive ships from abroad. I heat my house with wood pellets and a "smart" furnace that has very high efficiency. Also I have a benefit of good insulation. In previous years I would pay about $500 for a year's supply of fuel (this is just house heating, water for bathrooms is heated with electricity). This year I bought before the majority of the price increases hit and I paid $1200 (this is for 2.5 tons of the "premium" version of the stuff). Then I got $800 back from the state as heating subsidy. So overall it cost me less than in an usual year.
Then there is the state sanctioned freeze on the price of gas for private people (not businesses) and same for electricity until you use up 2MWh.Imagine how bad it would be without it. Still this cost is well worth it.
IMO what's bad is some people's expectations. One of the countries within the power grid is at war. Some people expect that to have no impact on the grid.
The problem, at least for the sorry state of electricity prices, isn't that Ukraine was at war... it was/is that the French did an absurdly large bet on nuclear power while at the same time tying at least 40% of heating to resistive heating, but failed to have a backup plan other than "hope the rest of Europe has excess capacity" once it became clear that Flamanville was under massive delays, and on top of that they massively neglected maintenance of their aging nuclear fleet even before Covid hit and prevented maintenance. They also did not plan ahead for climate change-induced massive droughts that led to an almost complete lack of cooling water for the plants.
They were essentially closing their eyes to the pile-up of delays at Flamanville and as a result they had a "perfect storm" event in the summer.
And which is my main issue with nuclear power: it isn't distributed, but centralized and heavily dependent on governments and extreme long-term-planning. Which is a recipe for disaster. The chance that Flamaville would be delivered late is about 100%. Reacting to rapid changes like a war (spiking fuel prices or making NG unattainable) always slow, and always late if possible at all.
So, aside from all the other arguments against nuclear power, it is slow, expensive, centralized and heavily dependent on governments; it's the closest you'll get to a government-ran electricity production. All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite.
The entire opposite is solar: heavily distributed, privately owned and immensely fast. Wind is somewhere in-between, cheaper and faster to build than a CHP, but obviously more centralized than solar.
That one is actually easy to answer: Most of the European left does not like nuclear because of cost externalization - let's be real: it's not today's rate payers that are going to fund the decades worth of work needed to dismantle the plants (e.g. the AKW Greifswald in Germany has already been taking 30 years with at least 15 more years planned [1]) or to safely store all that nuclear waste for likely hundreds if not thousands of years, it's the tax payers of the future. On top of that come the enormous and un-insurable financial risks of disasters: Chernobyl happened 35 years ago and still you can't eat game or shrooms in Bavaria without running them in front of a Geiger counter (not to mention that Chernobyl is in an active war zone with radiation-releasing disruptions having happened as a part of the war, as are about a dozen other plants that are, to make it worse, even being actively shot at), the cost of the Fukushima cleanup is estimated to run into 200 billion dollars.
In contrast, the European right wing loves nuclear precisely because it is so "cheap" on paper with ~13 ct/kWh... it's their usual playbook of conveniently ignoring the above-mentioned externalities.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/2021/42/rueckbau-kernkraftwerke-atomauss...
It took decades of massive government subsidies for solar panel production to scale up and advance enough to make solar as affordable as it is today. The same could be achieved with nuclear, with the additional benefits of not having the additional costs of storage and transmission infrastructure, which push up the real cost of solar to "$472 per MWH":
https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
They are opposites on "centralisation" vs "decentralisation". With solar, I, a private citizen, can generate electricity, store it, sell it, expand it, mine bitcoin with it, and so fort. With Nuclear, I'm completely at the whims of a government and a semi-private monopolist. "Free-market-nuts" should therefore hate Nuclear and love solar. Yet the opposite is true. And I find that remarkable.
My parents have had solar thermal collectors for hot water on their roof in Lebanon for 3 decades now... other than a few days in winter when you need to use the electric heater, its been a near perfect fit for purpose.
However now with many more highrises being built they no longer are as popular and we are forced to use electric heaters.
From what I understand, the Lebanese are used to working around the failings of their government in all aspects of life: work, shopping, now banking, and even education where possible. I don't know about water supplies or roads, but from what I heard the Lebanese view their government more as a siphon of their earnings and resources than as a provider of services and order.
That’s fascinating! Can you say more?
It's likely a safety issue in the case of grid-connected solar installations. These panels are designed to send excess electricity to the grid, and if the grid is down, the utility needs to make sure that busted cables are not carrying electricity... for the safety of the repairmen.
https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/do-blackouts-...
You need to move up to more expensive models that support “islanding” to be able to use solar power while the grid is down. For some reason it appears that this type of inverter isn’t legal in Israel?
In case the main grid goes off, your equipment is supposed to stop working so that it doesn't feed power backwards into the grid while some person is trying to fix whatever broke, so unless you have a battery/UPS and a large switch to flip, your solar panels "die" along with the grid.
The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up.
Totally separated solar panels would also mean you barely have any electricity on that circuit for half of the year.
Another option is an inverter that can sense the net and switch that flip automatically, but they are more expensive and still not legal everywhere because it's not really needed in Western European countries.
The installation had to be certified by the electricity company to ensure that it operates safely in the event of a grid power outage, but (in theory as we've not had a power cut since installation) it should all work fine.
Many a datacenter outage could have been prevented had there been more regular testing of all the components involved.
AFAIK the latter part is now less and less true in Germany because the price for selling excess back is only a fraction of the cost of getting power out of the grid, so people are installing batteries, heat storage and controllers that switch heavy consumers like their heat pump according to other loads in their house.
The naive solution would be to have a small 12v automotive battery and 240v inverter to generate the sine wave, and to use it only after fully disconnecting from the grid. However the sine wave that 240v inverters create are "digital" sine waves - they are easily discerned from the real analogue sine waves that a power station produces with spinning armatures and flywheels.
Why do you put "environment" and "pollution" in quotes? My guess is you don't believe, or mean to convey that you believe, that these are phony concepts or issues, but that lower income people treat these as someone else's concern.
I find this linguistically interesting. Someone could write a paper about this. Perhaps someone has.
That's the sad truth.
I mean, they do care about them, but their lives already suck a ton so distant doom is not really on their radar when faced with constant, present doom.
Simple example: EVs are arguably less polluting. So there might be a need for a policy to ban ICEs, which are much, much less expensive monetarily. That would mean poor people wouldn't be able to buy and use cars, at all. So poor people will obviously vote against that. It both makes sense and it's sad at the same time.
Oh, to clarify: rich people also pollute a ton and don't care about the environment, but they have the luxury of not caring if environmentally sound but more expensive policies are adopted (they can go "whatever" and do the right thing with no major personal loss for them).
On top of that, it is the rich people's responsibility to find environmentally sound policies which are acceptable to everyone, since they're the ones with most of the power.
Edit: Oh, you don't have to believe me. Go talk to 100 low income people (construction workers, cooks, waiter, nannies, agricultural workers, etc) about the environment, it will be quite eye opening for ivory tower folks.
People once had no writing system at all. Then they had no way to represent speech sounds. Then they had no way to represent individual phonemes. They had to invent spaces between words, punctuation, capital letters. I expect the Egyptians had no way to represent what was represented here with quotation marks. I'm curious how long and how widely quotation marks have been used this way.
> The use of a graphic symbol on an expression to indicate irony or dubiousness goes back much further: Authors of ancient Greece used a mark called a diple periestigmene for that purpose.
> In certain Ethiopic languages, sarcasm and unreal phrases are indicated at the end of a sentence with a sarcasm mark called temherte slaqî, a character that looks like the inverted exclamation point (U+00A1) (¡).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
> Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes, sneer quotes, and quibble marks) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense.
> Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression "so-called"; they may imply skepticism or disagreement, belief that the words are misused, or that the writer intends a meaning opposite to the words enclosed in quotes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) wrote in his Etymologiae that the diple was used to mark quotations from the Bible. He mentions how diple periestigmene (dotted diple) were used to mark dubious passages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diple_(textual_symbol)
"My parents have had solar thermal collectors for hot water on their roof in Lebanon for 3 decades now"
For 30 years now your parents have circumvented the state. Welcome to Lebanon.
https://saice.org.za/downloads/SAICE-2022-Infrastructure-Rep...
Cant argue with it being good for buisness, its just bad for the people living in such a society.
South Africa is not falling victim to US lobbying. Its problems in this area are as listed by previous poster.
As for the other countries: it's very difficult to keep any state services running well. They have to constantly resist bloat; budget defence strategies; policies that make it impossible to remove low-performing employees; and they have little or not incentive to do any of those things. The only way they ever worked was when run by personally motivated leaders who wanted to run them leanly, or (more often) on fabulously wealthy economies that can afford them. Sadly those economies have taken huge strain for various reasons.
There's no need to invoke silly anti-US conspiracy theories.
It's not privatized at all, it's a state-owned monopoly. So basically the exact opposite of what you're complaining about.
Privatization, i.e. selling off individual power plants to private entities and allowing private entities to generate more power is probably the best way out of their electricity crisis.
That's not to say that nationalized or majority-government-owned companies can't fuck up either, France's EDF or Germany's Deutsche Bahn prove that, but at least the government there can be held accountable by the general public in elections.
The problems Europeans complain about are on a much higher level and can't be compared to having 2 to 4 hours blackouts every day for the majority of the year, or to having the water cut off regularly or various other examples of state failure.
> but at least the government there can be held accountable by the general public in elections.
This is tenuous at best in advanced democracies and practically non-existent in many developing countries, like South Africa.
South Africa has had rolling blackouts since around 2007, and the same government that's caused this mess is still in power.
Not disputing that - but I fear that allowing private/venture capital to intervene will further solidify existing discrimination issues in the long term, even if it may show quick improvements short term.
South Africa's discrimination issues are largely due to the state and not private capital or the private sector.
The private sector on the whole would be happy to hire and provide services to any race or ethnicity, but the state has always aggressively intervened in favor of certain ethnic groups. During Apartheid it was intervening in favor of white people, today it's in favor of black Africans.
Many of the current discrimination issues are a result of the (Apartheid) state actively impeding the economic development of black people.
The current electricity crisis is in no small part due to the current state actively discriminating against skilled white employees (forcing them into early retirement, hiring based on race and not skills, forcing Eskom to procure from black-owned companies who are often just middle-men adding huge markups due to their regulatory capture).
But I can tell you that the current situation is only making the divide between rich and poor greater. The worse it gets the greater the divide will grow as basic things like water and electricity become more scarce.
It’s not about allowing private/venture capital to intervene. People are going off grid because it’s the only choice. Unless you’re talking about allowing private companies to provide power to the grid? I’m not sure what the solution is there.
> Cant argue with it being good for buisness, its just bad for the people living in such a society.
You've taken a sliver of truth and ran away with it into the abyss.
Syria’s Surprising Solar Boom: Sunlight Powers the Night in Rebel Idlib https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/world/middleeast/syria-so...
With starlink the third world will have options for internet too. Now, starlink probably can't serve billions of people, but it can still be an option, especially for rural.
For new cells, probably the best option is to try and find a good deal on LFP cells, though in the U.S. at least they tend to be really overpriced. A BMS will be needed too.
Connect a few V2G cars to the apartment building as well to soak up the excess supply in the daytime and demand at night, and pretty soon we have a robust solution.
V2G (or generally, electric) cars are absurdly expensive even in Western countries.
The advent of the sodium ion 150 wh/kg (CATL in mass production this year) should drop the price and increase availability without the Lithium supply issue. Also, LFP / LMFP will hit 200+ wh/kg this year in production (CATL as well, and others) ... needs lithium, but don't require cobalt or nickel as I understand it.
The first world smug answer is that the second and third world will tolerate less reliability. They apparently already do, but they gain more control with the panels.
Gravity based storage (flywheels or heck, pulleys) may be good enough for non-first-world expectations as well. Generally it won't work for first world expectations. Flywheels would probably be sufficient.
The market should be huge though, in the billions of people. Again, a smug first world answer is that the "decarbonization" problem needs to be prioritized, so as much solar/wind/storage needs to be focused on the first world grids to get consumer transportation and power generation on BEVs and solar/wind as quickly as possible.
But again I like to think that solar (home panels on roof) + wind (in the sense of a village megawatt turbine in a rural village) + personal BEVs (electric scooter, e-bike) + starlink terminal should be so empowering to a rural second/third world community.
Heck, think about Australia, a "first world country" but basically a bunch of cities and very very rural surroundings. It has all the infrastructure / distance / spreadout issues that America has but on steroids.
Now, I don't live there and don't know the terrain beyond the fact that it is grassland / desert in the middle of the country, and a lot of it. You know what that's perfect for? Solar and Wind. Australia could likely start to economically develop more of its interior without huge infrastructure projects like transmission lines and huge amounts of cell towers and the like: starlink for communications relays, some local 5g towers for distributing the bandwidth to villages, solar for homes, a village wind turbine for more "local grid" power, and that leaves: storage and uh... water.
And roads.
I really do view this as a very empowering opportunity for tribal and indigenous populations which almost always exist in minority political positions in central governments. What is the primary means of denial of opportunity and resources to these political minorities? Infrastructure.
The fact that power and communications can be so effectively decentralized and locally controlled for wind / solar / battery / starlink is a fundamental game changer to these people. Look at our native american populations: the poverty in these communities (if they don't have the casino deal) is striking, and they are far away from centralized infrastructure.
I'm not saying having your own wind/solar/starlink comms will solve all the problems, but it is empowering to a community and individual people that may live there.
The tragedy of the strong Republican character of rural America is that the same thing effectively goes for almost all rural communities: cheaper and better power, cheaper and better communications, improve the appeal of moving urban and suburban workers to more remote rurals and improve their economic quandry of aging populations and population loss. At the same time, increase housing availability and affordability to more people by making the rural areas more accessible.
Wow, that was meandering, but anyway, I think the focus on alternative energy is getting too far towards grid centric just because it is a bit cheaper on cost/kwhr. There should be strong focus on home / community solar/wind/battery storage and development.
And home storage is a key aspect to it. IMO, it is largely solved technologically for the 1-2 days of storage with sodium ion batteries, you just need the scaling. Maybe you have a gas generator for rea...
I grew up in that part of the world too and our government completely failed to provide basic electricity and everyone resorted to either solar or generators.
How do I use as much electricity as Elon musk does running the Twitter servers?
Start your own cryptocoin and promote it. Then other people will spend megawatts of their own electricity to make you money. Er, make themselves money.
Electricity distribution companies would keep on increasing prices to make up for lost revenue from stealing. On other hand, stealing kept on increasing.
In recent years, huge chunk of public have pivoted to installing solar panels for water heater etc. When I was a kid, solar water heater was found only on upper middle and politician's home. Now it's very common. This is welcome progress and inadvertent good for environment since the real motivation is to free self from manipulation of electricity companies.
a. Tier 1 would be state capitals, Tier 2 would be prominent cities in that state, Tier 3 would be rest of district headquarters.
I have never heard that before, cities like Ranchi can hardly be described as "Tier 1". The HRA classification given on the Wikipedia page[1] is much better guide to what my intuitions are on what people mean by tier 1-3.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_cit...
Finally someone starting from the bottom of the latin alphabet to categorize something that can grow over time (i.e. Delhi becomes even bigger, much more bigger than other X cities, it will move to a W category).
Yes, I'm looking at you, European energy classes system and yours A+++++++++ classes.
And the scale needs to be changed regularly anyways because the criteria are not the same, so a 8 now would not even be guaranteed to be a 8 tomorrow.
The European system already resets the scales after a while (for instance the new ones don't have a + yet) and it is not just about changing min and max but many things are reevaluated based on new knowledge, so an item that was B can no be D while another one that was C stays C. Be it number or letters it is a breaking change so you might as well go with the intuitive system that matches most people's intuition
You will know that, when measuring something, the higher, the better, for whatever definition of "better" applies (less CO2, less Watts, more good nutrients etc). If the scale changes, or the definition of "better", you now have "9" appliances, which will be better than "3" appliances with their 15 years old label still attached to them. With the current system you have to check "oh, it's A+ from 2017, I need to check the actual numbers anyway".
And yes, I understand that those labels are mainly directed at new items bought right now, and only as "local" comparison. And that if you sell a "new" appliance today manufactured 5 years ago and the labels have changed, you need to update the labels on it. Still, it's cumbersome. You either update the scale ever 2 years or keep adding "+" for a while.
EDIT: also, houses. those fuckers tend to last for tens of years while being sold and bought all the time in the meanwhile.
Further when you change the scales you can't compare old and new. Is my A+ rated fridge better or worse than a new A rated fridge. Is it worth me updating it?
A system of 1 to 5 can scale upwards. Alternatively set A as the best possible score as allowed by the laws of physics.
"This gauge system originated in the number of drawing operations used to produce a given gauge of wire."
Yeah, no. There is no state in India that has exorbitant electricity prices for domestic consumers. Virtually every state discom sets the base tarrif below cost. People steal electricity because they can, not because they can't afford it.
I disabled our shower by forcing the taps shut with spanner, the tap washers I prefer are ok for this.
Attached a shower head hose to the bath tap, so now all we have is a shower head you have to hold and mostly sit or squat to use it.
This has eliminated certain individuals from emptying the hot water system while washing their hair, and my own tendency to use a fair bit of hot water while standing in the shower.
Bit of a hack, YMMV.
Vs alternatives like using a flash boiler, or convincing your government to reduce the water that the agriculture industry can use, or adding a timer on the shower?
I don't care about water usage, it's extremely cheap here and highly recyclable. That's why I framed my comment with the energy conservation context.
I guess this makes at least some sense though? A sizable proportion of the heat from shower water must go into water vapour that evaporates into the air as the droplets fall from shower head to floor drain. If you go into an unventilated room where someone has had a shower & you’ll find the air both very warm & very damp!
Using a heat recovery system like this also means you don’t need to pull cold dry air into the bathroom from outside in order to avoid condensation problems - the heat recovery also pulls the water out of the air - so it saves a considerable amount of energy that way too.
Whether these are enough to offset the installation cost I don’t know.
In winter one would like the hot humid air from the bathroom to be heat exchanged and heat dumped back into the property. In summer perhaps feed the input airflow for a water heat pump and again dump out the humid air.
Either way, we leave a lot of efficieny the table.
https://www.homedepot.ca/en/home/categories/building-materia...
As for the hot humid bathroom air, that also exists in the form of ERV (energy recovery ventilators). For well sealed houses you route all the exhaust and intake for the home to one place where there is a heat exchanger to minimize the losses from getting fresh air into the house.
You can enjoy him being roasted here: https://youtu.be/X4gt7jL0rP0?t=54
In western countries, and especially in the USA, people mostly want to live in a private house, with two or more cars. If those vehicles are electric (and that's the future we're pointed to), I think solar panels would provide a tiny share of the electricity required for this way of life.
When living in a large city building, the energy required for each family is much smaller since cars are not needed and since heating etc is lower than in individual houses. In that case, solar panels are more useful, though not enough to be independent.
Solar/wind in combination with natural gas is very profitable in the UK as long the natural gas is cheap enough. Right now that is not the case so the cost of the energy grid in UK is extremely high, and much higher than in solar heavy countries located next to deserts that don't need to use natural gas to cover all those rainy and snowy days.
The technology is improving so rapidly you can't use stats from last year.
There would be generators owned by mafia type people that would sell electricity to neighborhoods.
Once we ran out of dollar currency to buy gas people resorted to solar
I'll be investing in solar powers and portable generators next. Me and my motorbike are gonna go full-solar this year .. and I live in a wealthy nation that is in relatively good stance, energy-sector -wise.
The benefits outweight the disadvantages and effort required. There is nothing quite so satisfying as to navigate traffic silently, not contributing to everyones' lung disease as I pass by ..
I expect the worst of it to be when (former) middle class residing in suburban sprawl realise they cannot afford a car any more : think yellow vests (aka "roundabout folks"), but worse.
It also doesn’t help when political class is protected by foreign governments (USA & Iran) so change is unlikely also dangerous.
Our problem is that we’re too diverse and fixated on religion. I worry about America if they continue fixating on identity politics with race and genders
I have resisted the idea of Li-ion battery in the house because of fire risks and costs. If Na-ion battery tech or one of the many promising battery tech being talked about every week comes to life soon, I'd jump on it.
The vast majority of battery backup solutions in 2022 and forward are LFP tech, which is much safer than cylindrical Li Ion cells.