5 ms·

For years (decade? decades?) this has been the promise of distributed solar and storage, and been analogized to how developing countries leapfrogged to wireless

For years (decade? decades?) this has been the promise of distributed solar and storage, and been analogized to how developing countries leapfrogged to wireless telecom without the expensive wired last-mile telecom stage. The grid is very valuable, but it's also very expensive, and as storage and solar get really cheap, while grid costs stay stagnant, we may arrive at a future for which decentralized, disconnected microgrids are the cheapest energy solution for large chunks of the world.

gpm 4y ago
I'm not convinced that this is a case of leapfrogging. Off grid solar+storage is great when you and everyone around you is using very little electricity. It lets you go from "nothing" to "lightbulb at night" very cheaply, which is a huge improvement. Once you're using tons of electricity, list a 1st world home does (refrigeration/ac/microwaves/electric ovens/electric stoves/washing machines/vehicles/...), storage would have to be absurdly cheap for it to not be worthwhile to start hooking homes together to load balance and reduce (not eliminate) the need for storage. And then the same logic applies to hooking up cities/towns/villages. And in the end it almost certainly turns out that by the time you're a huge consumer of electricity like the 1st world you have a grid. A different path, but the same end result.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  These are small islands. More storage is almost certainly cheaper than inter island connections.
  - gpm 4y ago
    All the pictures in the article are Sumba island, which has an area of 11k km^2 and roughly 800k people (slightly less population density than the state of California), I'm not sure that really counts as small. Yes island interconnects seem reasonably unlikely. Similarly Hawaii has no interconnects between the main islands [0] despite being a first world locale. A different geography leading to a different grid structure the mainland US isn't "leapfrogging", it's just a different geography leading to a different grid structure. [0] https://puc.hawaii.gov/energy/ https://puc.hawaii.gov/energy/
    - rippercushions 4y ago
      Indonesia has around 10,000 inhabited islands, although around half the population is on Java and most of the rest on the next big five (Borneo/Kalimantan, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Bali, Papua).
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- seb1204 4y ago
  Since there is a limit with what the solar system can provide the user/community will work with that. No need to say it can't accommodate a wasteful western way to use the energy.
  - gpm 4y ago
    If you mean to say "as long as they can't afford luxuries they'll do without them" that is no doubt true. However to suggest that once they can afford luxuries that are most cheaply acquired by going beyond a single-household electricity setup, that they will continue to do without them over some attachment to not having a grid, that claim seems almost certainly completely incorrect. It also needs to be said that electricity isn't just used for "wasteful things", it's used for making things more efficient, so that people can do more. The article talks about this in the context of lighting, but it's no less true in the context of washing machines, and dishwashers, and microwaves, and air-conditioning [1], and mechanized transportation (electric bikes/cars/...), and ... [1] http://corporatemechanical.com/how-air-conditioning-impacts-productivity/ http://corporatemechanical.com/how-air-conditioning-impacts-...
  - hedora 4y ago
    Wasteful is relative. Our house produces 250-300% of our usage most days, but 5-50% of our usage some weeks. Heating and cooling (and the computers that manage the batteries, which draw about 200W, including internet!) is hard to timeshift, but everything else is easy to move to sunny days. Anyway, on those sunny days, electricity is literally free. I wish I could just dump it into a magic box that pulled charcoal out of the atmosphere.
    - sdenton4 4y ago
      At some point I got an itch and looked into what it would take to run such a magic box myself. The lightbulb moment was realizing that of I did manage to pull a ton (or 15) of carbon out of the air by whatever method, I would then have to move that carbon... Somewhere. I had been looking especially at algae bio reactors, which leave you with a particularly soupy waste situation. :)
- hedora 4y ago
  I’m not sure having a grid is the end state. The US is abandoning the grid in Puerto Rico and California (though the politicians won’t admit it, and the pork is still flowing). If solar and batteries continue to get cheaper, the cost of the grid hookup will eventually stop making economic sense for new construction.
- epistasis 4y ago
  That sort of lifestyle is really feasible on solar. Rooftops alone are likely enough, or at worst some bit of agrovoltaics. The vast majority of Western energy is wasted, rejected as waste heat. Solar electrification skips over a wasteful thermodynamic conversion of heat to electricity. Even the rare case where fossil fuels seem at first glance as efficient, such as for heating water and homes, it turns out that 99% efficiency of conversion of fossil fuel energy to heat still requires 3-4x as much energy as a heat pump to get the same result. And don't get me started on how incredibly wimpy and inefficient ICE cars are.... unreliable bad machines. And the only, literally the only time I have seen somebody come up with napkin math to say that solar would be hard to install in sufficient quantity to meet existing lifestyles in countries with normal insolation, it has been using total energy, rather than the actual useful amount of energy. Solar and storage are gigantic technological marvels compared to the tech that delivered energy to us in the 20th century. Unless one's earning are tied directly to spreading FUD about these new technologies, it makes no sense not to acknowledge both the amazing tech curve of the past decades, and to speculate won the wonderful places that solar and storage in future will take us.
  - gpm 4y ago
    > That sort of lifestyle As I said in another comment, once people can afford a better lifestyle, they aren't remotely likely to choose to keep living the worse one. On the other hand, I too am a fan of solar and electricity. I completely buy the solar + storage + grid is sufficient for a western lifestyle. I'm not arguing against solar, I'm arguing against lack of grid, that connecting houses, towns, and cities together can save more money on storage than it costs to run the wires. You want to plan for very-close-to-worst generation + storage >= very-close-to-worst-case load over all time frames, and grids smooth over variations in both generation and load, which makes the worst cases go way down, which means that that equation requires a lot less storage (not none, but less). Incidentally I also think that "solar + wind + storage + grid" is an even better combination... and that wind power only works with a grid (because the scaling rules around them mean you want giant wind turbines that put out enough power for many houses)... but even with only solar grids just make too much sense.
    - 4y ago
- neltnerb 4y ago
  Maybe it makes sense to truly integrate generation and storage with your neighbor. Between two towns separated by forty miles of roads? I don't think you get to the same end result. When production is in the same location as consumption, the interconnects can be way less expensive and in a disaster the grid has more redundancy. Plus it bootstraps way better, locally people get access to the initial benefits before the entire grid has been planned out. And as others suggest, those interconnects might go mostly unused, storage and generation is pretty impressive nowadays. But even besides the timing advantages, you just end up in a situation where the power grid is closer to the internet in architecture where sources and consumers of electricity are all over. We have the technology to handle that.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 7952 4y ago
  A lot of places in the developing world have a large rural population that is widely spread out. You may have a family dwelling every 100m surrounded by a small farm with each dwelling connected by foot tracks. It is like taking a large city in America or Europe and spreading the population out across the entire county. This is a different challenge to connecting urban areas and small towns to a wider grid. IMHO it would be useful to have grid technology that could work as a web of low voltage/low current connections. Something that could be installed without needing lots of expertise and be intrinsically safe. Maybe even in the same package as water pipes.
  - joncrocks 4y ago
    The reason that high voltages are used is transmission efficiency. Low voltage = high current = less inefficient, less dangerous. High voltage = low current = more efficient, more dangerous. There's good reasons why overhead power lines are very high voltage.
datadeft 4y ago
This sounds nice but in reality you need sophisticated grid controlling measures to have a fixed frequency for many things. This is doable just good to be aware of it.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
In many parts of the world the grid is a combination of unreliable or not there at all. And the required level of investment to fix all that is at least short term not keeping up with the increase in demand. So, things are getting worse for people dependent on the grid. And where grids are actually available, they aren't necessarily cheap, which incentivizes people that use a lot of power to invest in alternatives. You see this with e.g. companies exploiting vehicle chargers. They all end up installing solar panels and investing in electricity infrastructure rather than just paying per kwh to their local grid provider. The grid is a last resort for them. This is going to be true for any business where energy is a big component of their cost. To get reliable and cheap power, people have to invest in their own generation. That's still expensive but increasingly more feasible and critical for especially small businesses. If you run e.g. a small shop and you have perishable goods in a fridge in a tropical country and the power goes out, you basically have a lot of melted / rotten goods after a few hours. Not great. If that happens a lot, your business dies. In the same way, having the AC on or off in a hot country can mean the difference between having your place full of customers or not. It's not optional. If grid power is only available a few hours a day, your business is at risk unless you fix a more reliable supply. Many grids in e.g. Africa are very unreliable and don't have enough capacity. In many countries people are still relying on generators for this but increasingly solar and batteries are becoming a viable alternative. The upfront cost of this is a big obstacle for many smaller businesses. As is the availability of components. But generators and fuel are also not free. And they break down and need maintenance too. And the exhaust fumes cause health issues. However, solutions in this space actually have a value and return on investment. So, providing lines of credit for this is actually something that is potentially a profitable business and not just charity. Plenty of entrepreneurs in Africa, the Middle East, parts of Asia, etc. that could use that to bootstrap their businesses and would be able to pay back loans with interest. I'd say micro grids will be a reality long before, if ever, people figure out cheap, reliable grid power in many of these places.
nonethewiser 4y ago
> analogized to how developing countries leapfrogged to wireless telecom without the expensive wired last-mile telecom stage Another example of this sort of dynamic are skipping credit cards for app based payments. Or not having much of a postal service because email. In all these cases I think its more of a shortcut than truly leapfrogging. Not as good in terms of redundancy (good for reliability) and interoperability.

gpm 4y ago

I'm not convinced that this is a case of leapfrogging. Off grid solar+storage is great when you and everyone around you is using very little electricity. It lets you go from "nothing" to "lightbulb at night" very cheaply, which is a huge improvement. Once you're using tons of electricity, list a 1st world home does (refrigeration/ac/microwaves/electric ovens/electric stoves/washing machines/vehicles/...), storage would have to be absurdly cheap for it to not be worthwhile to start hooking homes together to load balance and reduce (not eliminate) the need for storage. And then the same logic applies to hooking up cities/towns/villages. And in the end it almost certainly turns out that by the time you're a huge consumer of electricity like the 1st world you have a grid. A different path, but the same end result.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
These are small islands. More storage is almost certainly cheaper than inter island connections.
- gpm 4y ago
  All the pictures in the article are Sumba island, which has an area of 11k km^2 and roughly 800k people (slightly less population density than the state of California), I'm not sure that really counts as small. Yes island interconnects seem reasonably unlikely. Similarly Hawaii has no interconnects between the main islands [0] despite being a first world locale. A different geography leading to a different grid structure the mainland US isn't "leapfrogging", it's just a different geography leading to a different grid structure. [0] https://puc.hawaii.gov/energy/ https://puc.hawaii.gov/energy/
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Indonesia has around 10,000 inhabited islands, although around half the population is on Java and most of the rest on the next big five (Borneo/Kalimantan, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Bali, Papua).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
seb1204 4y ago
Since there is a limit with what the solar system can provide the user/community will work with that. No need to say it can't accommodate a wasteful western way to use the energy.
- gpm 4y ago
  If you mean to say "as long as they can't afford luxuries they'll do without them" that is no doubt true. However to suggest that once they can afford luxuries that are most cheaply acquired by going beyond a single-household electricity setup, that they will continue to do without them over some attachment to not having a grid, that claim seems almost certainly completely incorrect. It also needs to be said that electricity isn't just used for "wasteful things", it's used for making things more efficient, so that people can do more. The article talks about this in the context of lighting, but it's no less true in the context of washing machines, and dishwashers, and microwaves, and air-conditioning [1], and mechanized transportation (electric bikes/cars/...), and ... [1] http://corporatemechanical.com/how-air-conditioning-impacts-productivity/ http://corporatemechanical.com/how-air-conditioning-impacts-...
- hedora 4y ago
  Wasteful is relative. Our house produces 250-300% of our usage most days, but 5-50% of our usage some weeks. Heating and cooling (and the computers that manage the batteries, which draw about 200W, including internet!) is hard to timeshift, but everything else is easy to move to sunny days. Anyway, on those sunny days, electricity is literally free. I wish I could just dump it into a magic box that pulled charcoal out of the atmosphere.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    At some point I got an itch and looked into what it would take to run such a magic box myself. The lightbulb moment was realizing that of I did manage to pull a ton (or 15) of carbon out of the air by whatever method, I would then have to move that carbon... Somewhere. I had been looking especially at algae bio reactors, which leave you with a particularly soupy waste situation. :)
hedora 4y ago
I’m not sure having a grid is the end state. The US is abandoning the grid in Puerto Rico and California (though the politicians won’t admit it, and the pork is still flowing). If solar and batteries continue to get cheaper, the cost of the grid hookup will eventually stop making economic sense for new construction.
epistasis 4y ago
That sort of lifestyle is really feasible on solar. Rooftops alone are likely enough, or at worst some bit of agrovoltaics. The vast majority of Western energy is wasted, rejected as waste heat. Solar electrification skips over a wasteful thermodynamic conversion of heat to electricity. Even the rare case where fossil fuels seem at first glance as efficient, such as for heating water and homes, it turns out that 99% efficiency of conversion of fossil fuel energy to heat still requires 3-4x as much energy as a heat pump to get the same result. And don't get me started on how incredibly wimpy and inefficient ICE cars are.... unreliable bad machines. And the only, literally the only time I have seen somebody come up with napkin math to say that solar would be hard to install in sufficient quantity to meet existing lifestyles in countries with normal insolation, it has been using total energy, rather than the actual useful amount of energy. Solar and storage are gigantic technological marvels compared to the tech that delivered energy to us in the 20th century. Unless one's earning are tied directly to spreading FUD about these new technologies, it makes no sense not to acknowledge both the amazing tech curve of the past decades, and to speculate won the wonderful places that solar and storage in future will take us.
- gpm 4y ago
  > That sort of lifestyle As I said in another comment, once people can afford a better lifestyle, they aren't remotely likely to choose to keep living the worse one. On the other hand, I too am a fan of solar and electricity. I completely buy the solar + storage + grid is sufficient for a western lifestyle. I'm not arguing against solar, I'm arguing against lack of grid, that connecting houses, towns, and cities together can save more money on storage than it costs to run the wires. You want to plan for very-close-to-worst generation + storage >= very-close-to-worst-case load over all time frames, and grids smooth over variations in both generation and load, which makes the worst cases go way down, which means that that equation requires a lot less storage (not none, but less). Incidentally I also think that "solar + wind + storage + grid" is an even better combination... and that wind power only works with a grid (because the scaling rules around them mean you want giant wind turbines that put out enough power for many houses)... but even with only solar grids just make too much sense.
  - 4y ago
neltnerb 4y ago
Maybe it makes sense to truly integrate generation and storage with your neighbor. Between two towns separated by forty miles of roads? I don't think you get to the same end result. When production is in the same location as consumption, the interconnects can be way less expensive and in a disaster the grid has more redundancy. Plus it bootstraps way better, locally people get access to the initial benefits before the entire grid has been planned out. And as others suggest, those interconnects might go mostly unused, storage and generation is pretty impressive nowadays. But even besides the timing advantages, you just end up in a situation where the power grid is closer to the internet in architecture where sources and consumers of electricity are all over. We have the technology to handle that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
7952 4y ago
A lot of places in the developing world have a large rural population that is widely spread out. You may have a family dwelling every 100m surrounded by a small farm with each dwelling connected by foot tracks. It is like taking a large city in America or Europe and spreading the population out across the entire county. This is a different challenge to connecting urban areas and small towns to a wider grid. IMHO it would be useful to have grid technology that could work as a web of low voltage/low current connections. Something that could be installed without needing lots of expertise and be intrinsically safe. Maybe even in the same package as water pipes.
- joncrocks 4y ago
  The reason that high voltages are used is transmission efficiency. Low voltage = high current = less inefficient, less dangerous. High voltage = low current = more efficient, more dangerous. There's good reasons why overhead power lines are very high voltage.

datadeft 4y ago

This sounds nice but in reality you need sophisticated grid controlling measures to have a fixed frequency for many things. This is doable just good to be aware of it.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

In many parts of the world the grid is a combination of unreliable or not there at all. And the required level of investment to fix all that is at least short term not keeping up with the increase in demand. So, things are getting worse for people dependent on the grid. And where grids are actually available, they aren't necessarily cheap, which incentivizes people that use a lot of power to invest in alternatives. You see this with e.g. companies exploiting vehicle chargers. They all end up installing solar panels and investing in electricity infrastructure rather than just paying per kwh to their local grid provider. The grid is a last resort for them. This is going to be true for any business where energy is a big component of their cost. To get reliable and cheap power, people have to invest in their own generation. That's still expensive but increasingly more feasible and critical for especially small businesses. If you run e.g. a small shop and you have perishable goods in a fridge in a tropical country and the power goes out, you basically have a lot of melted / rotten goods after a few hours. Not great. If that happens a lot, your business dies. In the same way, having the AC on or off in a hot country can mean the difference between having your place full of customers or not. It's not optional. If grid power is only available a few hours a day, your business is at risk unless you fix a more reliable supply. Many grids in e.g. Africa are very unreliable and don't have enough capacity. In many countries people are still relying on generators for this but increasingly solar and batteries are becoming a viable alternative. The upfront cost of this is a big obstacle for many smaller businesses. As is the availability of components. But generators and fuel are also not free. And they break down and need maintenance too. And the exhaust fumes cause health issues. However, solutions in this space actually have a value and return on investment. So, providing lines of credit for this is actually something that is potentially a profitable business and not just charity. Plenty of entrepreneurs in Africa, the Middle East, parts of Asia, etc. that could use that to bootstrap their businesses and would be able to pay back loans with interest. I'd say micro grids will be a reality long before, if ever, people figure out cheap, reliable grid power in many of these places.

nonethewiser 4y ago

> analogized to how developing countries leapfrogged to wireless telecom without the expensive wired last-mile telecom stage Another example of this sort of dynamic are skipping credit cards for app based payments. Or not having much of a postal service because email. In all these cases I think its more of a shortcut than truly leapfrogging. Not as good in terms of redundancy (good for reliability) and interoperability.