6 ms·

I would encourage people to go look at satellite view of random "rich" neighbourhoods in Pakistan, and note how many solar panels there are on rooftops. Here is

I would encourage people to go look at satellite view of random "rich" neighbourhoods in Pakistan, and note how many solar panels there are on rooftops. Here is the first one I scrolled to in Lahore [1], and one in Karachi [2] Pakistan's grid prices tripled or more since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, because the extremely mismanaged and poorly designed electricity system+economy could not handle the energy price shock. This spiraled into rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@31.3611237,74.2493456,357m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTEyMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@31.3611237,74.2493456,357m/data... [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@24.8014179,67.0460688,415m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTEyMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@24.8014179,67.0460688,415m/data...

riku_iki 11mo ago
> rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more. how it exacerbated problems exactly?..
- saidinesh5 11mo ago
  I'm guessing: fewer people buying from the power companies/grid => the fixed costs of these companies are pushed onto the poorer customers, who already couldn't afford much.
  - gus_massa 11mo ago
    Don't they charge a minimum just for keeping the wires connected?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bee_rider 11mo ago
      I think most places the service is priced under the assumption that usage is enough to pay for the grid… I’ve only ever rented though. Are connection fees something that homeworkers think about? Possibly we will have to see changes to account for this sort of stuff at a more granular level, as the grid becomes more dynamic. But, that’s a future we should be actively looking to design for, as the energy supply mix is going to change whatever anybody thinks about that. Can’t beat energy falling from the sky, on price…
      - namibj 11mo ago
        In a random German apartment usage tends to be on the order of 30-ish EUR per person, and the connection fee is typically around 10 EUR per month.
        apelapan 11mo ago
        Is the €30 usage fee going directly to the producer of electricity, or is part of it a variable transmission fee that goes to the network operator? My monthly electricity bill in Sweden, averaged over a year to 1600KWh/month, is approximately €90 production, €50 transmission fee, €25 fixed connection-size fee (25A, 400V), €70 national electricity tax and €50 VAT for a total of €285/month. We'll be moved to yearly-peak-based transmission tariff in 2027 (European law), but for now I don't need to worry about plugging in the car to chargeon cold days or taking shower when someone is cooking.
        namibj 11mo ago
        Both, currently; notably it's mostly not what goes to your local grid, but rather mostly to the larger scale grid. It's about a 60/40 to 70/30 split between production/"grid-usage-fee" ("Netznutzungsentgelt"). It basically pays off the grid stability provision bids for fast-response power, and the transmission itself. It'd likely be helpful if the peak part could be regulated in a way that's more condusive to match the actual impact you create on transformer sizing, not the worst-case impact you might have. Because there's a difference between a mostly-uncorrelated peak of shower+cooking vs. the car+cold day, because your neighbours don't shower the same time, but the several hours of charging do often overlap and the cold is the same across a neighbourhood that shares a local substation. But yeah, for the most part, transformer size isn't that large of a contributor to overall electricity provision expenses, so I don't expect that to be a significant problem by that 2027 law.
    - manmal 11mo ago
      Usually that’s included in per-kWh fee, so indeed usage dependent.
    - phkahler 11mo ago
      When they start charging that way, the rich will buy batteries and disconnect from the grid entirely.
      - gus_massa 11mo ago
        It's good until a Wednesday afternoon your home system dies and you have no electricity until Monday. I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case.
        chickenbig 11mo ago
        > I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case. The grid becomes an insurance policy. In that case it is justified to ask for the insured party to pay their share of the system costs; both an energy fee and transmission/distribution/generation capacity fee.
    - abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
      I heard that they are trying to restructure the billing in this way for next fiscal year (July 2026- ), but its really difficult to find a non-regressive scheme. Electricity per-unit prices in Pakistan are set by the government, they vary depending on how much you consume [1], and they play a pretty significant role in government popularity. [1] There is a price for the first 50 units you consume, then a higher price for the next 150 units, etc. Similar system to income taxes.
      - namibj 11mo ago
        Grids in Germany if you're not a "typical household/office" with therefore atypical grid usage bill for peak power and energy separately; the billing related peak power is measured by averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the worst one of a year. Alternatively it's also practical for such solar situations to bill for market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately; this doesn't correctly attribute transformer and other transmission equipment expenses between solar houses and non-solar houses, but it's still handling the grid tie solar load on the grid's power plants during periods of very little sun.
        andyferris 11mo ago
        > averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the worst one of a year. What an interesting metric. Wouldn't even a very cheap and small battery (definitely small enough to keep inside an appartment) provide enough smoothing to, like, halve this peak number? You could rig it to not even output energy until you are beyond the current year's peak usage... How much money would you save this way? I just feel this number is so prone to small mistakes (grandma plugs in the wrong things at the wrong times) and hacks (like the above) that the relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate. > market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately I am currently on a plan with 5 minute market rates, can buy and sell in (sell prices can go negative - as can buy, actually), all automated. At least I feel we am working with the grid, not against it, and we make a small net profit (before depreciation).
        11mo ago
  - riku_iki 11mo ago
    its easily fixable, utility company can charge fee for fixed cost those who connected to the grid, and if all rich decided to disconnect, then they disconnect neighborhood eliminating fixed cost.
  - abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
    This is correct. But there is a bit more. Almost all power plants in Pakistan are built with state-backed dollar-denominated loans (reason govt incompetence+corruption). This means if grid demand goes down, power plants don't go out of business like they would in a market based system. Instead, they keep collecting dollar-denominated interest paid by the state, even if they produce zero power. The state mitigates this by increasing electricity prices (in rupees). I have forgotten how this helps.
    - jstanley 11mo ago
      So the power plants lend dollars to the state so that they can pay to build the power plant? Or else I don't see how the power plants are collecting the interest?
      - abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
        Usually there are three parties in these agreements. 1. State of Pakistan 2. Someone with dollars (the investors) 3. Local businessman who are willing run the power plant. The three parties come to an agreement on what the minimum returns should be on the investment. Say 10% annual. Then the investors give money to the businessman, who then import the power plant equipment and start operating it. The state-run electricity distribution companies buys from the power plant as needed and pays them the unit price set by the State of Pakistan. Part of this is converted into dollars at some pre-agreed rate and transferred to the investors. In all this, if the total returns to the investor are above 10%, then all is good. However, if the grid demand has fallen, and the distribution company didn't buy a lot of units from the power plant, then the State of Pakistan has to step in and give the investors the difference to make up the 10% returns. Yes, it is an insane system.
        bofadeez 11mo ago
        State capitalism like you described totally undermines the price system by replacing profit-and-loss–guided entrepreneurial calculation with political allocation of resources, thereby rendering economic calculation increasingly impossible and eroding the coordinating function of the market process.
- kieranmaine 11mo ago
  The following isn't a grid problem (more of a demand issue), but maybe they're referring to this: > But 45 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, putting solar panel systems well beyond their reach. The pool of customers for the national grid has gotten smaller and poorer, and the costs of financing old coal-powered plants have increasingly been passed on to those who can least afford it. [1] 1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-pakistan-s-solar-energy-boom-led-to-higher-power-bills-for-the-poor/ar-AA1L6xeu https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-pakistan-s-solar-en...
- ZeroConcerns 11mo ago
  Previously, pretty much everyone (not just 'rich people', although, well, 'rich' is relative here, of course...) had diesel generators, which were not connected to the grid, since that would be seriously expensive, plus syncing would be pretty much impossible anyway. With solar, you can feed back into the grid much more easily, to the point that this is the default. This sort-of doubles the load on the grid (not exactly, but you get the idea), since both 'consumption' and 'production' need to cross the same wires. This is a problem even in, like, Germany, where the grid operator can send a "kill signal" to local solar inverters to shut down. In Pakistan, I can't even imagine...
- elzbardico 11mo ago
  Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather). Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources. Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro. But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time. Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs. Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception. AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.
  - k1musab1 11mo ago
    This exact issue lead me to follow the grid orchestration research out of the Oak Ridge Laboratory. The building blocks already exist to enable this. An interconnected smart network of renewables can become a stabilizing force in the overall grid. Off-peak storage would still be required, but would no longer need to be "stabilizing" (turbine or other similar generator), and can be simple batteries.
  - londons_explore 11mo ago
    All these problems become solved if you have realtime market pricing. Nobody would bother to install rooftop solar if daytime power was super cheap on every sunny day, yet expensive at night when their solar isn't working.
- Gibbon1 11mo ago
  I read that Pakistan told Qatar to sell off 24 containers of LNG next year. And there are abusive penalty clauses that get triggered when you do that. I went an looked and it appears Pakistan imports ~110 containers of LNG a year. And their natural gas plants are running as 50% capacity. Personal belief on big reason for a country to install solar, wind, and batteries to be able to tell the criminals at the IMF to go f' themselves.
tibbydudeza 11mo ago
Price of Chinese PV panels and inverters and batteries have dropped so much and there has been financing schemes available where you get the installation for free and pay per usage cheaper than what the utility company charges and it is more realiable.
Havoc 11mo ago
Did whoever named those streets have a stroke? 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, MDR 7, 32, 33, no name at all, 39, 40 And they're not even unique...they recycle them a kilometer further. WAT
- ssl-3 11mo ago
  It appears that the recycled street numbers each appear on different blocks. Street 6, for instance: I've found it twice so far. But they're still distinct, in that one Street 6 is within Block M 3 B, and another is within Block M 7. Which appears to suggest that blocks are more important at identifying an address than a street name is, and if that's the case then that works just fine. And indeed, a distinct address appears to be something like this: Plot 15, Block M 7 Lake City, Lahore, Pakistan. Plug that into Google Maps and you'll see what I'm seeing (and note that the string doesn't include a street name at all). It does seem weird to my wee little Ohio-trained brain to identify a building by what block it is on more than the street it is facing, but then: Canadian post codes and Hungarian addresses also look weird to me, and also work fine in the places where they're used.
  - abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
    That's correct. In Pakistan, typically cities are broken up into housing societies. Each society is broken up into sectors/blocks, which are typically indexed by the alphabet(A, B, C, ...), but occasionally, one will see block M7 or sector B2 etc. In each such sector, each house has a unique numbered address. Some larger societies are first broken up into "phases" and then into sectors/blocks. Street numbers are typically not required in an address, but are often provided as helpful guidance. Not a great system, but still better than Calgary's system (where I studied), which might be the worst system I have ever seen. You can't navigate at all without a map.
    - catlover76 11mo ago
      [dead]
    - jbm 11mo ago
jahnu 11mo ago
According to this interview [1] and a recent Economist podcast blackouts were a huge driver of the decision of those that could afford it to go for solar and batteries. Now the utilities are in a death spiral. Customers disconnect, prices rise, more incentive to go for solar and storage as prices continue to fall while price of unreliable grid energy rises. Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable. [1] https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom
- ghiculescu 11mo ago
  In other words poor people are being forced to subsidize luxury beliefs.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
    Pakistan has the highest per capita slavery except for communist countries with forced labor regimes, in the world. Their country is built on the backs of slavery.
    - shelled 11mo ago
      As someone from India — who has written this kind of comment against India and Pakistan in forums, with poor reception, and later realised it was rightly so — some more detail and nuance, possibly with some easily readable sources, would help a great deal - mostly for the people who want a picture of that because slavery is a very evocative term.
      - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
        thats ok. india thast the highest population of slaves worldwide, not on a per capita basis.
  - 11mo ago

riku_iki 11mo ago

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

saidinesh5 11mo ago
I'm guessing: fewer people buying from the power companies/grid => the fixed costs of these companies are pushed onto the poorer customers, who already couldn't afford much.
- gus_massa 11mo ago
  Don't they charge a minimum just for keeping the wires connected?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bee_rider 11mo ago
    I think most places the service is priced under the assumption that usage is enough to pay for the grid… I’ve only ever rented though. Are connection fees something that homeworkers think about? Possibly we will have to see changes to account for this sort of stuff at a more granular level, as the grid becomes more dynamic. But, that’s a future we should be actively looking to design for, as the energy supply mix is going to change whatever anybody thinks about that. Can’t beat energy falling from the sky, on price…
    - namibj 11mo ago
      In a random German apartment usage tends to be on the order of 30-ish EUR per person, and the connection fee is typically around 10 EUR per month.
      - apelapan 11mo ago
        Is the €30 usage fee going directly to the producer of electricity, or is part of it a variable transmission fee that goes to the network operator? My monthly electricity bill in Sweden, averaged over a year to 1600KWh/month, is approximately €90 production, €50 transmission fee, €25 fixed connection-size fee (25A, 400V), €70 national electricity tax and €50 VAT for a total of €285/month. We'll be moved to yearly-peak-based transmission tariff in 2027 (European law), but for now I don't need to worry about plugging in the car to chargeon cold days or taking shower when someone is cooking.
        namibj 11mo ago
        Both, currently; notably it's mostly not what goes to your local grid, but rather mostly to the larger scale grid. It's about a 60/40 to 70/30 split between production/"grid-usage-fee" ("Netznutzungsentgelt"). It basically pays off the grid stability provision bids for fast-response power, and the transmission itself. It'd likely be helpful if the peak part could be regulated in a way that's more condusive to match the actual impact you create on transformer sizing, not the worst-case impact you might have. Because there's a difference between a mostly-uncorrelated peak of shower+cooking vs. the car+cold day, because your neighbours don't shower the same time, but the several hours of charging do often overlap and the cold is the same across a neighbourhood that shares a local substation. But yeah, for the most part, transformer size isn't that large of a contributor to overall electricity provision expenses, so I don't expect that to be a significant problem by that 2027 law.
  - manmal 11mo ago
    Usually that’s included in per-kWh fee, so indeed usage dependent.
  - phkahler 11mo ago
    When they start charging that way, the rich will buy batteries and disconnect from the grid entirely.
    - gus_massa 11mo ago
      It's good until a Wednesday afternoon your home system dies and you have no electricity until Monday. I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case.
      - chickenbig 11mo ago
        > I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case. The grid becomes an insurance policy. In that case it is justified to ask for the insured party to pay their share of the system costs; both an energy fee and transmission/distribution/generation capacity fee.
  - abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
    I heard that they are trying to restructure the billing in this way for next fiscal year (July 2026- ), but its really difficult to find a non-regressive scheme. Electricity per-unit prices in Pakistan are set by the government, they vary depending on how much you consume [1], and they play a pretty significant role in government popularity. [1] There is a price for the first 50 units you consume, then a higher price for the next 150 units, etc. Similar system to income taxes.
    - namibj 11mo ago
      Grids in Germany if you're not a "typical household/office" with therefore atypical grid usage bill for peak power and energy separately; the billing related peak power is measured by averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the worst one of a year. Alternatively it's also practical for such solar situations to bill for market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately; this doesn't correctly attribute transformer and other transmission equipment expenses between solar houses and non-solar houses, but it's still handling the grid tie solar load on the grid's power plants during periods of very little sun.
      - andyferris 11mo ago
        > averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the worst one of a year. What an interesting metric. Wouldn't even a very cheap and small battery (definitely small enough to keep inside an appartment) provide enough smoothing to, like, halve this peak number? You could rig it to not even output energy until you are beyond the current year's peak usage... How much money would you save this way? I just feel this number is so prone to small mistakes (grandma plugs in the wrong things at the wrong times) and hacks (like the above) that the relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate. > market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately I am currently on a plan with 5 minute market rates, can buy and sell in (sell prices can go negative - as can buy, actually), all automated. At least I feel we am working with the grid, not against it, and we make a small net profit (before depreciation).
        11mo ago
- riku_iki 11mo ago
  its easily fixable, utility company can charge fee for fixed cost those who connected to the grid, and if all rich decided to disconnect, then they disconnect neighborhood eliminating fixed cost.
- abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
  This is correct. But there is a bit more. Almost all power plants in Pakistan are built with state-backed dollar-denominated loans (reason govt incompetence+corruption). This means if grid demand goes down, power plants don't go out of business like they would in a market based system. Instead, they keep collecting dollar-denominated interest paid by the state, even if they produce zero power. The state mitigates this by increasing electricity prices (in rupees). I have forgotten how this helps.
  - jstanley 11mo ago
    So the power plants lend dollars to the state so that they can pay to build the power plant? Or else I don't see how the power plants are collecting the interest?
    - abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
      Usually there are three parties in these agreements. 1. State of Pakistan 2. Someone with dollars (the investors) 3. Local businessman who are willing run the power plant. The three parties come to an agreement on what the minimum returns should be on the investment. Say 10% annual. Then the investors give money to the businessman, who then import the power plant equipment and start operating it. The state-run electricity distribution companies buys from the power plant as needed and pays them the unit price set by the State of Pakistan. Part of this is converted into dollars at some pre-agreed rate and transferred to the investors. In all this, if the total returns to the investor are above 10%, then all is good. However, if the grid demand has fallen, and the distribution company didn't buy a lot of units from the power plant, then the State of Pakistan has to step in and give the investors the difference to make up the 10% returns. Yes, it is an insane system.
      - bofadeez 11mo ago
        State capitalism like you described totally undermines the price system by replacing profit-and-loss–guided entrepreneurial calculation with political allocation of resources, thereby rendering economic calculation increasingly impossible and eroding the coordinating function of the market process.
kieranmaine 11mo ago
The following isn't a grid problem (more of a demand issue), but maybe they're referring to this: > But 45 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, putting solar panel systems well beyond their reach. The pool of customers for the national grid has gotten smaller and poorer, and the costs of financing old coal-powered plants have increasingly been passed on to those who can least afford it. [1] 1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-pakistan-s-solar-energy-boom-led-to-higher-power-bills-for-the-poor/ar-AA1L6xeu https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-pakistan-s-solar-en...
ZeroConcerns 11mo ago
Previously, pretty much everyone (not just 'rich people', although, well, 'rich' is relative here, of course...) had diesel generators, which were not connected to the grid, since that would be seriously expensive, plus syncing would be pretty much impossible anyway. With solar, you can feed back into the grid much more easily, to the point that this is the default. This sort-of doubles the load on the grid (not exactly, but you get the idea), since both 'consumption' and 'production' need to cross the same wires. This is a problem even in, like, Germany, where the grid operator can send a "kill signal" to local solar inverters to shut down. In Pakistan, I can't even imagine...
elzbardico 11mo ago
Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather). Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources. Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro. But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time. Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs. Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception. AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.
- k1musab1 11mo ago
  This exact issue lead me to follow the grid orchestration research out of the Oak Ridge Laboratory. The building blocks already exist to enable this. An interconnected smart network of renewables can become a stabilizing force in the overall grid. Off-peak storage would still be required, but would no longer need to be "stabilizing" (turbine or other similar generator), and can be simple batteries.
- londons_explore 11mo ago
  All these problems become solved if you have realtime market pricing. Nobody would bother to install rooftop solar if daytime power was super cheap on every sunny day, yet expensive at night when their solar isn't working.
Gibbon1 11mo ago
I read that Pakistan told Qatar to sell off 24 containers of LNG next year. And there are abusive penalty clauses that get triggered when you do that. I went an looked and it appears Pakistan imports ~110 containers of LNG a year. And their natural gas plants are running as 50% capacity. Personal belief on big reason for a country to install solar, wind, and batteries to be able to tell the criminals at the IMF to go f' themselves.

tibbydudeza 11mo ago

Price of Chinese PV panels and inverters and batteries have dropped so much and there has been financing schemes available where you get the installation for free and pay per usage cheaper than what the utility company charges and it is more realiable.

Havoc 11mo ago

Did whoever named those streets have a stroke? 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, MDR 7, 32, 33, no name at all, 39, 40 And they're not even unique...they recycle them a kilometer further. WAT

ssl-3 11mo ago
It appears that the recycled street numbers each appear on different blocks. Street 6, for instance: I've found it twice so far. But they're still distinct, in that one Street 6 is within Block M 3 B, and another is within Block M 7. Which appears to suggest that blocks are more important at identifying an address than a street name is, and if that's the case then that works just fine. And indeed, a distinct address appears to be something like this: Plot 15, Block M 7 Lake City, Lahore, Pakistan. Plug that into Google Maps and you'll see what I'm seeing (and note that the string doesn't include a street name at all). It does seem weird to my wee little Ohio-trained brain to identify a building by what block it is on more than the street it is facing, but then: Canadian post codes and Hungarian addresses also look weird to me, and also work fine in the places where they're used.
- abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
  That's correct. In Pakistan, typically cities are broken up into housing societies. Each society is broken up into sectors/blocks, which are typically indexed by the alphabet(A, B, C, ...), but occasionally, one will see block M7 or sector B2 etc. In each such sector, each house has a unique numbered address. Some larger societies are first broken up into "phases" and then into sectors/blocks. Street numbers are typically not required in an address, but are often provided as helpful guidance. Not a great system, but still better than Calgary's system (where I studied), which might be the worst system I have ever seen. You can't navigate at all without a map.
  - catlover76 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - jbm 11mo ago

jahnu 11mo ago

According to this interview [1] and a recent Economist podcast blackouts were a huge driver of the decision of those that could afford it to go for solar and batteries. Now the utilities are in a death spiral. Customers disconnect, prices rise, more incentive to go for solar and storage as prices continue to fall while price of unreliable grid energy rises. Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable. [1] https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom

ghiculescu 11mo ago
In other words poor people are being forced to subsidize luxury beliefs.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- calvinmorrison 11mo ago
  Pakistan has the highest per capita slavery except for communist countries with forced labor regimes, in the world. Their country is built on the backs of slavery.
  - shelled 11mo ago
    As someone from India — who has written this kind of comment against India and Pakistan in forums, with poor reception, and later realised it was rightly so — some more detail and nuance, possibly with some easily readable sources, would help a great deal - mostly for the people who want a picture of that because slavery is a very evocative term.
    - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
      thats ok. india thast the highest population of slaves worldwide, not on a per capita basis.
- 11mo ago