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Peru To Provide Free Solar Power To Its Poorest Citizens
An anonymous reader writes "Peru is looking to provide free electricity to over 2 million of its poorest citizens by harvesting energy from the sun. Energy and Mining Minister Jorge Merino said that the National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program will provide electricity to poor households through the installation of photovoltaic panels."
I know.. SOCIALISM!!!!
Two million times say $50 per panel is not crazy money.
a $50 panel can power LED lights for hours.
a $50 panel can power cell phones or mountain top to mountain top mesh networks.
Mountain top mesh networks can look like those old triangulation meshes that worked their way up canyons. Line of site Pringle-can style WiFi can support networking fully as rich as the Telebit modem networks that bootstrapped the computer age. Dust off the old store and forward protocols like mail and "bob's your uncle".
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
There are infrastructure costs associated with most other methods.
I can go down to costco tomorrow and buy enough solar to power my house and as long as my wiring meets code I'm good. And it's the same damn codes that builders follow wiring any other residential crap.
/. article. Seriously, I'd like to see your patent. You'll be rich.
I've said this before and I'm sure I'll say it again: stop blaming the phantom 'bureaucracy' for all your woes. There's a bloody good reason we have regulations about how homes are wired. You know fire can spread, right?
Also, major citation needed on solar panels for pennies. Got the
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Problem: Poor people can't afford power.
Solution: Supply just about the most expensive form of power available... for free.
Problem: The infrastructure build-out needed to produce cheap coal-fired electricity is never going to be justified by poor people as customers,and we can't afford it as a social or populist program.
Solution: As with so many things, the marginal value of going from 'nothing' to 'something' is a whole hell of a lot higher than the marginal value of going from 'something' to 'lots of something', so we can gain many of the benefits at a fraction of the cost by choosing a system that costs a lot per kilowatt-hour; but comparatively little in capital costs, and fuck-all in ongoing maintenance.
I realize that all the best insights fit on bumper stickers; but it is occasionally possible that ideas occupying several whole sentences are actually just elitist plots against honest common sense, rather than elitist communist plots against honest common sense and economic logic.
It's pretty mind blowing.
OP is just pissed that without the government spending trillions of dollars on the infrastructure, private businesses aren't going to be able to come in and take over after the hard work is done and make easy profit.
First, this is aimed at the poorest people who still use oil for lighting, according to the article.
In no way is it documented they are on the grid and I'd suspect they aren't. If I had to guess, this is going to be a solar-charged battery system primarily for providing light. To keep the cost down, there won't be any fancy equipment for returning excess power to the grid.
This is entirely different than what's needed in the US. We want our power subsidized by solar, not strictly provided by it. That's more expensive and more complicated.
Cheapness isn't really the point here. It's lack of a power grid, and the prohibitive cost, effort, and impact of building one up. (Ok, so cheapness is part of it.) The thing about solar is that it's not dependent on an existing power grid. This means it can be used anywhere there's a reasonable amount of sunlight and the power requirements aren't too massive. Caveat: It's not just the solar panels, there needs to be a way to store energy also, which usually means batteries, which have their own lifecycle issues.
Seriously, if they could put aside their differences, the greens and the preppers would realize they want the same thing for different reasons -- the greens because it's, well, green, and the preppers because it reduces or even eliminates reliance on the grid. It's all about marketing.
For instance, I'm not sure I buy into solar being all that green, when you take in the entire end-to-end environmental footprint including manufacturing and disposal at EOL. Nevertheless, I have solar panels and battery banks at my home, because they still work (at least until EOL) when the power shuts down, and that's valuable to me. At some point I would like to have enough panels to be completely off the grid, and the nice thing about solar is that you can do it in small increments, whereas power grids and centralized power generation needs to be done in much larger chunks, with MUCH larger start-up costs.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
About 1,300,0000 of them to do an installation for an average home. The national debt is pennies too...
OP is just pissed that without the government spending trillions of dollars on the infrastructure, private businesses aren't going to be able to come in and take over after the hard work is done and make easy profit.
Didn't that strategy experience 100% Great Success with the Latin American water systems?
Is this the end shitty cell phone batteries?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
solar energy installation is incredibly cheap.... like pennies. the only reason why every houshold in the US doesnt have solar panels is because the energy companies lobby our government to increase the cost of them thousandfold...
Methinks there is another angle to this matter - China Phobia.
China can produce PV panels cheapest than anybody in the world, and if USA is indeed serious into cheap electricity, the most rational action to take is to get as many solar panel as the Chinese can produce and install them in the U.S. of A.
But is that happening ?
Why not?
Instead of making US strong again by taming the power crisis, congress is more concern of "unfair dumping" or whatever fucking excuse they can come up with, and ban the import of the solar panel from China.
They claim that China has unfairly subsidize their PV industry, and I mean, so what ?
If the Chinese are going to subsidize $100 per solar panel that we buy, let us by 1 billion solar panels and the Chinese will end up having to subsidize $100 billion on the sale.
That's basic math.
If they are going to subsidize something that we can use for our OWN benefits, let us buy as many as we could possibly use, and in the meantime, bankrupt those motherfuckers who are doing all the subsidizing.
Simple reasoning like this our congress also cannot comprehend.
Please tell me, what's the fucking use to have a congress that can not think properly ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
same goes for Georgia, we tried in southern Georgia to get solar panels but city ordinance, zoning commission inspection fees and licensing, state red tape and you have to notify the grid and since the city controls utilities here, we dont have a normal power company our power bill is issued by the city on the bill has power, water, cable, garbage all on one bill. They wont allow them to be fed back into their grid here.
You may want to read this ...
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/07/15/peru-solar-power-program-to-give-electricity-to-2-million-of-poorest-peruvians/
Meanwhile, in the United States, Americans for Prosperity - a political lobbying group founded by billionaire fossil fuel industrialists Charles and David Koch - is currently lobbying the Georgia state legislature to reject a plan requiring Georgia Power, one of the largest energy utilities in the American Southeast, to buy more solar energy.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In Germany, peak production of electricity by solar has hit 50% at times.
This is an issue with people who tout solar as the solution to our power needs. The fact that at some point 50% of the electricity was produces by solar is great. The more important point is how much can be relied upon to be there when needed? Sure, on a sunny summer day one gets lots of solar power. One gets a lot less than that when in the middle of storm. There is no way to turn up solar when one needs it. That's where conventional plants come in. These plants do not turn on instantly and need to be kept in standby mode. So while the solar panels are supplying the energy there are conventional plants still spewing greenhouse gasses just in case they are needed.
The output of solar power needs to be looked at at it's lowest day because conventional power needs to make up the difference.
I have seen the benefits of solar power in rural, tribal communities of Kerala, South India. These communities are living in the edge of forests - sometimes deep inside forests - where conventional power distribution via any type of cable/wire is impractical and prohibitively expensive.
The government has provided a solar panel to power basic needs - lights, fans, radio and a small TV. This is the way solar power has to be harnessed at least till the efficiency of panels goes up and costs go down for this to be widely useful.
Tat Tvam Asi
I realize that the public in the US is sort of zoned out, brain dead or zombie like. But really we just can not keep pretending that other nations are backwards or poorly governed when they so frequently do things that the US can not. If any claims about American superiority are true we should be more than able to do things like provide solar power for the poor, medical care, and countless other items such as decent educations for poor students.
We are appearing clown like to the world.
If those leaders are generous enough to open their funds to those poorest people who need the basics and can't afford them, then maybe this is what the world needs to do to have generosity that it not in this world. Peru could prove to be the stepping block for this trend. I would like to see this trend pick up, even though in the most of agreeable terms other countries in a similar situation could but would not.