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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."
No, the USA lacks solar panels because everybody is already on the grid.
Peru is using photovoltaics to provide small amounts of electricity without the infrastructure cost, which makes perfect sense.
PVs are still a very expensive way to generate large amounts of power. Only a wealthy country like Germany can afford to waste obscene amounts of money that way, where the benefits are mostly political.
That said, there is no sane reason why countries like the US and Australia should not be use far more solar-powered water heaters, and build homes for passive solar heating. Huge amounts of fossil fuels are being wasted that way.
Especially since this keeps them dependent on their *own* energy sources, I'd say it is a pretty great idea.
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Two million times say $50 per panel is not crazy money.
TFA says "about 12,500 solar (photovoltaic) systems to provide for approximately 500,000 households at an overall cost of about $200 million."
So $16,000 per village system. They are not simply putting one small panel and a motocycle battery on each house.
The photos in the inhabit.com article are very misleading. Shoddy work, taking somebody else's article, and adding your own vaguely related stock photos.
from the first page of google : http://inhabitat.com/nyc/new-york-citys-bureaucracy-slowing-down-construction-of-residential-solar-panels/ http://www.thestate.com/2012/10/14/2480345/why-solar-power-rarely-shines.html http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/solar-at-home/2009/06/04/what-you-really-need-to-install-solar-a-cpa/
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. So far they refuse to allow it, but you can set them up and run them side by side so use the solar power for some things but it can't connect back to the grid in any form or fashion, therefore it doesn't really negate anything. Since city can just raise rates if you ever do get the ability to get them installed.
they raise rates on houses individually here, based on how many people live in the home and ages, etc.
its a racket
It would be especially awesome if you could also pump the extra energy "into the grid" so to speak during the day. That can even make it profitable. I heard they have some program like that in Germany. Too lazy to google to verify.
That's exactly how it works here in the US! It's called "net metering". The power company doesn't have to do anything special to enable it. Even my 15 year old mechanical meter simply started spinning backwards when I turned the PV array on, though it's since been switched to a smart meter that tracks incoming and outgoing power separately.
My PV array often generates more than I can use. That goes into the grid (my neighbors end up using it). If at the end of the month, I've generated more KwH than I've used, my power company, Southern California Edison pays me 22c per kwh. SCE's Net metering customers typically get switched to annual billing. So, I get 1 electricity bill per year. California recently passed a law that the power company has to give you a check if you generate more power than you use in that year. Prior to that passing, you would "lose" any excess generation at the end of your 12 month billing cycle.
I've had my system for a couple years now. I "make" money in the spring and fall, and use up the credit in the summer and winter. It's a no-brainer if you live in an area with high electric rates.
"Spinning reserve" is required whether you have zero renewable energy or 50% renewable energy. Those conventional plants that are in standby mode are required anyway, and adding renewables doesn't mean more are needed in standby mode. Additionally, modern gas stations can come online extremely quickly - basically, a modern gas station is the core of a Rolls Royce Trent jet engine, and it can throttle up in a power station just as rapidly as it can on a plane on its takeoff roll (in seconds. Of course the power turbine might take a bit longer, but it's measured in at most a few minutes).
In fact, from the point of view of the UK national grid, nuclear or coal power is seen as intermittent and wind power is seen as reliable. The reason is that Sizewell B (a very large nuclear power plant) can suddenly go offline without any warning at all, and suddenly the grid is short of 420MW. However, over a period of an hour, wind and solar are considered extremely reliable. We can easily predict what the wind is going to do over the next hour or so, it won't suddenly start or stop unforecast over a gigantic area. Also wind and solar plants are widely distributed and small. If a wind turbine suddenly goes offline you lose maybe 1MW out of 2GW of power production. So you actually need less spinning reserve for renewables than you do for a large nuclear or coal station because you don't risk suddenly losing all 420MW in an instant like you do with a large power station. Similarly, with solar, you can easily see where the storms are so you can easily predict how the generation is going to change over the next hour.
There isn't just spinning reserve either, high power users like electric furnaces have frequency cutoffs in them. On the UK national grid, when generating capacity is falling behind load, the frequency falls (and conversely, when the load is lighter than capacity, the frequency rises. IIRC they try to keep the frequency between something like 49.9Hz and 50.1Hz). Some industrial users who have equipment that takes days to get up to temperature aren't affected by having the power cut off for a half hour to this piece of equipment, so their contract with National Grid includes a piece of equipment that cuts the power to the equipment if the frequency falls below a certain threshold. This can be used for brief periods of load shedding.
So in summary, no, this is not an issue with solar and wind. The spinning reserve is required anyway, and from the point of view of the grid and the timescales for spinning reserve, wind and solar is actually seen as more reliable than a large coal or nuclear power station because of its distributed nature and the predictability of wind and solar over the short term.
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