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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.
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.
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.
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 !
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.
"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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows