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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."
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.
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.
Peru is using photovoltaics to provide small amounts of electricity without the infrastructure cost, which makes perfect sense.
That is EXACTLY why I consider this is an AWESOME idea. I have visited some of those locations, and the geography around them is extremely harsh. Many of these families live above 2500m altitude (some even above 3500m - 4000m), get their water from rivers, wells or old aqueducts (some of them made during the Inka's empire), and live mainly from farming and livestock. Giving them electricity from PV so they can use basic things, like led lights and small radios, will improve their quality of life A LOT. Bringing them electricity from the regular grid would be cost-prohibitive.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
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/
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.
AC wrote:
"PV is a hippie pipe dream. ...and taking money from person A to buy votes from person B is bullshit.
ehhhh... energy companies or so evil... never mind that many municipalities own their own power generation infrastructure.
please show us a PV cell factory that itself runs entirely off the grid."
This is a troll. OK. But so too does it present a position and value set that's common among Libertarians, so someone ought to respond. Because underneath the derision is a point worth debating. And that's, can a governmental body invest in infrastructure to the benefit of a common good? Peru (and many other nations) are buying PV infrastructure because they believe it the best option to electrify outlying areas. Those of the Libertarian persuasion view this as wasted money, for reasons that the AC listed above in quotes.
In Germany, peak production of electricity by solar has hit 50% at times. This is causing the unintended consequence that the centralized power plant model is failing, because peak hours of consumption coincide with peak production by solar. That is, at the very time when central power plants have long expected to extract the highest price per kilowatt - during business hours in daylight - is also the time when privately installed PV offsets those costs. Thus disrupting an old centralized energy production and distribution model.
The same has happened in Australia. (I'm currently living in Australia for a short time, so I see this first hand). Last year, government subsidies for solar PV and hot water installation were scrapped early, because too many people took advantage of the opportunity, thus - just like in Germany - affecting income and profit projections across the power industry. Just like in the United States, industry players lobbied to remove the subsidies and won.
Yet this hasn't stopped solar installation. People still rush to buy. It's a long-term price lock-in, because even in the U.S. PV is already close to grid parityopportunity for those of the Libertarian persuasion?
Next, government subsidies given to central utility producers. There are massive costs involved in grid infrastructure that have to be amortized across its life, plus profit. This is then shifted out to customers, either through utility rates or by taxation if it's government run. As the AC notes, "many municipalities own their own power generation infrastructure." Doesn't that mean they're "taking money from person A to buy votes from person B"? That is, you can't have the argument both ways. If solar subsidies violate gains from a free market, then so does central power production and grid distribution.
Which is a red herring. Actually, the entire society benefits from grid infrastructure. The only question here is whether private interests can sustain investment to transition to new generation technologies like PV, or whether government subsidies are necessary to sustain this path. PV is already shown to be price competitive. If market forces work as Libertarians claim, then because prices are at parity and continuing to drop, grid upgrades and maintenance to support this new technology will occur whether they like it or not. And if the Libertarian 'free market' model fails, we'll know that by how well central producers throttle deployment of PV technology.
Finally, another red herring: Why must PV factories use self-produced electricity to manufacture PV cells and panels? Should aluminum factories be required to use aluminum in their production process?
This exists in Australia, and it is very common indeed to see PVs on house roofs (in Melbourne at least). Originally, there was a feed-in subsidy so you got paid very handsomely for the energy you fed into the grid (~3x the price of purchasing electricity from the grid).
Having rooftop PV is not a bad idea, but without subsidies it never pays for itself at current electricity rates. It may well in future, though, with emissions trading schemes etc. The problem is that feed-in subsidies are a very inefficient way to reduce pollution production. Spending the same money on developing offshore wind etc gets a much better bang for buck.
One advantage of high feed-in solar rates is that you can supply local houses and so reduce peak load on the grid (because supply doesn't need to be drawn in from distant locations). However, it is not clear to me whether the decreased peak load on transmission leads to enough of a decrease in cost of building distribution capacity that it offsets the money put into the feed-in subsidy. I doubt it.
That isn't to say that rooftop PV is a bad idea: just that subsidising it is not a good way for government to spend their clean-energy money.
This case, of course, is totally different.
It's sad, but that is the prevailing mentality in the USA right wing these days. Helping other people and generally being a decent human being is decried as "OMG SOCIALISM!!!!!11" and is looked down upon because such actions just help a bunch of "lazy moochers". How are the poor supposed to haul themselves up by their bootstraps when they can't even afford shoes? Of course, those poor people have no one but themselves to blame because they weren't born into rich families, right? The rich people who act like that are fucking hypocrites because they often get corporate subsidies and tax breaks the rest of us peons can't exploit--and then they act like they fucking worked for it!
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Peru has huge areas where it is impractical or just plain impossible to run electrical lines (wander around the Andes in Google Earth and you'll quickly see why). We have a house in Paruro, near Cusco. Step out the door, turn right, and by the time you've gone a horizontal mile you've climbed most of a thousand feet. Walk as far as Pukapuka (2 1/2 hours, vertical rise of 2500 feet) and you'll see why rural settlements are called "communidades" (communities) rather than "pueblitos" (villages). The 150 or so residents are spread out through the valley, with almost none of the houses closer than several hundred feet away. This area is not atypical in any way, except that Paruro is close enough to Cusco that they've had electricity for 30 years. Cusibamba Baja, down the valley, has only had electricity for 10 years, Cusibamba Alta, across the Apurimac River, still doesn't.
Wind power would seem like a good solution, except that wind generators need maintenance and get demolished by the "vientarrones" (big winds that come out of nowhere) in August. I saw a vientarron rip a chunk of corrugated metal roofing off a house, toss it several hundred feet in the air, and drop it a mile or more away from where it started. Water power isn't viable either, since in most of the altiplano not a drop of rain falls from June though August.
That leaves solar power. We're not talking about large power draws, just a few LED or florescent lamps, a radio, possibly a very small TV, a D-cell battery charger, maybe an OLPC. No refrigerator, , washing machine, blender, electric stove, water heater, or furnace, just a few things that seem like luxuries to them.
There are already a few houses with solar panels scattered around, mostly homes of folks like Marco, who has a guinea pig ranch and sold half a dozen of them to buy the panel since it gives him the extra light to tend them later in the day, after he gets home from the fields. There are enough of them that the government knows that this small investment will make a large difference in the life of two million families.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
PV is a hippie pipe dream.
Uh huh. Germany, on a good day, can get 50% of its power from PV right now. That's like the entire state of California, or the entire state of Texas with enough left over to power all of Montana, Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Dakota, combined.
Installed and operating, today.
It's reality, not a pipe dream.
solar rooftop installations will be stolen
These are for households in rural areas, not Lima. Peru may as well be two totally separate countries, Lima and Everywhere Else. The further you get from Lima the nicer it is.
people will view a thousand dollars worth of stuff on their roof
These are a single small panel, probably worth about $50, and a basic battery, designed to run a few lamps, a radio, charge some batteries, and the like. These people aren't going to be running a central heating plant, refrigerator, hot water heater, etc. We have a house in Paruro, near Cusco. A thousand dollars worth of panels would provide electricity for several square blocks in Paruro, which has been on the electrical grid three decades. In a truly rural community like Misqabamba or Pukapuka a single solar panel would probably serve a couple or three houses.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin