Slashdot Mirror
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.
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/
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?
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