I would encourage people to go look at satellite view of random "rich" neighbourhoods in Pakistan, and note how many solar panels there are on rooftops. Here is the first one I scrolled to in Lahore [1], and one in Karachi [2]
Pakistan's grid prices tripled or more since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, because the extremely mismanaged and poorly designed electricity system+economy could not handle the energy price shock. This spiraled into rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
According to this interview [1] and a recent Economist podcast blackouts were a huge driver of the decision of those that could afford it to go for solar and batteries. Now the utilities are in a death spiral. Customers disconnect, prices rise, more incentive to go for solar and storage as prices continue to fall while price of unreliable grid energy rises.
Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable.
This is a problem that started because the IMF forced Pakistan to get rid of energy subsidies after Pakistan over invested in tradition fossil fuel burning power infrastructure.
This meant that Pakistan started charging such high unsubsidized prices that it was cheaper for those with money to buy cheap solar panels and batteries. This drop in demand exacerbated the oversupply issue and meant that the unsubsidized price had to go even higher creating a feedback cycle.
You are very defintly confused here,;) or there, in Pakistan where some of the rulling class will brag about never getting utility bills, but the reality is that every built thing, down to the roads is there for them, but at root the main concepts of fuedal societies are intact, and going solar, fits in quite well, as it can be set up as distributed systems that will literaly conect into a larger grid, based on alliegences.
The adoption of electric cars and especialy trucks/tractors/farm/industrial will follow quickly and allow fossil fuels to be reserved for strategic use.
The real kicker will be batteries that have decadal life spans allowing for predictable,
"one time" infrastructure investments that can the become self supporting through use "fees"
Pakistan has the highest per capita slavery except for communist countries with forced labor regimes, in the world. Their country is built on the backs of slavery.
As someone from India — who has written this kind of comment against India and Pakistan in forums, with poor reception, and later realised it was rightly so — some more detail and nuance, possibly with some easily readable sources, would help a great deal - mostly for the people who want a picture of that because slavery is a very evocative term.
It appears that the recycled street numbers each appear on different blocks.
Street 6, for instance: I've found it twice so far.
But they're still distinct, in that one Street 6 is within Block M 3 B, and another is within Block M 7.
Which appears to suggest that blocks are more important at identifying an address than a street name is, and if that's the case then that works just fine.
And indeed, a distinct address appears to be something like this: Plot 15, Block M 7 Lake City, Lahore, Pakistan. Plug that into Google Maps and you'll see what I'm seeing (and note that the string doesn't include a street name at all).
It does seem weird to my wee little Ohio-trained brain to identify a building by what block it is on more than the street it is facing, but then: Canadian post codes and Hungarian addresses also look weird to me, and also work fine in the places where they're used.
That's correct. In Pakistan, typically cities are broken up into housing societies. Each society is broken up into sectors/blocks, which are typically indexed by the alphabet(A, B, C, ...), but occasionally, one will see block M7 or sector B2 etc. In each such sector, each house has a unique numbered address.
Some larger societies are first broken up into "phases" and then into sectors/blocks.
Street numbers are typically not required in an address, but are often provided as helpful guidance.
Not a great system, but still better than Calgary's system (where I studied), which might be the worst system I have ever seen. You can't navigate at all without a map.
In Calgary, the streets are numbered and it's super easy to navigate between "16th St NW" and "18th St NW". Certainly easier to understand than "Go from St. Catherine's Street to Peel" in Montreal.
Where they are not numbered, they at least have the name of the community. Edgemont, for example, has no numbered streets but the name usually starts with "Edge", making it clear what part of the city you are going to.
I don't think it is perfect but I have also lived in Tokyo where the system is literally impossible without a GPS because the locations are not as neatly arranged as here.
> I don't think it is perfect but I have also lived in Tokyo where the system is literally impossible without a GPS because the locations are not as neatly arranged as here.
Even GPS and being a native speaker of Japanese isn't enough to successfully navigate somewhere in Japan sometimes often enough that it's super common for businesses to include detailed access instructions on how to get to their business.
The amount of times I've seen my wife not even be able to read a place name here makes me wonder why they don't just do something slightly more sensible. A recent funny one was when city hall sent her some mail advertising some seminar and she couldn't read the name of the train station on the pamphlet, so she called city hall and enquired about it and the person she talked to couldn't read it either.
A society is a business entity. They have some control over all houses in an area. Most societies are large. Hundreds or thousands of houses/buildings.
The administration of the society is usually done by the original developers. They decide how big the plots of land are, decide the rules houses must follow in their design. The houses themselves are built by the owners of the plots.
They society collects monthly fees typically. It is usually responsible for trash pickup. Richer societies will arrange water supply and even backup electricity plants. Larger societies create commercial areas and parks within their bounds as well.
They are not always gated as the parent states. Only the ones rich enough to hire security.
You have an inbuilt assumption about the purpose of a street name. Compare it with addresses in Japan [1], where some streets don't even have names. I don't know anything about Pakistan, but i wouldn't be surprised if the street name is solely to differentiate within some small geographic area. Looking at street view[2] from a nearby real estate development supports this
This was a bit painful for me when I first moved to Tokyo, since the building I was supposed to move into was newly build, and not on Google Maps yet. I had to ask a very nice old lady where １９番１５号 was supposed to be, and it took 20 minutes of us searching to find the place.
First thing I did upon finding it was to add it to the map lol
Price of Chinese PV panels and inverters and batteries have dropped so much and there has been financing schemes available where you get the installation for free and pay per usage cheaper than what the utility company charges and it is more realiable.
I'm guessing: fewer people buying from the power companies/grid => the fixed costs of these companies are pushed onto the poorer customers, who already couldn't afford much.
But there is a bit more. Almost all power plants in Pakistan are built with state-backed dollar-denominated loans (reason govt incompetence+corruption). This means if grid demand goes down, power plants don't go out of business like they would in a market based system. Instead, they keep collecting dollar-denominated interest paid by the state, even if they produce zero power.
The state mitigates this by increasing electricity prices (in rupees). I have forgotten how this helps.
The reason power plants in Pakistan probably require this kind of financing is because Pakistan doesn't have the industrial capability to make the equipment that you need to build a power plant, so, dollars are a requirement.
Power companies in Pakistan also don't have easy access to international money markets, and thus, it makes sense for the government to back those strong currency loans as a subsidy on infrastructure.
This is not exclusive to Pakistan, this is the routine of infrastructure financing on developing countries. J.P. Morgan is not really eager to lend money for PakiPower Incorporated, but it is willing to lend to the government.
It is unfortunate that the government of Pakistan and their investors (China and the IMF) made poor investment decisions. They should feel free to go back to debt holders to renegotiate the debt, or default on it and hand the stranded assets back to creditors. The death spiral is of their own making, and will only accelerate as solar PV and battery cost declines continue. Electricity consumers will simply go off the grid. Such is the risk of unsophisticated investors not understanding the market in which they invest. Capital being at risk is an inherent component of investment.
My condolences and sympathy to the people of Pakistan caught in the mess. The global energy transition will be volatile.
Who owns the distressed fossil generation collateralized debt? China. Where is Pakistan importing cleantech from? China. There is some IMF debt in there as well, for accuracy.
> default on it and hand the stranded assets back to creditors
I doubt the debt is secured by the power assets. If anything, maybe China can assume ownership of the entire powerplant if Pakistan cannot pay. They have done that many times in Africa. See: "debt-trap diplomacy". Also, it is terrible advice to tell a country to default on external debt. See: Argentina!
Usually there are three parties in these agreements.
1. State of Pakistan
2. Someone with dollars (the investors)
3. Local businessman who are willing run the power plant.
The three parties come to an agreement on what the minimum returns should be on the investment. Say 10% annual. Then the investors give money to the businessman, who then import the power plant equipment and start operating it. The state-run electricity distribution companies buys from the power plant as needed and pays them the unit price set by the State of Pakistan. Part of this is converted into dollars at some pre-agreed rate and transferred to the investors.
In all this, if the total returns to the investor are above 10%, then all is good. However, if the grid demand has fallen, and the distribution company didn't buy a lot of units from the power plant, then the State of Pakistan has to step in and give the investors the difference to make up the 10% returns.
State capitalism like you described totally undermines the price system by replacing profit-and-loss–guided entrepreneurial calculation with political allocation of resources, thereby rendering economic calculation increasingly impossible and eroding the coordinating function of the market process.
Yes, but nobody has found a more effective way to build infrastructure in poor countries. State capitalism as described is how infrastructure development happened in Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.
Catlover76 asks in a [dead]ed comment, "And China, right?" It's a reasonable question. It's debatable whether the infrastructure of the parts of China I didn't mention was built by state capitalism or by a straightforwardly Communist system of production, so I only mentioned the more clear-cut cases.
The fact that infrastructure was built under state capitalism does not demonstrate the superiority of central planning, only that capital accumulation occurred despite intervention, often financed by prior scarcity, foreign savings, or coerced transfers; absent market prices and entrepreneurial profit-and-loss, the state cannot know whether the infrastructure created was the most value-productive use of scarce resources, only that concrete and steel were poured.
I think it demonstrates the increased variance of central planning. The Congo Free State was also centrally planned, and so was the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian Genocide, Suharto's mass murder of suspected PKI sympathizers, etc. But the expected outcome for poor countries is that they stay poor and don't develop into industrialized export giants the way my laundry list of countries did.
Higher variance isn’t a redeeming feature when the mechanism that generates it lacks rational calculation in the first place. Central direction can occasionally coincide with growth in poor countries because initial scarcity leaves many wasteful paths that still raise output, but that doesn’t establish a positive expected value
I’m not arguing that centralized or state-capitalist systems “never work” in the sense that nothing gets built, or that output can’t rise. Clearly roads, ports, power plants, and factories were constructed in many of the cases you listed.
The narrower point I’m making is about economic rationality. Without market prices for capital goods generated through profit-and-loss entrepreneurship, there is no way to know whether those projects were the best use of scarce resources, or merely a use that happened to raise output from a very low baseline.
In very poor countries, almost any large capital investment will increase measured output because there are so many unmet needs. That means growth can occur even under badly misallocated investment. The fact that development happened does not tell us whether it happened efficiently, or whether alternative decentralized uses of those same resources would have generated more value.
That’s also why I don’t find higher variance persuasive as a defense. Occasional success doesn’t validate a mechanism that lacks systematic feedback. Without prices and profits, planners can’t distinguish luck from competence, or learning from error. Things such as malinvestment and moral hazard result. You only know concrete and steel were poured, not whether society is richer than it otherwise would have been.
So my claim isn’t state capitalism always fails, nor is it a moral argument about atrocities. It’s that infrastructure success alone doesn’t answer the calculation problem. Growth from scarcity is compatible with irrational allocation, and therefore doesn’t establish a positive expected value for centralized direction as a general development strategy.
They surely were not the best use of scarce resources. However, I don't know if you've ever tried to run a business in a poor country. It turns out that the decentralized economic systems they have are also not economically rational, systematically failing to provide functioning market mechanisms that support long-term investments such as highway systems, reliable electric grids, municipal water treatment, etc., even when those things would be highly efficient uses of scarce resources. Rather, generally speaking, they systematically squander their resources in order to stabilize the existing socioeconomic power structures.
Generally speaking, if you invest your money in a historically kleptocratic country, you can expect your investment to get confiscated if it's profitable, and possibly even if it's not, which is what happened to my retirement savings. Even if you make your investment at a time when the country is governed by non-kleptocrats, you will probably lose it after the next coup or election in which new kleptocrats come to power.
In that environment, where private investment in long-term infrastructure projects is irrational and languishing in poverty for many generations is the normal state of affairs, state capitalism frequently works.
I don't think moral arguments about atrocities are somehow orthogonal here. Power plants and electrical grids are often worthwhile investments, not because building monuments to Westinghouse is a pious sacrifice that pleases the electrical gods, but because they promote human welfare by providing material abundance. That's how we measure whether society is richer, not, as you say, by the amount of concrete poured. If human welfare is your yardstick, the possibility of economic catastrophes like the Holodomor greatly diminishing human welfare must necessarily weigh on the negative side of the balance. The inhabitants of Auschwitz and the Congo Free State were not enjoying even the material abundance they had enjoyed previously.
So we know that central planning carries risks to human welfare that decentralized systems do not. However, it also has opportunities to promote human welfare that decentralized systems do not. The variance is larger. I don't think we know enough to measure the expectation.
Sure, running a business in kleptocratic hellholes is a nightmare. Confiscation risks kill private investment, especially for big infrastructure that needs stable property rights and enforceable contracts to make sense.
But that's not a bug of decentralized markets; it's the poison of political interference and weak institutions, which state capitalism only doubles down on by swapping entrepreneurial discovery for bureaucratic fiat, still without solving the calculation problem or providing systematic feedback beyond "stuff got built."
Look at Hong Kong in your list: it boomed precisely because of its hands-off, free-market approach with top-tier economic freedom rankings, unlike more interventionist tigers that rode credit-fueled waves but crashed in '97 or stagnated like Japan post-bubble.
Atrocities are the dark side of concentrated power touted as enabling opportunities, jacking up variance with no way to gauge if human welfare gains beat the unseen costs of foregone innovations.
Without prices and profits guiding resources, we're left guessing expectations, but history shows freer systems deliver sustainable abundance when institutions let them, not coerced escapes that often loop back to poverty or worse.
I heard that they are trying to restructure the billing in this way for next fiscal year (July 2026- ), but its really difficult to find a non-regressive scheme. Electricity per-unit prices in Pakistan are set by the government, they vary depending on how much you consume [1], and they play a pretty significant role in government popularity.
[1] There is a price for the first 50 units you consume, then a higher price for the next 150 units, etc. Similar system to income taxes.
Grids in Germany if you're not a "typical household/office" with therefore atypical grid usage bill for peak power and energy separately; the billing related peak power is measured by averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the worst one of a year.
Alternatively it's also practical for such solar situations to bill for market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately; this doesn't correctly attribute transformer and other transmission equipment expenses between solar houses and non-solar houses, but it's still handling the grid tie solar load on the grid's power plants during periods of very little sun.
> averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the worst one of a year.
What an interesting metric. Wouldn't even a very cheap and small battery (definitely small enough to keep inside an appartment) provide enough smoothing to, like, halve this peak number? You could rig it to not even output energy until you are beyond the current year's peak usage... How much money would you save this way?
I just feel this number is so prone to small mistakes (grandma plugs in the wrong things at the wrong times) and hacks (like the above) that the relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate.
> market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately
I am currently on a plan with 5 minute market rates, can buy and sell in (sell prices can go negative - as can buy, actually), all automated. At least I feel we am working with the grid, not against it, and we make a small net profit (before depreciation).
> relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate.
It's still much closer to the real costs for the grid operator than $/kWh. The fundamental problem that rooftop solar has revealed is that people think they are paying for the electricity, but they are not. Electricity is dirt cheap. Most of what they are paying for is the maintenance of the grid, and simple usage based billing crushes the system because of freeloader problem once rooftop solar is added.
Long term, the likely thing you pay for will be the size of the main fuse that connects you to the grid. Because that's the thing that scales with the costs you impose on the operator.
Actually the local cost is not the fuse size, but how much smaller the first transformer after you could be if you weren't there.
Though it's often more fair to determine such for each user; then take those as a relative scale, then split the transformer's actual TCO by the determined share sizes between the users. Because the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size, which is lower as they won't use it peak at the same time.
> the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size
Of course, how does the electricity company determine which user was first in this situation. A tariff that depends on the order of connection may not be practical for domestic situations, although it may be OK for very large users, e.g. factories, data-centres.
Using fuse size seems a more reasonable and fair proxy for cost, assuming the same load patterns as the rest of the users. Then again, consumers with EVs might argue that their load pattern is different to the average user (e.g. filling up with off-peak electricity). Also consumers with air conditioning might argue for special treatment given their usage correlates with solar output (except where it does not).
You don't; you let the second one pay more than what the marginal cost was, in order to make the first one not pay so disproportionally.
That only has to happen once there is a second one, though.
Punishing a mere "large enough to not worry about popping it" fuse by billing shared infrastructure based on it (not just billing the stub line from the main in the street to the fuse/meter box in one's home in relation to what wire gauge is needed based on the fuse choosen) is pretty stifling.
If e.g. your furnace fails in the middle of the winter and the repair guy tells you it needs replacing, you might want to get some space heaters and run them for a few days until your actually-wanted new furnace/heatpump/whatever can get delivered, instead of having to get installed whatever the HVAC guy has in the local storage, because if you wait more than on the order of 12 hours, you'll start to get frost damage from pipes and such.
Having to be beholden to an electricity company having time to upgrade your fuses on such short notice so that you can plug in the space heaters without blowing them might be a problem.
But paying say 300 bucks extra because you did that for like 3 days or so would easily be cheaper than the cost of temporarily installing an available loan furnace and then having to remove it again to make way for the actually-wanted one.
They do though bill you if you make them dig the street up to say pull a medium voltage line into your factory that previously just got low voltage from a shared street transformer, but now that you've plans to use a lot more, you'd need the higher feed. Then they bill you and if within like 10 years or so someone else orders service that can piggyback on what capex you paid for, then you'd get a proportional refund from them having to pay off part of your share.
But that's not for just getting normal basic electric service to a normal residential building in a city, that's for building a new farmhouse on the other end of some field where there never was electricity, or for getting unusual service that wouldn't be in the street if you didn't request it.
Merely sizing the transformers/substations to handle the aggregate current of the users attached is not typically handled by the above mechanism, especially because it only covers initial buildout.
This is how it works in Japan for the newer rate plans for consumers now (replacing the previous method of charging you based on the size of your main breaker), but checked in 30 minute increments rather than 15.
The steps are pretty coarse - on my rate plan there are just 3 steps: 0-10 kW, 11-15 kW, 15 kW+. You're not going to surpass peak 10 kW in an apartment anyway.
It's legacy tactics; against the hacking the comparable thing for internet connections has historically been iirc 5 minute chunks and then taking the 95th percentile (like, charging not the highest, but the one 5% away from the highest). Not sure about the 5 min aggregation tbh.
The 15 minute chunks are due to the German and much of the European grid market being in that chunk size.
I don't think it's necessarily impossible to get that billing model as a household; it's just not an interesting one to have as it's not competitive for the usage patterns of a household.
It's good until a Wednesday afternoon your home system dies and you have no electricity until Monday. I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case.
> I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case.
The grid becomes an insurance policy. In that case it is justified to ask for the insured party to pay their share of the system costs; both an energy fee and transmission/distribution/generation capacity fee.
I think most places the service is priced under the assumption that usage is enough to pay for the grid…
I’ve only ever rented though. Are connection fees something that homeworkers think about?
Possibly we will have to see changes to account for this sort of stuff at a more granular level, as the grid becomes more dynamic. But, that’s a future we should be actively looking to design for, as the energy supply mix is going to change whatever anybody thinks about that. Can’t beat energy falling from the sky, on price…
Is the €30 usage fee going directly to the producer of electricity, or is part of it a variable transmission fee that goes to the network operator?
My monthly electricity bill in Sweden, averaged over a year to 1600KWh/month, is approximately €90 production, €50 transmission fee, €25 fixed connection-size fee (25A, 400V), €70 national electricity tax and €50 VAT for a total of €285/month.
We'll be moved to yearly-peak-based transmission tariff in 2027 (European law), but for now I don't need to worry about plugging in the car to chargeon cold days or taking shower when someone is cooking.
Both, currently; notably it's mostly not what goes to your local grid, but rather mostly to the larger scale grid.
It's about a 60/40 to 70/30 split between production/"grid-usage-fee" ("Netznutzungsentgelt").
It basically pays off the grid stability provision bids for fast-response power, and the transmission itself.
It'd likely be helpful if the peak part could be regulated in a way that's more condusive to match the actual impact you create on transformer sizing, not the worst-case impact you might have.
Because there's a difference between a mostly-uncorrelated peak of shower+cooking vs. the car+cold day, because your neighbours don't shower the same time, but the several hours of charging do often overlap and the cold is the same across a neighbourhood that shares a local substation.
But yeah, for the most part, transformer size isn't that large of a contributor to overall electricity provision expenses, so I don't expect that to be a significant problem by that 2027 law.
its easily fixable, utility company can charge fee for fixed cost those who connected to the grid, and if all rich decided to disconnect, then they disconnect neighborhood eliminating fixed cost.
Previously, pretty much everyone (not just 'rich people', although, well, 'rich' is relative here, of course...) had diesel generators, which were not connected to the grid, since that would be seriously expensive, plus syncing would be pretty much impossible anyway.
With solar, you can feed back into the grid much more easily, to the point that this is the default. This sort-of doubles the load on the grid (not exactly, but you get the idea), since both 'consumption' and 'production' need to cross the same wires.
This is a problem even in, like, Germany, where the grid operator can send a "kill signal" to local solar inverters to shut down. In Pakistan, I can't even imagine...
The following isn't a grid problem (more of a demand issue), but maybe they're referring to this:
> But 45 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, putting solar panel systems well beyond their reach. The pool of customers for the national grid has gotten smaller and poorer, and the costs of financing old coal-powered plants have increasingly been passed on to those who can least afford it. [1]
Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather).
Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources.
Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro.
But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time.
Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs.
Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception.
AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.
This is all true except for the fact that storage is not incredibly expensive anymore, which invalidates every single conclusion you reach. Storage is now reasonably affordable, and the trend suggests it will soon be incredibly cheap.
The largest battery systems in operation are primarily designed for short-duration grid support rather than long-term, multi-day backup. They can even bridge a single windless night.
And this is talking about short term mismatch between supply and demand in a 24 hour cycle. If you consider the need to account for the yearly seasonal generation variation (which is far more dramatic as most of the developed world is situated on high latitudes) battery storage becomes even more problematic due to the absurd capital expenditures for a resource that you'd have to charge with a dramatic production supply during the summer months to slowly discharge during the winter.
People have been misled with the convenient lie of LCOE for too long, when what really matters are the true system costs. We don't even have in place the supply chain to sustain this, and I am not even talking about Lithium or Cobalt, I am talking about plain old Copper.
Then, there are the capital requirements for recycling and decommissioning, as the useful life of such systems is unfortunately not something to write home about.
Think about it. We have spent too much time and money on solar and wind, money that could have been spent on nuclear power. The clock is ticking, replacing our grid with solar may be the wet dream of big finance, but it is not a reasonable solution, it is about time we stop wasting our time with it.
I don't know why you're even talking about nuclear when that's not something an individual can do at their scale. It's not relevant to this conversation. But everything you've just said about it is wrong.
LCOE, when LCOE is calculated correctly, is absolutely the right measure and absolutely includes the true system cost including storage to bring it up to a similar level of availability and decommissioning (incidentally decommissioning is way higher cost for nuclear than batteries so it's weird that you try to cite it).
Even if we switch gears from talking about individual generation to grid scale generation nuclear done safely is simply too expensive. Solar and battery storage are cheaper than it in sunny places today, they were cheaper than it in sunny places a year ago, and their price is and has been consistently falling exponentially while nuclear's price stays about constant.
Those prices are including the absolutely massive subsidies that are given to nuclear, in every form from government investment in the technology to government absorbing the vast majority of the insurance cost by not requiring they are insured to anywhere close to even a small fraction of the full amount of damage they could cause in a worst case disaster.
The only fantasy here is that nuclear is somehow going to suddenly buck the trend of staying at about constant price and start falling in price even more exponentially than solar and batteries have been to catch up. Spending money on nuclear only serves to prolong the climate crisis by taking away money from actual scalable solutions like solar that can outcompete with fossil fuels on cost.
You don't build storage for yearly cycles, you build it for daily cycles (which is affordable today) and overbuild solar to account for seasonal variation in generation and demand. Note that even things like nuclear have to be overbuilt for seasonal variation in demand, and to account for the fact that there is maintenance and sometimes some of your plants are down.
I was obviously talking about grid scale, that's what matters.
I have solar Li-ion and hybrid inverters at my home, basically because I foresee more frequent blackouts in the future. Part of the cost of my system is generously paid by poorer consumers, because I still have net-metering in my country (talk about subsides).
Nuclear power is one of the most insanely regulated industries due to the misinformed work of science denier green militants and populist politics. Talking about subsides ignoring all the red tape nuclear is a common tactic behind the propaganda of big finance and big green corrupt interests.
LCOE is absolutely the right measure only in two cases:
1) You have a financial interest on selling intermittent power
or/and
2) You're hopeless ignorant about both the physics and the economics of a power grid.
> I was obviously talking about grid scale, that's what matters.
As demonstrated by the fine article, it is not the only scale that matters.
> Nuclear power is one of the most insanely regulated industries due to the misinformed work of science denier green militants and populist politics.
Nuclear power is a highly regulated industry for two very very good reasons
- It's incredible destructive power if you cut corners. See chernobyl and then realize that it was far from a worst case and every nuclear power plant has the capacity to do 1000x worse than that if enough corners are cut. No other form of energy, not even fossil fuels with global warming, comes close in terms of potential downside per kwh generated. And humans inevitably cut corners in the absence of a strong regulatory regime.
- It's incredible destructive power if weaponized, potentially resulting in species ending wars.
You're showing your own ignorance with regards to LCOE.
It’s not reasonably affordable by any real “middle class” metric and the impact a reliable grid has on the industrial and commercial base of an economy is being undervalued by an utterly laughable degree during these discussions. Westerners and rich folks take it for granted as a fact of life at this point.
The duck curve is a rounding error when discussing energy storage.
The storage needed to turn solar into a reliable (as any comparable fossil fuel power plant) dispatchable source of power, plus the cost of the solar in the first place, costs less than other sources of dispatch-able power (like gas) in sunny places per kwh.
It also scales down better (though not perfectly).
Either you can afford it (both storage and solar), or you can't afford power at all, or you don't live in a sunny place.
Ignoring sunk capital costs into other energy infrastructure of course. If you already have a working nuclear power plant you're not going to save money by randomly turning it off and switching to something else, for instance.
Well, I certainly can’t make a couple weeks of battery storage pencil out vs. a fossil fuel generator at this point.
The math actually gets worse once you get into combined cycle natural gas at scale.
You I suppose could make an argument that load curtailment is cheaper than planning for the current grid reliability everyone has gotten used to over the past 50 years, but it would be a societal shift.
Seasonal energy storage is what is interesting to discuss, and of course is where that last 2% of grid reliability comes from. It’s also the most expensive part of running a grid. The first watts are basically free, the last are very expensive.
I’d love to be proven wrong within the next decade though! I just personally don’t see the battery storage price going down at the same rates it has been simply due to structural raw material input cost reasons - short of a breakthrough in chemistry. I think we are getting close to the maximum savings achieved by economies of scale with current technology.
You shouldn't need a couple weeks of battery storage - if you're in a sunny place. For example Las Vegas should be able to reach 97% uptime of constant energy supply (greater than your typical fossil fuel plants uptime) by building ~17 hours worth of storage and ~6x the amount of power needed in the nameplate capacity of the solar panels. Even a slight bit of curtailment, the kind already done on western grids, to reduce load when the weather calls for a bunch of clouds, or uncorrelated energy production (e.g. wind, which won't necessarily go down on the odd cloudy day, or for on-grid cases just transmission lines to solar somewhere else, or a backup generator), pushes that much further to 100%.
Seasonal energy storage is uninteresting, you just overbuild the energy production instead. This is already done for every existing type of energy production to account for seasonal variation in demand.
If batteries became cheap enough where you could do days instead of hours affordably it pushes this sort of calculus into less sunny places as well, and there's every reason to think that they will become that cheap (perhaps not cheap enough to make weeks reasonable though).
> Seasonal energy storage is uninteresting, you just overbuild the energy production instead. This is already done for every existing type of energy production to account for seasonal variation in demand.
It’s the only thing that is interesting, considering you just hand-wove that last 3% of reliability away with vague “backup generators” and “transmission lines to other places”. Both immensely expensive items if they are idle 97% of the time.
I’m not interested in the least about having my grid availability at 97% - in a cherry picked location ideal for solar.
I’m totally fine overbuilding nameplate capacity for my solar field - already plan to by about 8x due to where I live. Panels are cheap! At least that problem seems more or less solved.
The issue is I have no realistic means to store that energy for even days much less weeks when the sun doesn’t shine. A small wind turbine can help a bit, but doesn’t get rid of the need for a backup generator.
The same holds true at grid scale currently - which is both a more important topic and more interesting to discuss than some rich tech bro being able to brute force his off-grid solar+battery install.
Someone needs to back that last 3% with something like a combined cycle natural gas plant. That amount of capital investment sitting idle is exceedingly expensive. The only thing you are saving much money on vs. running it all-out is fuel costs - you still need to staff it.
A national grid sounds pretty neat, but would both be crazy expensive and is so politically untenable that I don’t expect to see it seriously even discussed in my lifetime. Just a small amount of time spent in the rural areas of the country made me realize how utterly impossible it would be due to NIMBY.
Again, to me at least that last 3% is where everyone hand-waves and makes it someone else’s problem. At some point though you run out of other people’s power.
I do wish we had not destroyed our nuclear industry into irrelevance, as 50 more years of experience and hands-on construction knowledge pushing that tech forward might have had us in a far different place today!
And fwiw I do hope I’m wrong. Perhaps energy storage gets to the point we can keep a fully reliable inexpensive grid for the common folks and industry to rely upon. I’ve certainly been wrong before!
You understand that fossil fuel and nuclear plants are typically less reliable (have a lower availability factor) than that right? Every form of power generation has downtime, and needs balancing with other types or accepting that downtime. Solar tradeoffs low mechanical complexity for higher environmental dependence, but ends up with similar (in fact less) downtime here under unfavorable assumptions (100% of energy coming from a single point source of solar, constant energy load not your typical lower energy from consumption energy at night, no ability to shed load with price signalling or curtailment).
The last 3% is left alone because it's the fair comparison to other energy sources... tilted in the direction of favoring the other energy sources.
> It’s the only thing that is interesting, considering you just hand-wove that last 3% of reliability
The 3% issue doesn't come from seasonal variation, it comes from short term weather patterns where you might have a week of heavy cloud cover. Seasonal variation is trivially solved by simply increasing the multiplier on nameplate capacity (and the 6x for Los Vegas includes that increase). It's always going to be easier to generate an extra 25% energy than to store 25% of your energy produced in summer and use it in winter.
> “backup generators” and “transmission lines to other places”. Both immensely expensive items if they are idle 97% of the time.
On the contrary both things that exist anyways. Every place that cares about consistent power already has backup generators for when nonsense happens like power poles being blown over. Transmission lines exist to allow sale of excess production. It's only at tiny scales where these things aren't pre-existing and at those tiny scales overbuilding solar and batteries even more is so much cheaper than the alternatives (like building redundant gas plants disconnected from the grid, or even just redundant diesel generators) that they win by a mile.
An understated win of the storage model here is that these generators don't have to be able to supply the entire load, they just have to be turned on in advance when the weather forecast says there might be a problem to slow the drain on the batteries.
PS. I don't know what country you're from, but it seems a bit crazy to me that you apparently used to have a nuclear industry but apparently don't have a national grid... If you have actual weeks where the sun doesn't shine and no grid... you aren't in a sunny place... so you can still brute force it of course but done efficiently a lower percentage of solar makes sense.
Fossil Fuel and Nuclear Plants are extremely reliable, surpassed only for coal. You're doing a rhetorical sleight of hand by deliberately confusing scheduled downtime with reliability.
You keep on citing dubious numbers from the Big Green lobby, but the reality is. There's not a single place on this planet where after a certain threshold of penetration solar and wind haven't made supply less reliable, haven't caused economic sustainability issues to generators and haven't made power absurdly more expensive to customers.
Not to mention the frequently forgotten issues of toxic waste in production and decommissioning, the toxic fire hazard of giant battery banks and the pathetic short useful life of intermittent power infrastructure. Not to mention the environment impact of such big land gobblers, cynically overlooked by the same folks that decided to destroy nuclear with mountains of bureaucratic red tape deliberately created to suffocate it by ignorant green politicians.
Solar may have a bigger place, in countries with plenty of sun like Brasil, the Middle East or North Africa where residential and commercial consumption peaks with air conditioning usage during peak solar production, and with long days, but even then, absent some magical storage technology that doesn't exist yet, with limits.
Which will make the problems of the rich disappear and the problems of the poor and the state ... worse. (because the costs of the state are paying off loans for expensive generation, costs which they recover from the poor)
The state can default on the loans too. It sucks and it will make future financing more difficult. But it remains an option. No such thing as risk-free lending.
... which would cut off imports in a non-self-sufficient state (Pakistan is a country that if it ever were isolated internationally, the people would just start dieing). For the poor the situation is simple: either they pay the loans or they lose everything they have and probably even die of hunger.
A lot of muslim and African states are in that boat. If the US, yes, the international monetary system is under US control, frankly because nobody else will pay for it. If the US ever decides not to cover Pakistan's debts starvation is exactly what will happen in Pakistan.
All these problems become solved if you have realtime market pricing.
Nobody would bother to install rooftop solar if daytime power was super cheap on every sunny day, yet expensive at night when their solar isn't working.
Wouldn't this model price out poor people? Doesn't that mean the most vulnerable people cant afford the services when they need them most, ie max hot/cold?
Changing the utility to a market sort of defeats the point of trying to optimize the utility.
It’s better to give welfare / benefits directly to help poor people in that situation, rather than fix prices to make energy appear artificially scarce during daylight and abundant at night.
A typical user still pays the same on average in a market.
Just they might pay more in some hours and less in others.
Some market systems have gotten bad press over huge bills (eg. Texas), but that only happens when only a small chunk of users participate in the market, whilst others are on fixed pricing and therefore don't care about usage.
When everyone participates, supply and demand make sure the price never goes super high, simply because there are enough people who will turn off stuff to save money.
This exact issue lead me to follow the grid orchestration research out of the Oak Ridge Laboratory. The building blocks already exist to enable this. An interconnected smart network of renewables can become a stabilizing force in the overall grid. Off-peak storage would still be required, but would no longer need to be "stabilizing" (turbine or other similar generator), and can be simple batteries.
We switched to solar in 2021 expecting a 3.5-year payback. Electricity prices rose so fast that we recovered the investment in under two years.
Also the national grid is notorious for it's frequent blackouts (load-shedding) since the early ’90s. Solar allowed us to have uninterrupted supply in the mornings and longer backups during night.
We got roof top solar 1.5 years ago in Canada. Payoff will be 6-7 years, but we got an interest free loan to cover it.
So we’ll just pay what we would have for power for those years ~$1000 a year, then we’ll have free power for 20 more, saving something like $20,000 for $0 investment.
Payback - I never factored that in or even thought about that.
I was more concerned about having reliable power and reducing my electricity bill.
The daily 2-hour power cuts were getting out of hand, and I was running my business from my home office, so the tax incentives helped slightly.
The grid is more stable now as new power units became available but a big chunk of middle-class consumers using solar are using way less power now, so the local town councils are having problems balancing their books (town councils re-sells electricity from the national operator).
Excellent results, even if the source article is a bit government-optimistic-press-releasy. The less-good news is that, even with abundant solar, you still need a functional grid (even more so than in traditional top-down energy distribution schemes) in order for everyone to take advantage of it, but this is a problem that lots of rich nations are working through right now, so affordable off-the-shelf solutions are bound to appear in the near future.
And I wish Pakistan the best in taking advantage of those and/or their home-grown ingenuity!
What this shows is solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model. Even without net metering, demand destruction will cause the traditional model to stop working.
Will it? I’m not sure how the utilities structure their prices wrt the actual cost, but they definitely separate the baseline connection cost from usage on bills (at least in the US), so they may not be killed by people using very little power as long as the connection fee actually covers things.
The hardest possible demand to meet is random, reasonal, and spikey demand spread diffusely over a large area. Which is more or less homes.
Conversely the easiest possible demand to meet is localized constant and high demand. Basically AI datacenters or industrial users. These guys are basically paying for the grid and residential have it as a subsidy.
The supermajority of the price of electricity is fixed costs related to installing and maintaining capacity. The marginal problem of increasing generation or utilization is cheap. I believe it's like under 20% even for gas power where you have to buy gas. For grid solar it would be even crazier because marginally its basically free they really don't care how much you use it even goes negative but the fixed costs are everything.
So what causes a lot of social problems is when wealthy people get their own private solar because the whole current pricing structure revolves around wealthy people using a lot of electricity and paying down the connection costs for poor people. If they have solar the poor people are fronting the maintainence cost which destabilizes everything.
Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720
What you could do is bill per energy in e.g. 15 minute chunks, and separately bill for transformer/line capacity by e.g. the peak usage in any such chunk over the contract period, like they do in Germany for atypical load profile industrial users since decades ago.
Net metering is overall just entirely stupid as a concept; measure inbound and outbound flow separately if you can't just measure the 15 minute chunks; bill grid fees on the energy price on inbound and only pay energy price on outbound.
Or even bill grid fees on outbound up to one of many available large substations, and thus handle the issue of demand across large distances making buildout of solar in a convenient but far away place not being disincentivized vs. more-demand-local buildout.
if the same solar also had enough battery capacity, sure. But they do not, they still need to buy at out of solar peak and that just causes problems for both sides.
I think grid should start moving into selling storage as a service. Just put a bunch of bulk storage at every transformer station and buy solar from consumers at solar peak, sell them back say 80% of it (or whatever margin is required to pay for it) off peak.
That way utility no longer have to haul megawatts all the way from the power plant all the time, any peak can be hauled from the batteries and let the other types of power plant more time to spool up, and the grid is more resilient to outages (assuming you were lucky and battery bank local to you still had some charge
LFP chemistries are approaching ~$50/kWh, and CATL's sodium chemistry is supposed to be ~$40/kWh (per CATL); soon it will be more expensive to ship the battery storage than the storage itself.
That's because of the huge range of voltages in the charge curve - resistive losses in wiring scale with the square of current. When the voltage drops, the current needs to increase for the same power.
If you can accept low power/current output (which EVs cant, but homes can), this isn't so bad.
EVs have giant batteries - they can be connected via their DC ports and charged/discharged via solar inverters - technically. The current spec for CCS and NACS doesn't allow for this (Chademo did, but they lost the 'format war'). Giant effing oversight on manufacturers' part if you ask me.
Some people have managed to trick their cars into reverse charging via solar hybrid inverters and some custom hardware and it works as advertised - which is no surprise since its a lithium battery charge controller charging/discharing a solar battery.
If you could use your 60kWh EV battery on top of the 10-20 kWh you have at home, it would be a game changer, most people could power their homes for a week on that sort of capacity.
Replacing all the road vehicles in the US with 70 kWh BEVs would mean their battery capacity would equal about 40 hours of the average US grid power consumption.
BTW, this will mean that EV charging is going to have to have variable rates, or else people will just ride over Dunkleflauten by charging up their EV at a charger, driving back, then using it to power the home.
In most places in the developed world utility-scale solar is much cheaper to build than rooftop solar. And there's value in having a stable grid to fall back on. I think the demand destruction story is overrated.
And we come back to my original point. Residential roof installation is the most expensive way to install solar power. Utility scale solar is easily haf the cost of residential.
> Utility scale solar is easily half the cost of residential.
If it's only half, the problem it's not going to stop residential installs. By the time that utility power gets to them here in Australia it costs about 3 times as much, so they are going to install their rooftop systems anyway.
I can't speak for elsewhere, but here in Australia residential installs tend to be over provisioned. A small'ish install is 5kW. That generates about 20kWh per day. Typical household consumption is 1/2 that. Newer builds like mine tend to have far more - upwards of 20kW of panels. That's to cater for charging EV's. The result is grid solar installs are getting hammered by roof top solar: https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-hit-record-share-...
It shouldn't be, I agree. And eventually it won't be. But SEIA's report https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight... said that, in Q1 of 02024, utility-scale fixed-tilt installations in the USA averaged 98¢ per peak watt, of which 40¢ was the PV modules; and residential installations averaged 325¢ per peak watt, of which 20¢ was the PV modules, which is an atypically low share, historically speaking.
I'm surprised at the 40¢ figure for utility scale. Are you sure that didn't include the mounting hardware? Utility-scale PV is typically with 1-axis trackers.
Another possibility would be that utility scale solar optimizes to a much large disparity between DC rating and AC rating than does domestic rooftop PV.
A heavily used hairdryer is typically in use for 5 minutes per day, so a 1500-watt-peak hairdryer might average 5.2 watts. It needs 1500 watts of batteries (say, 3kWh of 0.5C batteries, or 0.4kWh of 4C batteries), not 1500 watts of solar panels.
I can't wrap my head around what off-grid balcony solar even means. Balcony solar is meant for apartment dwellers. Or detached home/townhome owners who don't want to spend on a rooftop install. You aren't installing balcony solar to go fully off-grid.
Sure, but you don't need to go fully off-grid to have an off-grid balcony solar panel. You can connect it to just your freezer, or just a storage heater, or to the batteries you run your homelab off of.
Commercial and industrial use already makes up a large portion of demand. While the model will change to cater less to residential needs, overall demand for stable, high voltage generation is not going to go down.
If long term storage (like Standard Thermal) comes into play, I could see industrial users decide to just decouple from the grid too (or, use the threat to do so as a means to drive down what they are charged.)
We may see industrial users preposition themselves in locations with ample nearby PV potential. If I were building a factory in the US (or a data center) I would think twice before putting it in a higher population density area.
We may also see local microgrids develop. This would still have distribution costs, but not transmission.
Commercial properties often have enough roof area to meet most of their daytime demand on-site. And industrial consumption in Western countries has been flat or declining for years, so "stable, high-voltage generation" may face less demand than assumed.
> solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model
The writing is on the wall that the electric utility business model is a dying business like the career of bus or truck driver. Some countries will take a while to realize due to head in the sand , tariffs and corruption.
I think I can answer that, though I'm not a Pakistani but as a Nigerian in a developing country, you might also have a petrol generator for night times. But for the majority of people just having your phone and power bank charged for the night is pretty ok, a plus if you can keep a handful of bulbs on also.
Batteries are dirt cheap already and getting cheaper all the time. Pakistan would be buying them at the Chinese prices without a lot of tariffs or nonsense that might be misleading you into believing otherwise.
Think a bandwidth of 50-80$ per kwh cost levels for the manufacturer with a margin on top in a market where there's over production and prices are still trending down and margins are probably under quite a bit of pressure. That's the widely publicized cost levels for Chinese manufacturers that dominate the world supply currently. Some of the sodium ion batteries that are coming to market now are already at the lower end of that price bandwidth and could go to 10-20$/kwh over the next 5-10 years; maybe faster.
At those prices, anyone can afford plenty of battery to survive the sun not shining for days/weeks. Which in places like Pakistan would be redundant. It's far south and you can count the number of days that you shouldn't be wearing sunglasses outside per year on the fingers of one hand. Even when it's cloudy, there's plenty of light filtering through in that part of the world..
Prices you might be seeing in the US tell you more about the local politics there than the economics of batteries. The US has it self to blame for bad economics like that. Places like Pakistan aren't going to slow down because the US can't figure out all this new stuff. For them this is economic growth unlocked by vastly more energy than they've ever had access to. All they'll ever need basically.
Unless you are proposing the laws of physics are different in the US, this is just a matter of market friction and blockages from regulations and tariffs. You know, the sort of things nuclear bros dismiss with a wave of their hand?
Battery modules (not home scale, but utility scale) are around $50/kWh in China. If we assume a 20 year lifespan and 50% charge/discharge once a day, that adds (ignoring interest) $0.013/kWh to the energy cycled through the batteries (plus a small add from efficiency being not quite 100%).
This is quite cheap compared to (say) the fully loaded cost of energy from a nuclear power plant.
Smaller units will be more expensive per kWh, but not so enormously so as to render them impractical. And they will get cheaper quickly like all electronics do.
For $800 you can get a complete 2kWh system, including cells, inverter and panels shipped to your home in Europe, so if you're paying more than that for half the storage either your government or contractor is fleecing you.
I can confirm that prismatic 1kWh LFP cells cost ~$60 in single digit numbers.
You can order 2kWh of plug-in-ready battery for 400€ or so on Amazon. That's single digit cents per kWh over the lifetime of the battery. Bigger systems are cheaper.
They can be depending on your needs. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are pretty cheap for their capacity. If you build your own power station with them you'd be surprised how far your money goes.
In Australia, if you have the space for rooftop solar, it's far cheaper in the long run to buy solar+battery. We did the math for our household and even if grid prices are stable (which they aren't, they're fast increasing) we're still going to make money back on the investment in less than 4 years.
Granted this includes a government rebate for the battery, but overall the prices have plummeted. Any government that isn't pushing for renewables and energy storage at this point is actively working against it's citizens.
No, and once the Solar Sharer scheme kicks in it'll be very helpful in avoiding leaning too hard on the grid in the evening after rainy or overcast days.
It's a fantastic way to solve oversupply; give it to everyone, including those who have batteries in areas where the weather restricts solar output.
For my experience a lot of installations really doesn't have much battery capacity cause batteries are pretty expensive at least here in Nigeria, but a lot of people are really happy with the system as long as they get electricity even if it's only during the day.
The difference between off-peak and on-peak rates there is about $0.21/kWh in the summer and $0.29/kWh in the winter, so assume an average delta of $0.25/kWh.
Assuming no solar panels, if you charge the battery on the grid at off-peak rates and discharge it completely at on-peak rates, you break even after using about 3200kWh. Assuming 2 kWh used every day during peak rates that's a breakeven period of 4.38 years.
Maybe my calculations are wrong somewhere, and I'd love to learn if that's the case.
I also acknowledge some big assumptions: namely, that you will always need to use all your stored energy day at the peak time (reasonable in the summer when the AC is running) and that you can use all your battery power for those loads instead of grid power. On the other hand electricity rates tend to go up over time and batteries last for years.
No I goofed a bit too, by assuming 2kWh used every day but $800 in installation cost (which is for 1kWh). Fixing that error increases the payback to 8.76 years/kWh of installed battery. But only if you assume rates don't change for all of those ~9 years.
But rates will likely increase. So will the delta between off-peak and on-peak rates. I think the true payback period is between 5 and 8 years.
There’s a business model where distributed solar production and storage is the norm and central grid based generation and delivery is the minority.
Such a model is extremely resistant and there’s less system infrastructure necessary. It’s quite feasible to redesign the system around a “distributed first” model.
My understanding is there is less of a need for massive grid upgrades in this model due to the use of storage. Rather than having to be able to distribute peak loads from solar, requiring a larger connection, you can smooth out the supply and distribute an even amount throughout the day, using a smaller connection.
The section "1.1.3 Bringing large savings on grid expansions" [1] has a good explanation.
Visit Australia, plenty of people are! When the real paybacks are generally 4-8 years (depending on what we're talking about) why wouldn't people be? We have 4.2 million solar systems (for reference there are almost 11 million dwellings). Just this year the Federal Government started giving out grants for home batteries and over 55,000 people have already taken that up and at least 90,000 home battery installations exist so far according to these stats: https://cer.gov.au/markets/reports-and-data/small-scale-inst...
Even if people don't go to the lengths I do (I like to watch the current generation and will slightly delay my use big loads like the washing machine, dishwasher, dryer etc. to try and use as much as my solar as possible), it's still very common for people to choose to do things like set the dishwasher timer in the day to use solar - which is great because it's also taking load off the grid.
Most of the costs for residential solar are installation. Systems that you install yourself, e.g. balcony solar, have payback times below five years (even in less than ideal regions, like Germany). I would assume that labor in Pakistan is a bit cheaper.
A lot of people in my area are interested and it would be a net positive for them long term, but the area is poor so few can afford the initial costs despite knowing the money they would ultimately be saving.
It's really not expensive anymore. There's a Black Friday deal on amazon.de for an entry-level Anker Solix system with 4x500W panels and a 2.6 kWh battery. 1200 EUR.
For those that don't have the cash, financing is available.
Their smallest solar products are small lanterns. Simply having a pollution-free source of light is already a quality of life improvement for some people. One step up is to add a USB port to charge phones.
Oh I’m sure, Pakistan has alot of trade with China also so it’s probably cheaper than in the west. But it would still be expensive for the poorer Pakistanis, and would require some investment, they simply have less ability to do that than a richer middle class Pakistani, so the poor pay the poor tax because they can’t invest capital to bring their costs down.
Low Chinese prices are making it more and more possible though. I hope the future will be really different.
> The south Asian nation is planning to introduce new tariffs for large solar users, as well as changes to fee structures to ensure businesses with panels share equally in the costs of grid upkeep, she said.
Of course. We wouldn’t want the benefit of a public good to accrue to the public now, would we.
I feel like this is disingenuous - I have solar, and peak power exceeds demand by a sizeable margin, but there are week long stretches with basically no solar. Given how cheap panels, are, it makes a ton of sense to oversize your system, and charge your batteries in the couple hour stretches where the sun does happen to shine.
Up to the locals in the US. Depends what their pain threshold is for falling behind and looking a bit behind the times. I think FOMO is going to be a big driver in a few years. This is not a left vs right topic. It's a money topic. And my impression of the US is that they love getting stuff on the cheap. Solar energy should be such a thing and it's getting painfully obvious that the US is paying a steep price where the rest of the world isn't. If I'm reading the situation correct, that is already annoying the hell out of a lot of traditionally republican leading states and not because they are tree-huggers.
The right question to ask is whether places like Mexico are going to politely wait for the US to get its act together or whether they'll just go ahead and start electrifying their country and industry and reducing their cost levels. The current isolationist policy works both ways. Very sunny place, Mexico. Great place for solar and batteries. And once you have those, Chines EVs produced locally might work very well. And they can export those further south.
Mexico could start producing synfuels with abundant solar energy and exporting them to the US, but that is far from the course plotted by President Sheinbaum, even though (or perhaps because) her doctorate is in the use of energy. Instead she's doubling down on oil drilling.
It's going to be more expensive than the fuel the US digs up for quite some time. Synthetic fuels don't really make economic sense without the massive subsidies the US uses to keep e.g. it's agriculture going. There is a lot of discussion around aviation fuels currently. Targets for SAF boil down to mixing in a small percentage of bio fuels with regular fuel. This smooths out the 10x or so price difference of SAF to regular fuel a bit. But it also means it's not all that effective as a way to reduce emissions because only a tiny percentage of the fuel is "clean". And of course producing SAF isn't all that clean either. For example, agriculture is carbon intensive.
The US importing synthetic fuels is not going to be a huge market for economic reasons. There's no logical reason for tax payers to pay Mexicans to make really expensive fuel for them. Just so they can pretend battery electric doesn't work north of the border.
Synthetic fuel at scale is just really expensive. And battery electric is going to take a sledge hammer to any misguided plans around that topic. It's going to get progressively more awkward to build a case for that. All those things where people still hang on to the believe that "surely batteries will never work here" are going to melt away over time. Batteries are going to get a lot cheaper and better over the next decades. And they are pretty good already.
Yeah, biofuels are laughable, but fully synthetic fuel is a plausible contender, if cheap solar energy lets us make cheap fully synthetic fuel.
Your mention of aviation fuel is relevant. That's a context where batteries are not pretty good already, although they are viable for short hops; in aviation, as in shipping, heavier batteries create more energy consumption, so a carrier with a higher specific energy per kilogram is very valuable. Conventional jet fuel is 43MJ/kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Chemical_reacti...) while lithium-ion batteries are up to about 0.8MJ/kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Electrochemical...).
Very crudely, an airplane whose weight is mostly jet fuel can fly about 50 times as far as a rechargeable-battery-powered airplane if both are going the same speed. Rechargeable batteries are 50 times worse than jet fuel. And they're improving slowly; the last time that difference halved was with the invention of lithium-ion battery, which went mainstream about 30 years ago. The previous major improvement was the lead-acid battery 120 years earlier.
However, promising alternative synthetic fuels other than paraffin include aluminum, magnesium, and zinc, which can be burned in aluminum-air batteries, magnesium-air batteries, and zinc-air batteries, respectively. Aluminum and magnesium are 31.0 and 24.7MJ/kg, respectively, but burning them in metal-air batteries instead of in heat engines allows you to extract about twice as much useful energy from the reaction, so they are in practice higher in energy density than current jet fuel.
In California, grid-tied rooftop solar was putting energy prices into the negative so often that they reconfigured the NEM to discourage export back to the grid and encourage battery storage.
Batteries are the invisible change in the power business. They don't take up much land area. They're not visible to the public. Just being able to charge batteries during low power cost periods changes the whole economics of the industry.
Whether battery banks should be allowed to sell back to the grid is a tough question.
Texas says no.[2]
It's potentially "dispatchable" power, but only until the battery runs down.
And it's messing with our utilities in BC because we were buying the daytime oversupply in California and selling the hydro generated power back at night. They've had to adjust plans as battery storage comes online.
Already does in some cases but the utility companies have fought back and they can buy laws and regulations to slow down the process and protect profits.
Yeah but I think advanced economies can figure out to produce the same things if there's a strategic need - and absorb the cost - you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody, so China doesn't really have that much political leverage in how you use it.
There's also huge internal competition inside China between companies, so they have a harder time fixing prices.
Nope. A defining mechanism in energy markets is the cost to extract it. There's a reason Saudi Arabia dominates oil, if you can extract it with a shovel. And directly counter to your point, there's a reason, say, Germany can't just kick start a shell gas/oil industry even if it does have the deposits underneath.
> harder time fixing prices
Eh, it's not like the CCP didn't do heavy handed market interventions before, right? I mean some would even argue "fixing prices" is already embedded with the ruling party's name.
> you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody,
What is this even suppose to mean? Of course you can. That is the whole point of having geopolitical leverage.
There were similar comments on HN. The argument goes that since it takes energy to produce PV panels and wind turbines, China effectively is an energy exporting country. What’s even better is some of the PV and turbines are produced with renewable energy. And unlike oil and gas, which are used only once, PV panels and wind turbines generate power for many years.
The argument also has a geopolitical component: PV panels wear down, and by the time yours have too, the energy infrastructure around you will have shifted towards PVs. I.e. your (country’s) energy will be dependent on China.
That is another aspect of “the Saudia-Arabia of PVs”
Politicians need votes to remain in power. They lose votes if electricity is expensive. Lower demand and therefore low revenue in the face of fixed grid maintenance costs mean prices have to rise. Higher costs to voters terrifies politicians.
Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
It’s similar to how the British empire hated subsistence farming, and always wanted colonial subjects to be economically interacting with either trading companies or the state apparatus.
> Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
All well and good, provided the homeowner opts out of the system. Part of the problem comes when the grid connection is not severed. Using it as a backup option (at the same time as other people, for when the weather is bad) or demanding the grid takes their excess production are counter-productive to the system as a whole.
The payback periods get me confused. A relative set up solar a year ago in one of the sunniest places in Europe, the Canaries, cost €7,000 for 6KW. He just ran the math on it and found out that the payback period is 15 years. The only way to make it profitable is government subsidies. How can it be profitable to install solar in continental Europe where taxes and labor costs are much higher while having much less sun? Why are we using taxpayers' money to subsidize such negative NPV projects?
Your comment appears to be unrelated to Pakistan and, due to the confusion of units, has been reduced to nonsense. Moreover, your implied calculations don't work out.
If we assume that you meant €7000 for 6 kilowatts peak (not 6 kelvin wurtzite henries or 6 kilowatt hours, neither of which is sensible) the probable answer is that your relative paid 25× the current market price for their solar panels and therefore got 25× the payback time. However, if we assume €0.12/kWh and a 20% capacity factor, 6 kilowatts peak would average 1.2 kilowatts, which is 10520 kWh per year, which works out to €1260 per year, which would be a payback time of 6 years, not 15 years.
Moreover, another way of saying that the payback time on a durable investment is 15 years is that the investment returns 6.7% per year. That would be a highly profitable investment, even without government subsidies.
sorry yes. He told me, installation is 6,000 W and is about 91% efficient at peak. 12 460W panels. panels point in optimal direction. In spain he sells excess to grid at €0.04 per KHW. Lowest cost of importing is €0.085 for KHW at night, about €0.22 at peak hours. He ran the numbers on power not bought (self consumption) + power sold, over a year. He said it comes to about €500 for the year. He added this really surprised him and he started asking around, and this seems to be typical for rooftop solar in the Canarias.
That's a 7% yearly ROI, which is a pretty decent number, better than you'd do on average in the stock market and more predictable. If he had a little storage so he didn't have to sell any, it would improve further. But also 6000W of panels in the low-cost category now costs €300: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
You need more information to calculate the ROI. I gave you the peak efficiency, Which comes from clean panels and no clouds. The average efficiency is closer to 70%. While the canaries are pretty sunny, the panels get dirty very quickly (fine dust from Sahara), Actually, if you count cleaning costs, the ROI goes down even more. And also consumptions is at its peak in the evening when there is no sun. He was thinking about getting storage, A Tesla Powerwall 3 installed is about €11,000, No way that is worth it. My impression is that places where ROI is much better is also places where you get more than €0.04 per KWH.
That isn't the efficiency, which is a number somewhere under 23%, dividing the number of joules of light into the panel by the number of joules of electrical power out of it. Maybe you mean that at peak he gets 91% of the advertised 6kW, i.e., 5500W?
Anyway, you said they paid €7000 and get back €500 per year, which is enough to calculate the ROI at 7.1% per year.
Powerwalls are indeed extremely overpriced. But battery prices are down to below US$70/kWh (US$19/MJ, €17/MJ); if we assume the maximum production in a day is about 25%, that's 36 kWh (130MJ), so it would be about US$2500 for that amount of battery. But probably even €500 of battery (7.2kWh) would make a big dent. That would be 1800 watts for four hours in the evening.
Depending on the type of evening consumption, it might be possible to ameliorate it dramatically with various kinds of thermal storage, or even plugging the washing machine into a timer. Those are much cheaper than batteries.
yes 7% ROI if no depreciation, but neither panels nor inverter are expected to last much beyond ten years. I was actually chatting with him just now since I got into this discussion, and he said he also needs a maintenance/emergency callout and cleaning contract, thats about €250 a year. In spite of this, he was still happy with doing this, good for the planet, even if not for this wallet. He also put up a large screen with the relevant numbers to train others in the house to use appliances at optimal times.
Panels are normally warranted not to drop below 80% of rated output after 25 or 30 years, although some are defective and crack within a year or so. But they don't start dropping off more rapidly at that point; rather, their output declines more slowly after that point. Those panels will be fine 50 years from now if he doesn't throw them away.
Inverters are a different problem, and they do in fact die after a few years. But you don't need the inverter to use the energy.
A twenty-foot container, I imagine? Retail for onesies seems to be about 4× that.
Typically panels account for about a third of the cost of a turnkey solar power system, but that's largely because of historical design features that are no longer necessary.
Or someone who lurks here, but never posts. Not everybody has an account here. I was just curious because I was talking my friend who has the solar just earlier today and he was a bit upset when he ran the numbers.
In spain he pays more than that on average, and only gets €0.04 for sold KWH. If it was one-to-one credit offset, as you have in Canada, it would certainly be very profitable.
I would encourage people to go look at satellite view of random "rich" neighbourhoods in Pakistan, and note how many solar panels there are on rooftops. Here is the first one I scrolled to in Lahore [1], and one in Karachi [2]
Pakistan's grid prices tripled or more since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, because the extremely mismanaged and poorly designed electricity system+economy could not handle the energy price shock. This spiraled into rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@31.3611237,74.2493456,357m/data...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@24.8014179,67.0460688,415m/data...
According to this interview [1] and a recent Economist podcast blackouts were a huge driver of the decision of those that could afford it to go for solar and batteries. Now the utilities are in a death spiral. Customers disconnect, prices rise, more incentive to go for solar and storage as prices continue to fall while price of unreliable grid energy rises.
Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable.
[1] https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom
In other words poor people are being forced to subsidize luxury beliefs.
You seem confused here.
This is a problem that started because the IMF forced Pakistan to get rid of energy subsidies after Pakistan over invested in tradition fossil fuel burning power infrastructure.
This meant that Pakistan started charging such high unsubsidized prices that it was cheaper for those with money to buy cheap solar panels and batteries. This drop in demand exacerbated the oversupply issue and meant that the unsubsidized price had to go even higher creating a feedback cycle.
You are very defintly confused here,;) or there, in Pakistan where some of the rulling class will brag about never getting utility bills, but the reality is that every built thing, down to the roads is there for them, but at root the main concepts of fuedal societies are intact, and going solar, fits in quite well, as it can be set up as distributed systems that will literaly conect into a larger grid, based on alliegences. The adoption of electric cars and especialy trucks/tractors/farm/industrial will follow quickly and allow fossil fuels to be reserved for strategic use. The real kicker will be batteries that have decadal life spans allowing for predictable, "one time" infrastructure investments that can the become self supporting through use "fees"
What are you talking about?
Pakistan has the highest per capita slavery except for communist countries with forced labor regimes, in the world. Their country is built on the backs of slavery.
As someone from India — who has written this kind of comment against India and Pakistan in forums, with poor reception, and later realised it was rightly so — some more detail and nuance, possibly with some easily readable sources, would help a great deal - mostly for the people who want a picture of that because slavery is a very evocative term.
thats ok. india thast the highest population of slaves worldwide, not on a per capita basis.
Did whoever named those streets have a stroke?
20, 23, 25, 27, 28, MDR 7, 32, 33, no name at all, 39, 40
And they're not even unique...they recycle them a kilometer further. WAT
Reminds me of "Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" [0]
[0] https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
It appears that the recycled street numbers each appear on different blocks.
Street 6, for instance: I've found it twice so far.
But they're still distinct, in that one Street 6 is within Block M 3 B, and another is within Block M 7.
Which appears to suggest that blocks are more important at identifying an address than a street name is, and if that's the case then that works just fine.
And indeed, a distinct address appears to be something like this: Plot 15, Block M 7 Lake City, Lahore, Pakistan. Plug that into Google Maps and you'll see what I'm seeing (and note that the string doesn't include a street name at all).
It does seem weird to my wee little Ohio-trained brain to identify a building by what block it is on more than the street it is facing, but then: Canadian post codes and Hungarian addresses also look weird to me, and also work fine in the places where they're used.
That's correct. In Pakistan, typically cities are broken up into housing societies. Each society is broken up into sectors/blocks, which are typically indexed by the alphabet(A, B, C, ...), but occasionally, one will see block M7 or sector B2 etc. In each such sector, each house has a unique numbered address.
Some larger societies are first broken up into "phases" and then into sectors/blocks.
Street numbers are typically not required in an address, but are often provided as helpful guidance.
Not a great system, but still better than Calgary's system (where I studied), which might be the worst system I have ever seen. You can't navigate at all without a map.
I have to disagree.
In Calgary, the streets are numbered and it's super easy to navigate between "16th St NW" and "18th St NW". Certainly easier to understand than "Go from St. Catherine's Street to Peel" in Montreal.
Where they are not numbered, they at least have the name of the community. Edgemont, for example, has no numbered streets but the name usually starts with "Edge", making it clear what part of the city you are going to.
I don't think it is perfect but I have also lived in Tokyo where the system is literally impossible without a GPS because the locations are not as neatly arranged as here.
> I don't think it is perfect but I have also lived in Tokyo where the system is literally impossible without a GPS because the locations are not as neatly arranged as here.
Even GPS and being a native speaker of Japanese isn't enough to successfully navigate somewhere in Japan sometimes often enough that it's super common for businesses to include detailed access instructions on how to get to their business.
The amount of times I've seen my wife not even be able to read a place name here makes me wonder why they don't just do something slightly more sensible. A recent funny one was when city hall sent her some mail advertising some seminar and she couldn't read the name of the train station on the pamphlet, so she called city hall and enquired about it and the person she talked to couldn't read it either.
Two questions:
- What is a 'society'? Is it like a community that pays for upkeep and has other advantages or just a name for an area?
- Do tell about Calgary!
A society is a business entity. They have some control over all houses in an area. Most societies are large. Hundreds or thousands of houses/buildings.
The administration of the society is usually done by the original developers. They decide how big the plots of land are, decide the rules houses must follow in their design. The houses themselves are built by the owners of the plots.
They society collects monthly fees typically. It is usually responsible for trash pickup. Richer societies will arrange water supply and even backup electricity plants. Larger societies create commercial areas and parks within their bounds as well.
They are not always gated as the parent states. Only the ones rich enough to hire security.
As in a "gated society"/"gated community"
The same is true in Japan. In most areas of the country, locations are addressed by the block they are part of, not by the street.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
In Costa Rica, they don't even use street names. For instance, "50 meters down the old store, with a green door" is a valid address.
You have an inbuilt assumption about the purpose of a street name. Compare it with addresses in Japan [1], where some streets don't even have names. I don't know anything about Pakistan, but i wouldn't be surprised if the street name is solely to differentiate within some small geographic area. Looking at street view[2] from a nearby real estate development supports this
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/sfoKSP5yRU41yS8w5
This was a bit painful for me when I first moved to Tokyo, since the building I was supposed to move into was newly build, and not on Google Maps yet. I had to ask a very nice old lady where １９番１５号 was supposed to be, and it took 20 minutes of us searching to find the place.
First thing I did upon finding it was to add it to the map lol
Price of Chinese PV panels and inverters and batteries have dropped so much and there has been financing schemes available where you get the installation for free and pay per usage cheaper than what the utility company charges and it is more realiable.
> rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
how it exacerbated problems exactly?..
I'm guessing: fewer people buying from the power companies/grid => the fixed costs of these companies are pushed onto the poorer customers, who already couldn't afford much.
This is correct.
But there is a bit more. Almost all power plants in Pakistan are built with state-backed dollar-denominated loans (reason govt incompetence+corruption). This means if grid demand goes down, power plants don't go out of business like they would in a market based system. Instead, they keep collecting dollar-denominated interest paid by the state, even if they produce zero power.
The state mitigates this by increasing electricity prices (in rupees). I have forgotten how this helps.
The reason power plants in Pakistan probably require this kind of financing is because Pakistan doesn't have the industrial capability to make the equipment that you need to build a power plant, so, dollars are a requirement.
Power companies in Pakistan also don't have easy access to international money markets, and thus, it makes sense for the government to back those strong currency loans as a subsidy on infrastructure.
This is not exclusive to Pakistan, this is the routine of infrastructure financing on developing countries. J.P. Morgan is not really eager to lend money for PakiPower Incorporated, but it is willing to lend to the government.
It is unfortunate that the government of Pakistan and their investors (China and the IMF) made poor investment decisions. They should feel free to go back to debt holders to renegotiate the debt, or default on it and hand the stranded assets back to creditors. The death spiral is of their own making, and will only accelerate as solar PV and battery cost declines continue. Electricity consumers will simply go off the grid. Such is the risk of unsophisticated investors not understanding the market in which they invest. Capital being at risk is an inherent component of investment.
My condolences and sympathy to the people of Pakistan caught in the mess. The global energy transition will be volatile.
Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01356-y | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01356-y - May 26th, 2022
Rethinking Energy -- 100% Solar, Wind and Batteries Is Just The Beginning - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM2RxWtF4Ds - January 2021
Who owns the distressed fossil generation collateralized debt? China. Where is Pakistan importing cleantech from? China. There is some IMF debt in there as well, for accuracy.
How Chinese loans trapped Pakistan's economy - https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinese-loans-trapped-pakistans-ec... - August 2nd, 2024
Emeber Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (updated monthly)
Argentina has defaulted nine times in its history. One or two times is not material, based on historical observations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_debt_crises
> Argentina has defaulted nine times in its history
Argentina doesn’t make a habit of hosting its creditors’ troops [1].
[1] http://eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114/TopStories/16353167.htm...
So the power plants lend dollars to the state so that they can pay to build the power plant?
Or else I don't see how the power plants are collecting the interest?
Usually there are three parties in these agreements.
1. State of Pakistan
2. Someone with dollars (the investors)
3. Local businessman who are willing run the power plant.
The three parties come to an agreement on what the minimum returns should be on the investment. Say 10% annual. Then the investors give money to the businessman, who then import the power plant equipment and start operating it. The state-run electricity distribution companies buys from the power plant as needed and pays them the unit price set by the State of Pakistan. Part of this is converted into dollars at some pre-agreed rate and transferred to the investors.
In all this, if the total returns to the investor are above 10%, then all is good. However, if the grid demand has fallen, and the distribution company didn't buy a lot of units from the power plant, then the State of Pakistan has to step in and give the investors the difference to make up the 10% returns.
Yes, it is an insane system.
State capitalism like you described totally undermines the price system by replacing profit-and-loss–guided entrepreneurial calculation with political allocation of resources, thereby rendering economic calculation increasingly impossible and eroding the coordinating function of the market process.
Yes, but nobody has found a more effective way to build infrastructure in poor countries. State capitalism as described is how infrastructure development happened in Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.
Catlover76 asks in a [dead]ed comment, "And China, right?" It's a reasonable question. It's debatable whether the infrastructure of the parts of China I didn't mention was built by state capitalism or by a straightforwardly Communist system of production, so I only mentioned the more clear-cut cases.
The fact that infrastructure was built under state capitalism does not demonstrate the superiority of central planning, only that capital accumulation occurred despite intervention, often financed by prior scarcity, foreign savings, or coerced transfers; absent market prices and entrepreneurial profit-and-loss, the state cannot know whether the infrastructure created was the most value-productive use of scarce resources, only that concrete and steel were poured.
I think it demonstrates the increased variance of central planning. The Congo Free State was also centrally planned, and so was the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian Genocide, Suharto's mass murder of suspected PKI sympathizers, etc. But the expected outcome for poor countries is that they stay poor and don't develop into industrialized export giants the way my laundry list of countries did.
Higher variance isn’t a redeeming feature when the mechanism that generates it lacks rational calculation in the first place. Central direction can occasionally coincide with growth in poor countries because initial scarcity leaves many wasteful paths that still raise output, but that doesn’t establish a positive expected value
I have attempted to make sense of your comment several times, but I cannot figure out what the intended meaning is of most of it.
I’m not arguing that centralized or state-capitalist systems “never work” in the sense that nothing gets built, or that output can’t rise. Clearly roads, ports, power plants, and factories were constructed in many of the cases you listed.
The narrower point I’m making is about economic rationality. Without market prices for capital goods generated through profit-and-loss entrepreneurship, there is no way to know whether those projects were the best use of scarce resources, or merely a use that happened to raise output from a very low baseline.
In very poor countries, almost any large capital investment will increase measured output because there are so many unmet needs. That means growth can occur even under badly misallocated investment. The fact that development happened does not tell us whether it happened efficiently, or whether alternative decentralized uses of those same resources would have generated more value.
That’s also why I don’t find higher variance persuasive as a defense. Occasional success doesn’t validate a mechanism that lacks systematic feedback. Without prices and profits, planners can’t distinguish luck from competence, or learning from error. Things such as malinvestment and moral hazard result. You only know concrete and steel were poured, not whether society is richer than it otherwise would have been.
So my claim isn’t state capitalism always fails, nor is it a moral argument about atrocities. It’s that infrastructure success alone doesn’t answer the calculation problem. Growth from scarcity is compatible with irrational allocation, and therefore doesn’t establish a positive expected value for centralized direction as a general development strategy.
They surely were not the best use of scarce resources. However, I don't know if you've ever tried to run a business in a poor country. It turns out that the decentralized economic systems they have are also not economically rational, systematically failing to provide functioning market mechanisms that support long-term investments such as highway systems, reliable electric grids, municipal water treatment, etc., even when those things would be highly efficient uses of scarce resources. Rather, generally speaking, they systematically squander their resources in order to stabilize the existing socioeconomic power structures.
Generally speaking, if you invest your money in a historically kleptocratic country, you can expect your investment to get confiscated if it's profitable, and possibly even if it's not, which is what happened to my retirement savings. Even if you make your investment at a time when the country is governed by non-kleptocrats, you will probably lose it after the next coup or election in which new kleptocrats come to power.
In that environment, where private investment in long-term infrastructure projects is irrational and languishing in poverty for many generations is the normal state of affairs, state capitalism frequently works.
I don't think moral arguments about atrocities are somehow orthogonal here. Power plants and electrical grids are often worthwhile investments, not because building monuments to Westinghouse is a pious sacrifice that pleases the electrical gods, but because they promote human welfare by providing material abundance. That's how we measure whether society is richer, not, as you say, by the amount of concrete poured. If human welfare is your yardstick, the possibility of economic catastrophes like the Holodomor greatly diminishing human welfare must necessarily weigh on the negative side of the balance. The inhabitants of Auschwitz and the Congo Free State were not enjoying even the material abundance they had enjoyed previously.
So we know that central planning carries risks to human welfare that decentralized systems do not. However, it also has opportunities to promote human welfare that decentralized systems do not. The variance is larger. I don't think we know enough to measure the expectation.
Sure, running a business in kleptocratic hellholes is a nightmare. Confiscation risks kill private investment, especially for big infrastructure that needs stable property rights and enforceable contracts to make sense.
But that's not a bug of decentralized markets; it's the poison of political interference and weak institutions, which state capitalism only doubles down on by swapping entrepreneurial discovery for bureaucratic fiat, still without solving the calculation problem or providing systematic feedback beyond "stuff got built."
Look at Hong Kong in your list: it boomed precisely because of its hands-off, free-market approach with top-tier economic freedom rankings, unlike more interventionist tigers that rode credit-fueled waves but crashed in '97 or stagnated like Japan post-bubble.
Atrocities are the dark side of concentrated power touted as enabling opportunities, jacking up variance with no way to gauge if human welfare gains beat the unseen costs of foregone innovations.
Without prices and profits guiding resources, we're left guessing expectations, but history shows freer systems deliver sustainable abundance when institutions let them, not coerced escapes that often loop back to poverty or worse.
Don't they charge a minimum just for keeping the wires connected?
I heard that they are trying to restructure the billing in this way for next fiscal year (July 2026- ), but its really difficult to find a non-regressive scheme. Electricity per-unit prices in Pakistan are set by the government, they vary depending on how much you consume [1], and they play a pretty significant role in government popularity.
[1] There is a price for the first 50 units you consume, then a higher price for the next 150 units, etc. Similar system to income taxes.
Grids in Germany if you're not a "typical household/office" with therefore atypical grid usage bill for peak power and energy separately; the billing related peak power is measured by averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the worst one of a year.
Alternatively it's also practical for such solar situations to bill for market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately; this doesn't correctly attribute transformer and other transmission equipment expenses between solar houses and non-solar houses, but it's still handling the grid tie solar load on the grid's power plants during periods of very little sun.
> averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the worst one of a year.
What an interesting metric. Wouldn't even a very cheap and small battery (definitely small enough to keep inside an appartment) provide enough smoothing to, like, halve this peak number? You could rig it to not even output energy until you are beyond the current year's peak usage... How much money would you save this way?
I just feel this number is so prone to small mistakes (grandma plugs in the wrong things at the wrong times) and hacks (like the above) that the relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate.
> market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately
I am currently on a plan with 5 minute market rates, can buy and sell in (sell prices can go negative - as can buy, actually), all automated. At least I feel we am working with the grid, not against it, and we make a small net profit (before depreciation).
> relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate.
It's still much closer to the real costs for the grid operator than $/kWh. The fundamental problem that rooftop solar has revealed is that people think they are paying for the electricity, but they are not. Electricity is dirt cheap. Most of what they are paying for is the maintenance of the grid, and simple usage based billing crushes the system because of freeloader problem once rooftop solar is added.
Long term, the likely thing you pay for will be the size of the main fuse that connects you to the grid. Because that's the thing that scales with the costs you impose on the operator.
Actually the local cost is not the fuse size, but how much smaller the first transformer after you could be if you weren't there. Though it's often more fair to determine such for each user; then take those as a relative scale, then split the transformer's actual TCO by the determined share sizes between the users. Because the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size, which is lower as they won't use it peak at the same time.
> the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size
Of course, how does the electricity company determine which user was first in this situation. A tariff that depends on the order of connection may not be practical for domestic situations, although it may be OK for very large users, e.g. factories, data-centres.
Using fuse size seems a more reasonable and fair proxy for cost, assuming the same load patterns as the rest of the users. Then again, consumers with EVs might argue that their load pattern is different to the average user (e.g. filling up with off-peak electricity). Also consumers with air conditioning might argue for special treatment given their usage correlates with solar output (except where it does not).
You don't; you let the second one pay more than what the marginal cost was, in order to make the first one not pay so disproportionally. That only has to happen once there is a second one, though.
Punishing a mere "large enough to not worry about popping it" fuse by billing shared infrastructure based on it (not just billing the stub line from the main in the street to the fuse/meter box in one's home in relation to what wire gauge is needed based on the fuse choosen) is pretty stifling. If e.g. your furnace fails in the middle of the winter and the repair guy tells you it needs replacing, you might want to get some space heaters and run them for a few days until your actually-wanted new furnace/heatpump/whatever can get delivered, instead of having to get installed whatever the HVAC guy has in the local storage, because if you wait more than on the order of 12 hours, you'll start to get frost damage from pipes and such.
Having to be beholden to an electricity company having time to upgrade your fuses on such short notice so that you can plug in the space heaters without blowing them might be a problem. But paying say 300 bucks extra because you did that for like 3 days or so would easily be cheaper than the cost of temporarily installing an available loan furnace and then having to remove it again to make way for the actually-wanted one.
They do though bill you if you make them dig the street up to say pull a medium voltage line into your factory that previously just got low voltage from a shared street transformer, but now that you've plans to use a lot more, you'd need the higher feed. Then they bill you and if within like 10 years or so someone else orders service that can piggyback on what capex you paid for, then you'd get a proportional refund from them having to pay off part of your share. But that's not for just getting normal basic electric service to a normal residential building in a city, that's for building a new farmhouse on the other end of some field where there never was electricity, or for getting unusual service that wouldn't be in the street if you didn't request it. Merely sizing the transformers/substations to handle the aggregate current of the users attached is not typically handled by the above mechanism, especially because it only covers initial buildout.
This is how it works in Japan for the newer rate plans for consumers now (replacing the previous method of charging you based on the size of your main breaker), but checked in 30 minute increments rather than 15.
The steps are pretty coarse - on my rate plan there are just 3 steps: 0-10 kW, 11-15 kW, 15 kW+. You're not going to surpass peak 10 kW in an apartment anyway.
It's legacy tactics; against the hacking the comparable thing for internet connections has historically been iirc 5 minute chunks and then taking the 95th percentile (like, charging not the highest, but the one 5% away from the highest). Not sure about the 5 min aggregation tbh.
The 15 minute chunks are due to the German and much of the European grid market being in that chunk size.
> Wouldn't even a very cheap and small battery (definitely small enough to keep inside an appartment)
Like namibj mentioned, this does not apply for residential contracts.
I don't think it's necessarily impossible to get that billing model as a household; it's just not an interesting one to have as it's not competitive for the usage patterns of a household.
When they start charging that way, the rich will buy batteries and disconnect from the grid entirely.
It's good until a Wednesday afternoon your home system dies and you have no electricity until Monday. I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case.
> I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case.
The grid becomes an insurance policy. In that case it is justified to ask for the insured party to pay their share of the system costs; both an energy fee and transmission/distribution/generation capacity fee.
I think most places the service is priced under the assumption that usage is enough to pay for the grid…
I’ve only ever rented though. Are connection fees something that homeworkers think about?
Possibly we will have to see changes to account for this sort of stuff at a more granular level, as the grid becomes more dynamic. But, that’s a future we should be actively looking to design for, as the energy supply mix is going to change whatever anybody thinks about that. Can’t beat energy falling from the sky, on price…
In a random German apartment usage tends to be on the order of 30-ish EUR per person, and the connection fee is typically around 10 EUR per month.
Is the €30 usage fee going directly to the producer of electricity, or is part of it a variable transmission fee that goes to the network operator?
My monthly electricity bill in Sweden, averaged over a year to 1600KWh/month, is approximately €90 production, €50 transmission fee, €25 fixed connection-size fee (25A, 400V), €70 national electricity tax and €50 VAT for a total of €285/month.
We'll be moved to yearly-peak-based transmission tariff in 2027 (European law), but for now I don't need to worry about plugging in the car to chargeon cold days or taking shower when someone is cooking.
Both, currently; notably it's mostly not what goes to your local grid, but rather mostly to the larger scale grid. It's about a 60/40 to 70/30 split between production/"grid-usage-fee" ("Netznutzungsentgelt").
It basically pays off the grid stability provision bids for fast-response power, and the transmission itself.
It'd likely be helpful if the peak part could be regulated in a way that's more condusive to match the actual impact you create on transformer sizing, not the worst-case impact you might have. Because there's a difference between a mostly-uncorrelated peak of shower+cooking vs. the car+cold day, because your neighbours don't shower the same time, but the several hours of charging do often overlap and the cold is the same across a neighbourhood that shares a local substation.
But yeah, for the most part, transformer size isn't that large of a contributor to overall electricity provision expenses, so I don't expect that to be a significant problem by that 2027 law.
Usually that’s included in per-kWh fee, so indeed usage dependent.
its easily fixable, utility company can charge fee for fixed cost those who connected to the grid, and if all rich decided to disconnect, then they disconnect neighborhood eliminating fixed cost.
Previously, pretty much everyone (not just 'rich people', although, well, 'rich' is relative here, of course...) had diesel generators, which were not connected to the grid, since that would be seriously expensive, plus syncing would be pretty much impossible anyway.
With solar, you can feed back into the grid much more easily, to the point that this is the default. This sort-of doubles the load on the grid (not exactly, but you get the idea), since both 'consumption' and 'production' need to cross the same wires.
This is a problem even in, like, Germany, where the grid operator can send a "kill signal" to local solar inverters to shut down. In Pakistan, I can't even imagine...
The following isn't a grid problem (more of a demand issue), but maybe they're referring to this:
> But 45 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, putting solar panel systems well beyond their reach. The pool of customers for the national grid has gotten smaller and poorer, and the costs of financing old coal-powered plants have increasingly been passed on to those who can least afford it. [1]
1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-pakistan-s-solar-en...
Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather).
Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources.
Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro.
But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time.
Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs.
Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception.
AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.
This is all true except for the fact that storage is not incredibly expensive anymore, which invalidates every single conclusion you reach. Storage is now reasonably affordable, and the trend suggests it will soon be incredibly cheap.
Not true.
The largest battery systems in operation are primarily designed for short-duration grid support rather than long-term, multi-day backup. They can even bridge a single windless night.
And this is talking about short term mismatch between supply and demand in a 24 hour cycle. If you consider the need to account for the yearly seasonal generation variation (which is far more dramatic as most of the developed world is situated on high latitudes) battery storage becomes even more problematic due to the absurd capital expenditures for a resource that you'd have to charge with a dramatic production supply during the summer months to slowly discharge during the winter.
People have been misled with the convenient lie of LCOE for too long, when what really matters are the true system costs. We don't even have in place the supply chain to sustain this, and I am not even talking about Lithium or Cobalt, I am talking about plain old Copper.
Then, there are the capital requirements for recycling and decommissioning, as the useful life of such systems is unfortunately not something to write home about.
Think about it. We have spent too much time and money on solar and wind, money that could have been spent on nuclear power. The clock is ticking, replacing our grid with solar may be the wet dream of big finance, but it is not a reasonable solution, it is about time we stop wasting our time with it.
Absolutely true.
I don't know why you're even talking about nuclear when that's not something an individual can do at their scale. It's not relevant to this conversation. But everything you've just said about it is wrong.
LCOE, when LCOE is calculated correctly, is absolutely the right measure and absolutely includes the true system cost including storage to bring it up to a similar level of availability and decommissioning (incidentally decommissioning is way higher cost for nuclear than batteries so it's weird that you try to cite it).
Even if we switch gears from talking about individual generation to grid scale generation nuclear done safely is simply too expensive. Solar and battery storage are cheaper than it in sunny places today, they were cheaper than it in sunny places a year ago, and their price is and has been consistently falling exponentially while nuclear's price stays about constant.
Those prices are including the absolutely massive subsidies that are given to nuclear, in every form from government investment in the technology to government absorbing the vast majority of the insurance cost by not requiring they are insured to anywhere close to even a small fraction of the full amount of damage they could cause in a worst case disaster.
The only fantasy here is that nuclear is somehow going to suddenly buck the trend of staying at about constant price and start falling in price even more exponentially than solar and batteries have been to catch up. Spending money on nuclear only serves to prolong the climate crisis by taking away money from actual scalable solutions like solar that can outcompete with fossil fuels on cost.
You don't build storage for yearly cycles, you build it for daily cycles (which is affordable today) and overbuild solar to account for seasonal variation in generation and demand. Note that even things like nuclear have to be overbuilt for seasonal variation in demand, and to account for the fact that there is maintenance and sometimes some of your plants are down.
I was obviously talking about grid scale, that's what matters.
I have solar Li-ion and hybrid inverters at my home, basically because I foresee more frequent blackouts in the future. Part of the cost of my system is generously paid by poorer consumers, because I still have net-metering in my country (talk about subsides).
Nuclear power is one of the most insanely regulated industries due to the misinformed work of science denier green militants and populist politics. Talking about subsides ignoring all the red tape nuclear is a common tactic behind the propaganda of big finance and big green corrupt interests.
LCOE is absolutely the right measure only in two cases:
1) You have a financial interest on selling intermittent power or/and 2) You're hopeless ignorant about both the physics and the economics of a power grid.
> I was obviously talking about grid scale, that's what matters.
As demonstrated by the fine article, it is not the only scale that matters.
> Nuclear power is one of the most insanely regulated industries due to the misinformed work of science denier green militants and populist politics.
Nuclear power is a highly regulated industry for two very very good reasons
- It's incredible destructive power if you cut corners. See chernobyl and then realize that it was far from a worst case and every nuclear power plant has the capacity to do 1000x worse than that if enough corners are cut. No other form of energy, not even fossil fuels with global warming, comes close in terms of potential downside per kwh generated. And humans inevitably cut corners in the absence of a strong regulatory regime.
- It's incredible destructive power if weaponized, potentially resulting in species ending wars.
You're showing your own ignorance with regards to LCOE.
It’s not reasonably affordable by any real “middle class” metric and the impact a reliable grid has on the industrial and commercial base of an economy is being undervalued by an utterly laughable degree during these discussions. Westerners and rich folks take it for granted as a fact of life at this point.
The duck curve is a rounding error when discussing energy storage.
The storage needed to turn solar into a reliable (as any comparable fossil fuel power plant) dispatchable source of power, plus the cost of the solar in the first place, costs less than other sources of dispatch-able power (like gas) in sunny places per kwh.
It also scales down better (though not perfectly).
Either you can afford it (both storage and solar), or you can't afford power at all, or you don't live in a sunny place.
Ignoring sunk capital costs into other energy infrastructure of course. If you already have a working nuclear power plant you're not going to save money by randomly turning it off and switching to something else, for instance.
Well, I certainly can’t make a couple weeks of battery storage pencil out vs. a fossil fuel generator at this point.
The math actually gets worse once you get into combined cycle natural gas at scale.
You I suppose could make an argument that load curtailment is cheaper than planning for the current grid reliability everyone has gotten used to over the past 50 years, but it would be a societal shift.
Seasonal energy storage is what is interesting to discuss, and of course is where that last 2% of grid reliability comes from. It’s also the most expensive part of running a grid. The first watts are basically free, the last are very expensive.
I’d love to be proven wrong within the next decade though! I just personally don’t see the battery storage price going down at the same rates it has been simply due to structural raw material input cost reasons - short of a breakthrough in chemistry. I think we are getting close to the maximum savings achieved by economies of scale with current technology.
You shouldn't need a couple weeks of battery storage - if you're in a sunny place. For example Las Vegas should be able to reach 97% uptime of constant energy supply (greater than your typical fossil fuel plants uptime) by building ~17 hours worth of storage and ~6x the amount of power needed in the nameplate capacity of the solar panels. Even a slight bit of curtailment, the kind already done on western grids, to reduce load when the weather calls for a bunch of clouds, or uncorrelated energy production (e.g. wind, which won't necessarily go down on the odd cloudy day, or for on-grid cases just transmission lines to solar somewhere else, or a backup generator), pushes that much further to 100%.
Seasonal energy storage is uninteresting, you just overbuild the energy production instead. This is already done for every existing type of energy production to account for seasonal variation in demand.
If batteries became cheap enough where you could do days instead of hours affordably it pushes this sort of calculus into less sunny places as well, and there's every reason to think that they will become that cheap (perhaps not cheap enough to make weeks reasonable though).
> Seasonal energy storage is uninteresting, you just overbuild the energy production instead. This is already done for every existing type of energy production to account for seasonal variation in demand.
It’s the only thing that is interesting, considering you just hand-wove that last 3% of reliability away with vague “backup generators” and “transmission lines to other places”. Both immensely expensive items if they are idle 97% of the time.
I’m not interested in the least about having my grid availability at 97% - in a cherry picked location ideal for solar.
I’m totally fine overbuilding nameplate capacity for my solar field - already plan to by about 8x due to where I live. Panels are cheap! At least that problem seems more or less solved.
The issue is I have no realistic means to store that energy for even days much less weeks when the sun doesn’t shine. A small wind turbine can help a bit, but doesn’t get rid of the need for a backup generator.
The same holds true at grid scale currently - which is both a more important topic and more interesting to discuss than some rich tech bro being able to brute force his off-grid solar+battery install.
Someone needs to back that last 3% with something like a combined cycle natural gas plant. That amount of capital investment sitting idle is exceedingly expensive. The only thing you are saving much money on vs. running it all-out is fuel costs - you still need to staff it.
A national grid sounds pretty neat, but would both be crazy expensive and is so politically untenable that I don’t expect to see it seriously even discussed in my lifetime. Just a small amount of time spent in the rural areas of the country made me realize how utterly impossible it would be due to NIMBY.
Again, to me at least that last 3% is where everyone hand-waves and makes it someone else’s problem. At some point though you run out of other people’s power.
I do wish we had not destroyed our nuclear industry into irrelevance, as 50 more years of experience and hands-on construction knowledge pushing that tech forward might have had us in a far different place today!
And fwiw I do hope I’m wrong. Perhaps energy storage gets to the point we can keep a fully reliable inexpensive grid for the common folks and industry to rely upon. I’ve certainly been wrong before!
You understand that fossil fuel and nuclear plants are typically less reliable (have a lower availability factor) than that right? Every form of power generation has downtime, and needs balancing with other types or accepting that downtime. Solar tradeoffs low mechanical complexity for higher environmental dependence, but ends up with similar (in fact less) downtime here under unfavorable assumptions (100% of energy coming from a single point source of solar, constant energy load not your typical lower energy from consumption energy at night, no ability to shed load with price signalling or curtailment).
The last 3% is left alone because it's the fair comparison to other energy sources... tilted in the direction of favoring the other energy sources.
> It’s the only thing that is interesting, considering you just hand-wove that last 3% of reliability
The 3% issue doesn't come from seasonal variation, it comes from short term weather patterns where you might have a week of heavy cloud cover. Seasonal variation is trivially solved by simply increasing the multiplier on nameplate capacity (and the 6x for Los Vegas includes that increase). It's always going to be easier to generate an extra 25% energy than to store 25% of your energy produced in summer and use it in winter.
> “backup generators” and “transmission lines to other places”. Both immensely expensive items if they are idle 97% of the time.
On the contrary both things that exist anyways. Every place that cares about consistent power already has backup generators for when nonsense happens like power poles being blown over. Transmission lines exist to allow sale of excess production. It's only at tiny scales where these things aren't pre-existing and at those tiny scales overbuilding solar and batteries even more is so much cheaper than the alternatives (like building redundant gas plants disconnected from the grid, or even just redundant diesel generators) that they win by a mile.
An understated win of the storage model here is that these generators don't have to be able to supply the entire load, they just have to be turned on in advance when the weather forecast says there might be a problem to slow the drain on the batteries.
PS. I don't know what country you're from, but it seems a bit crazy to me that you apparently used to have a nuclear industry but apparently don't have a national grid... If you have actual weeks where the sun doesn't shine and no grid... you aren't in a sunny place... so you can still brute force it of course but done efficiently a lower percentage of solar makes sense.
Fossil Fuel and Nuclear Plants are extremely reliable, surpassed only for coal. You're doing a rhetorical sleight of hand by deliberately confusing scheduled downtime with reliability.
You keep on citing dubious numbers from the Big Green lobby, but the reality is. There's not a single place on this planet where after a certain threshold of penetration solar and wind haven't made supply less reliable, haven't caused economic sustainability issues to generators and haven't made power absurdly more expensive to customers.
Not to mention the frequently forgotten issues of toxic waste in production and decommissioning, the toxic fire hazard of giant battery banks and the pathetic short useful life of intermittent power infrastructure. Not to mention the environment impact of such big land gobblers, cynically overlooked by the same folks that decided to destroy nuclear with mountains of bureaucratic red tape deliberately created to suffocate it by ignorant green politicians.
Solar may have a bigger place, in countries with plenty of sun like Brasil, the Middle East or North Africa where residential and commercial consumption peaks with air conditioning usage during peak solar production, and with long days, but even then, absent some magical storage technology that doesn't exist yet, with limits.
Which will make the problems of the rich disappear and the problems of the poor and the state ... worse. (because the costs of the state are paying off loans for expensive generation, costs which they recover from the poor)
The state can default on the loans too. It sucks and it will make future financing more difficult. But it remains an option. No such thing as risk-free lending.
... which would cut off imports in a non-self-sufficient state (Pakistan is a country that if it ever were isolated internationally, the people would just start dieing). For the poor the situation is simple: either they pay the loans or they lose everything they have and probably even die of hunger.
A lot of muslim and African states are in that boat. If the US, yes, the international monetary system is under US control, frankly because nobody else will pay for it. If the US ever decides not to cover Pakistan's debts starvation is exactly what will happen in Pakistan.
All these problems become solved if you have realtime market pricing.
Nobody would bother to install rooftop solar if daytime power was super cheap on every sunny day, yet expensive at night when their solar isn't working.
Wouldn't this model price out poor people? Doesn't that mean the most vulnerable people cant afford the services when they need them most, ie max hot/cold?
Changing the utility to a market sort of defeats the point of trying to optimize the utility.
It’s better to give welfare / benefits directly to help poor people in that situation, rather than fix prices to make energy appear artificially scarce during daylight and abundant at night.
A typical user still pays the same on average in a market.
Just they might pay more in some hours and less in others.
Some market systems have gotten bad press over huge bills (eg. Texas), but that only happens when only a small chunk of users participate in the market, whilst others are on fixed pricing and therefore don't care about usage.
When everyone participates, supply and demand make sure the price never goes super high, simply because there are enough people who will turn off stuff to save money.
My solar system has a battery than smooths out the generation over a day or two so that I can satisfy my night time demand too.
This exact issue lead me to follow the grid orchestration research out of the Oak Ridge Laboratory. The building blocks already exist to enable this. An interconnected smart network of renewables can become a stabilizing force in the overall grid. Off-peak storage would still be required, but would no longer need to be "stabilizing" (turbine or other similar generator), and can be simple batteries.
I read that Pakistan told Qatar to sell off 24 containers of LNG next year. And there are abusive penalty clauses that get triggered when you do that.
I went an looked and it appears Pakistan imports ~110 containers of LNG a year. And their natural gas plants are running as 50% capacity.
Personal belief on big reason for a country to install solar, wind, and batteries to be able to tell the criminals at the IMF to go f' themselves.
We switched to solar in 2021 expecting a 3.5-year payback. Electricity prices rose so fast that we recovered the investment in under two years.
Also the national grid is notorious for it's frequent blackouts (load-shedding) since the early ’90s. Solar allowed us to have uninterrupted supply in the mornings and longer backups during night.
We got roof top solar 1.5 years ago in Canada. Payoff will be 6-7 years, but we got an interest free loan to cover it.
So we’ll just pay what we would have for power for those years ~$1000 a year, then we’ll have free power for 20 more, saving something like $20,000 for $0 investment.
Where in Canada?
BC. Tight valley, TONS of snow.
Rough location (if you feel comfortable sharing ground truth)?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622584
South Africa - load shedding is a curse word here :).
Great to hear about the fast payback period, wishing you reliable power :)
tibbydudeza didn't post about a fast payback period. Maybe neebz is his wife?
Broadly speaking, payback period in South Africa is very fast due to similar grid economics to Pakistan.
But neebz may not be in Pakistan either. Oh, they are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622584
Payback - I never factored that in or even thought about that.
I was more concerned about having reliable power and reducing my electricity bill.
The daily 2-hour power cuts were getting out of hand, and I was running my business from my home office, so the tax incentives helped slightly.
The grid is more stable now as new power units became available but a big chunk of middle-class consumers using solar are using way less power now, so the local town councils are having problems balancing their books (town councils re-sells electricity from the national operator).
Excellent results, even if the source article is a bit government-optimistic-press-releasy. The less-good news is that, even with abundant solar, you still need a functional grid (even more so than in traditional top-down energy distribution schemes) in order for everyone to take advantage of it, but this is a problem that lots of rich nations are working through right now, so affordable off-the-shelf solutions are bound to appear in the near future.
And I wish Pakistan the best in taking advantage of those and/or their home-grown ingenuity!
What this shows is solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model. Even without net metering, demand destruction will cause the traditional model to stop working.
Will it? I’m not sure how the utilities structure their prices wrt the actual cost, but they definitely separate the baseline connection cost from usage on bills (at least in the US), so they may not be killed by people using very little power as long as the connection fee actually covers things.
The hardest possible demand to meet is random, reasonal, and spikey demand spread diffusely over a large area. Which is more or less homes.
Conversely the easiest possible demand to meet is localized constant and high demand. Basically AI datacenters or industrial users. These guys are basically paying for the grid and residential have it as a subsidy.
The supermajority of the price of electricity is fixed costs related to installing and maintaining capacity. The marginal problem of increasing generation or utilization is cheap. I believe it's like under 20% even for gas power where you have to buy gas. For grid solar it would be even crazier because marginally its basically free they really don't care how much you use it even goes negative but the fixed costs are everything.
So what causes a lot of social problems is when wealthy people get their own private solar because the whole current pricing structure revolves around wealthy people using a lot of electricity and paying down the connection costs for poor people. If they have solar the poor people are fronting the maintainence cost which destabilizes everything.
Without load balancing, AI datacenters are very swingy (which is bad).
Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720
What you could do is bill per energy in e.g. 15 minute chunks, and separately bill for transformer/line capacity by e.g. the peak usage in any such chunk over the contract period, like they do in Germany for atypical load profile industrial users since decades ago.
Net metering is overall just entirely stupid as a concept; measure inbound and outbound flow separately if you can't just measure the 15 minute chunks; bill grid fees on the energy price on inbound and only pay energy price on outbound. Or even bill grid fees on outbound up to one of many available large substations, and thus handle the issue of demand across large distances making buildout of solar in a convenient but far away place not being disincentivized vs. more-demand-local buildout.
if the same solar also had enough battery capacity, sure. But they do not, they still need to buy at out of solar peak and that just causes problems for both sides.
I think grid should start moving into selling storage as a service. Just put a bunch of bulk storage at every transformer station and buy solar from consumers at solar peak, sell them back say 80% of it (or whatever margin is required to pay for it) off peak.
That way utility no longer have to haul megawatts all the way from the power plant all the time, any peak can be hauled from the batteries and let the other types of power plant more time to spool up, and the grid is more resilient to outages (assuming you were lucky and battery bank local to you still had some charge
LFP chemistries are approaching ~$50/kWh, and CATL's sodium chemistry is supposed to be ~$40/kWh (per CATL); soon it will be more expensive to ship the battery storage than the storage itself.
"Watershed moment:" Big battery storage prices hit record low in China auction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504630 - July 2025 (4 comments)
IEA: The battery industry has entered a new phase - https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-battery-industry-has-en... - March 5th, 2025
Naxtra Battery Breakthrough & Dual-Power Architecture: CATL Pioneers the Multi-Power Era - https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html - April 21st, 2025
China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/china-alread... - April 19th, 2024
Currently "Sodium Battery Cell" is priced at US$50–70/kWh on the Shanghai Metals Market, which gives every appearance of being a real thing: https://www.metal.com/en/markets/43. They list LFP batteries currently at US$38–52/kWh: https://www.metal.com/en/markets/42
I think you may be dramatically overestimating how much container shipping costs.
("Shanghai Metals Market" is reportedly a consultancy which provides price data, not a market.)
Sodium batteries have significantly lower round-trip efficiency, so they have to be cheaper to win against LFP.
That's because of the huge range of voltages in the charge curve - resistive losses in wiring scale with the square of current. When the voltage drops, the current needs to increase for the same power.
If you can accept low power/current output (which EVs cant, but homes can), this isn't so bad.
EVs have giant batteries - they can be connected via their DC ports and charged/discharged via solar inverters - technically. The current spec for CCS and NACS doesn't allow for this (Chademo did, but they lost the 'format war'). Giant effing oversight on manufacturers' part if you ask me.
Some people have managed to trick their cars into reverse charging via solar hybrid inverters and some custom hardware and it works as advertised - which is no surprise since its a lithium battery charge controller charging/discharing a solar battery.
If you could use your 60kWh EV battery on top of the 10-20 kWh you have at home, it would be a game changer, most people could power their homes for a week on that sort of capacity.
Replacing all the road vehicles in the US with 70 kWh BEVs would mean their battery capacity would equal about 40 hours of the average US grid power consumption.
BTW, this will mean that EV charging is going to have to have variable rates, or else people will just ride over Dunkleflauten by charging up their EV at a charger, driving back, then using it to power the home.
I think variable consumption is a thing even now - we have peaker plants just for that purpose, so that could be handled as well.
In most places in the developed world utility-scale solar is much cheaper to build than rooftop solar. And there's value in having a stable grid to fall back on. I think the demand destruction story is overrated.
Utility-scale solar needs land and has to deal with line losses. Rooftop solar does not have to deal with either.
Utility scale is 2x cheaper despite all that.
Not necessarily - you have to pay for that infrastructure between the plant and your home.
Balcony solar is even cheaper to build than utility-scale solar.
It's limited to 800W in Germany and 1200W in Utah. It isn't about to replace utility-scale generation anytime soon.
Those limits are just arbitrary regulations. It's easy to install 10x that on a residential roof.
And we come back to my original point. Residential roof installation is the most expensive way to install solar power. Utility scale solar is easily haf the cost of residential.
> Utility scale solar is easily half the cost of residential.
If it's only half, the problem it's not going to stop residential installs. By the time that utility power gets to them here in Australia it costs about 3 times as much, so they are going to install their rooftop systems anyway.
I can't speak for elsewhere, but here in Australia residential installs tend to be over provisioned. A small'ish install is 5kW. That generates about 20kWh per day. Typical household consumption is 1/2 that. Newer builds like mine tend to have far more - upwards of 20kW of panels. That's to cater for charging EV's. The result is grid solar installs are getting hammered by roof top solar: https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-hit-record-share-...
In the US it's typically about a quarter.
It shouldn't be that expensive. I had 10x 500w installed and wired on my 7-8 meter high roof in 1/2 day.
I only paid $50 where I ljve, but even with 10x higher labor costs in the US, it should be under $1000.
It shouldn't be, I agree. And eventually it won't be. But SEIA's report https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight... said that, in Q1 of 02024, utility-scale fixed-tilt installations in the USA averaged 98¢ per peak watt, of which 40¢ was the PV modules; and residential installations averaged 325¢ per peak watt, of which 20¢ was the PV modules, which is an atypically low share, historically speaking.
Where do you live?
I'm surprised at the 40¢ figure for utility scale. Are you sure that didn't include the mounting hardware? Utility-scale PV is typically with 1-axis trackers.
Another possibility would be that utility scale solar optimizes to a much large disparity between DC rating and AC rating than does domestic rooftop PV.
I was surprised at it too, but remember that the US basically doesn't allow Chinese solar panels to be imported.
Balcony solar is installed on a unit-by-unit basis. It isn't 800W per building; it's potentially up to 800W for each unit in an apartment.
That's still not a lot. Less than a hairdryer uses.
A heavily used hairdryer is typically in use for 5 minutes per day, so a 1500-watt-peak hairdryer might average 5.2 watts. It needs 1500 watts of batteries (say, 3kWh of 0.5C batteries, or 0.4kWh of 4C batteries), not 1500 watts of solar panels.
Balcony solar can still satisfy a significant portion of a household's demand.
That only applies if you connect it to the grid in each of those places, I believe.
I can't wrap my head around what off-grid balcony solar even means. Balcony solar is meant for apartment dwellers. Or detached home/townhome owners who don't want to spend on a rooftop install. You aren't installing balcony solar to go fully off-grid.
Sure, but you don't need to go fully off-grid to have an off-grid balcony solar panel. You can connect it to just your freezer, or just a storage heater, or to the batteries you run your homelab off of.
Commercial and industrial use already makes up a large portion of demand. While the model will change to cater less to residential needs, overall demand for stable, high voltage generation is not going to go down.
If long term storage (like Standard Thermal) comes into play, I could see industrial users decide to just decouple from the grid too (or, use the threat to do so as a means to drive down what they are charged.)
We may see industrial users preposition themselves in locations with ample nearby PV potential. If I were building a factory in the US (or a data center) I would think twice before putting it in a higher population density area.
We may also see local microgrids develop. This would still have distribution costs, but not transmission.
Commercial properties often have enough roof area to meet most of their daytime demand on-site. And industrial consumption in Western countries has been flat or declining for years, so "stable, high-voltage generation" may face less demand than assumed.
I think in most countrys, you already pay one bill for the grid and one for the used electric power.
> solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model
The writing is on the wall that the electric utility business model is a dying business like the career of bus or truck driver. Some countries will take a while to realize due to head in the sand , tariffs and corruption.
What will people do at night?
I think I can answer that, though I'm not a Pakistani but as a Nigerian in a developing country, you might also have a petrol generator for night times. But for the majority of people just having your phone and power bank charged for the night is pretty ok, a plus if you can keep a handful of bulbs on also.
overprovision for their needs during the day and utilize battery power at night.
Solar panels are cheap but batteries are very expensive.
Batteries are dirt cheap already and getting cheaper all the time. Pakistan would be buying them at the Chinese prices without a lot of tariffs or nonsense that might be misleading you into believing otherwise.
Think a bandwidth of 50-80$ per kwh cost levels for the manufacturer with a margin on top in a market where there's over production and prices are still trending down and margins are probably under quite a bit of pressure. That's the widely publicized cost levels for Chinese manufacturers that dominate the world supply currently. Some of the sodium ion batteries that are coming to market now are already at the lower end of that price bandwidth and could go to 10-20$/kwh over the next 5-10 years; maybe faster.
At those prices, anyone can afford plenty of battery to survive the sun not shining for days/weeks. Which in places like Pakistan would be redundant. It's far south and you can count the number of days that you shouldn't be wearing sunglasses outside per year on the fingers of one hand. Even when it's cloudy, there's plenty of light filtering through in that part of the world..
Prices you might be seeing in the US tell you more about the local politics there than the economics of batteries. The US has it self to blame for bad economics like that. Places like Pakistan aren't going to slow down because the US can't figure out all this new stuff. For them this is economic growth unlocked by vastly more energy than they've ever had access to. All they'll ever need basically.
"Batteries are dirt cheap already" they absolutely are not.
Multiple people have now explained you are in error here. I expect you will not repeat this falsehood going forward.
Installed costs for residential battery storage typically range from $800-1,200/kWh in the US market as of 2024-2025.
ROI for 24/7 solar+battery is negative in almost all residential cases using current technology and prices.
Unless you are proposing the laws of physics are different in the US, this is just a matter of market friction and blockages from regulations and tariffs. You know, the sort of things nuclear bros dismiss with a wave of their hand?
Battery modules (not home scale, but utility scale) are around $50/kWh in China. If we assume a 20 year lifespan and 50% charge/discharge once a day, that adds (ignoring interest) $0.013/kWh to the energy cycled through the batteries (plus a small add from efficiency being not quite 100%).
This is quite cheap compared to (say) the fully loaded cost of energy from a nuclear power plant.
Smaller units will be more expensive per kWh, but not so enormously so as to render them impractical. And they will get cheaper quickly like all electronics do.
Installed costs for residential battery storage typically range from $800-1,200/kWh in the US market as of 2024-2025.
ROI for 24/7 solar+battery is negative in almost all residential cases using current technology and prices.
For $800 you can get a complete 2kWh system, including cells, inverter and panels shipped to your home in Europe, so if you're paying more than that for half the storage either your government or contractor is fleecing you.
I can confirm that prismatic 1kWh LFP cells cost ~$60 in single digit numbers.
What is the US doing differently that it is so expensive there?
You can order 2kWh of plug-in-ready battery for 400€ or so on Amazon. That's single digit cents per kWh over the lifetime of the battery. Bigger systems are cheaper.
Batteries are cheap in developing world prices, cheap in rich country prices. They continue to become cheaper every year.
EDIT: I meant they're on the expensive side for the developing world, but cheap for rich countries. If you aren't stupid enough to tariff them.
They can be depending on your needs. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are pretty cheap for their capacity. If you build your own power station with them you'd be surprised how far your money goes.
It is much more expensive that just buying electricity from the grid at night.
In Australia, if you have the space for rooftop solar, it's far cheaper in the long run to buy solar+battery. We did the math for our household and even if grid prices are stable (which they aren't, they're fast increasing) we're still going to make money back on the investment in less than 4 years.
Granted this includes a government rebate for the battery, but overall the prices have plummeted. Any government that isn't pushing for renewables and energy storage at this point is actively working against it's citizens.
Does that take into account the free electricity?
No, and once the Solar Sharer scheme kicks in it'll be very helpful in avoiding leaning too hard on the grid in the evening after rainy or overcast days.
It's a fantastic way to solve oversupply; give it to everyone, including those who have batteries in areas where the weather restricts solar output.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-03/energy-retailers-offe...
The free electricity seems ideal to charge batteries with.
Shift usage to daytime and rely on battery storage.
For my experience a lot of installations really doesn't have much battery capacity cause batteries are pretty expensive at least here in Nigeria, but a lot of people are really happy with the system as long as they get electricity even if it's only during the day.
Batteries are very expensive.
They're cheap and getting cheaper. Your info is from 2021. Things change quickly in this industry.
Batteries are absolutely not cheap for what they store.
How much do you think they cost?
Installed costs for residential battery storage typically range from $800-1,200/kWh in the US market as of 2024-2025.
ROI for 24/7 solar+battery is negative in almost all residential cases using current technology and prices.
Let's assume the lower end of that range - $800/kWh and take the example of Arizona. https://www.aps.com/en/Residential/Service-Plans/Compare-Ser...
The difference between off-peak and on-peak rates there is about $0.21/kWh in the summer and $0.29/kWh in the winter, so assume an average delta of $0.25/kWh.
Assuming no solar panels, if you charge the battery on the grid at off-peak rates and discharge it completely at on-peak rates, you break even after using about 3200kWh. Assuming 2 kWh used every day during peak rates that's a breakeven period of 4.38 years.
Maybe my calculations are wrong somewhere, and I'd love to learn if that's the case.
I also acknowledge some big assumptions: namely, that you will always need to use all your stored energy day at the peak time (reasonable in the summer when the AC is running) and that you can use all your battery power for those loads instead of grid power. On the other hand electricity rates tend to go up over time and batteries last for years.
3.5 cents per KWh is exceptionally cheap and does seem to give a reasonable payback period for cheap enough batteries.
No I goofed a bit too, by assuming 2kWh used every day but $800 in installation cost (which is for 1kWh). Fixing that error increases the payback to 8.76 years/kWh of installed battery. But only if you assume rates don't change for all of those ~9 years.
But rates will likely increase. So will the delta between off-peak and on-peak rates. I think the true payback period is between 5 and 8 years.
Couple used car batteries or usb batteries are cheap.
Enough to keep the lights on, a fan or charging a phone. Not to run an AC or dishwasher but enough for the basics.
At night, what people will do is wait until the morning to run the washing machine.
There’s a business model where distributed solar production and storage is the norm and central grid based generation and delivery is the minority.
Such a model is extremely resistant and there’s less system infrastructure necessary. It’s quite feasible to redesign the system around a “distributed first” model.
Where do the massive upgrades to the distribution system required for this kind of setup come from?
We simultaneously hate utilities and want them to redesign and pay for a distribution system that was not intended for bidirectional load flow.
Our municipal distribution systems are barely adequate. Net metering produces essentially no revenue but imposes a huge load on that infra.
My understanding is there is less of a need for massive grid upgrades in this model due to the use of storage. Rather than having to be able to distribute peak loads from solar, requiring a larger connection, you can smooth out the supply and distribute an even amount throughout the day, using a smaller connection.
The section "1.1.3 Bringing large savings on grid expansions" [1] has a good explanation.
1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
Most people aren’t interested in being responsible for their own electrical generation. Especially with payback still being on the order of decades
Visit Australia, plenty of people are! When the real paybacks are generally 4-8 years (depending on what we're talking about) why wouldn't people be? We have 4.2 million solar systems (for reference there are almost 11 million dwellings). Just this year the Federal Government started giving out grants for home batteries and over 55,000 people have already taken that up and at least 90,000 home battery installations exist so far according to these stats: https://cer.gov.au/markets/reports-and-data/small-scale-inst...
Even if people don't go to the lengths I do (I like to watch the current generation and will slightly delay my use big loads like the washing machine, dishwasher, dryer etc. to try and use as much as my solar as possible), it's still very common for people to choose to do things like set the dishwasher timer in the day to use solar - which is great because it's also taking load off the grid.
Most of the costs for residential solar are installation. Systems that you install yourself, e.g. balcony solar, have payback times below five years (even in less than ideal regions, like Germany). I would assume that labor in Pakistan is a bit cheaper.
My payback is 6-7 years in Canada with $0 invested.
“Responsible for my own power generation” = I do literally nothing. Nada.
I get $1000 a year for free.
Please show me someone who does not want $1000 per year for absolutely nothing.
A lot of people in my area are interested and it would be a net positive for them long term, but the area is poor so few can afford the initial costs despite knowing the money they would ultimately be saving.
#1 is correct. #2 is quite incorrect.
Most people don’t have the capital to be responsible for their own electricity generation, except the rich.
It's really not expensive anymore. There's a Black Friday deal on amazon.de for an entry-level Anker Solix system with 4x500W panels and a 2.6 kWh battery. 1200 EUR.
For those that don't have the cash, financing is available.
Have you read this, about SunKing and SunCulture in Africa, recently posted on HN: https://climatedrift.substack.com/p/why-solarpunk-is-already...
Their smallest solar products are small lanterns. Simply having a pollution-free source of light is already a quality of life improvement for some people. One step up is to add a USB port to charge phones.
Oh I’m sure, Pakistan has alot of trade with China also so it’s probably cheaper than in the west. But it would still be expensive for the poorer Pakistanis, and would require some investment, they simply have less ability to do that than a richer middle class Pakistani, so the poor pay the poor tax because they can’t invest capital to bring their costs down.
Low Chinese prices are making it more and more possible though. I hope the future will be really different.
> The south Asian nation is planning to introduce new tariffs for large solar users, as well as changes to fee structures to ensure businesses with panels share equally in the costs of grid upkeep, she said.
Of course. We wouldn’t want the benefit of a public good to accrue to the public now, would we.
https://archive.today/48P6c
Great, you can easily switch them off or even better, store heat under ground for the winter.
Lahore doesn't really have a winter as such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore#Climate
Air conditioning is, however, life-changing.
Thermal energy storage can potentially power air conditioning, but it isn't a very well developed technology.
I feel like this is disingenuous - I have solar, and peak power exceeds demand by a sizeable margin, but there are week long stretches with basically no solar. Given how cheap panels, are, it makes a ton of sense to oversize your system, and charge your batteries in the couple hour stretches where the sun does happen to shine.
How many years before this happens in parts of the United States?
Up to the locals in the US. Depends what their pain threshold is for falling behind and looking a bit behind the times. I think FOMO is going to be a big driver in a few years. This is not a left vs right topic. It's a money topic. And my impression of the US is that they love getting stuff on the cheap. Solar energy should be such a thing and it's getting painfully obvious that the US is paying a steep price where the rest of the world isn't. If I'm reading the situation correct, that is already annoying the hell out of a lot of traditionally republican leading states and not because they are tree-huggers.
The right question to ask is whether places like Mexico are going to politely wait for the US to get its act together or whether they'll just go ahead and start electrifying their country and industry and reducing their cost levels. The current isolationist policy works both ways. Very sunny place, Mexico. Great place for solar and batteries. And once you have those, Chines EVs produced locally might work very well. And they can export those further south.
Mexico could start producing synfuels with abundant solar energy and exporting them to the US, but that is far from the course plotted by President Sheinbaum, even though (or perhaps because) her doctorate is in the use of energy. Instead she's doubling down on oil drilling.
It's going to be more expensive than the fuel the US digs up for quite some time. Synthetic fuels don't really make economic sense without the massive subsidies the US uses to keep e.g. it's agriculture going. There is a lot of discussion around aviation fuels currently. Targets for SAF boil down to mixing in a small percentage of bio fuels with regular fuel. This smooths out the 10x or so price difference of SAF to regular fuel a bit. But it also means it's not all that effective as a way to reduce emissions because only a tiny percentage of the fuel is "clean". And of course producing SAF isn't all that clean either. For example, agriculture is carbon intensive.
The US importing synthetic fuels is not going to be a huge market for economic reasons. There's no logical reason for tax payers to pay Mexicans to make really expensive fuel for them. Just so they can pretend battery electric doesn't work north of the border.
Synthetic fuel at scale is just really expensive. And battery electric is going to take a sledge hammer to any misguided plans around that topic. It's going to get progressively more awkward to build a case for that. All those things where people still hang on to the believe that "surely batteries will never work here" are going to melt away over time. Batteries are going to get a lot cheaper and better over the next decades. And they are pretty good already.
Yeah, biofuels are laughable, but fully synthetic fuel is a plausible contender, if cheap solar energy lets us make cheap fully synthetic fuel.
Your mention of aviation fuel is relevant. That's a context where batteries are not pretty good already, although they are viable for short hops; in aviation, as in shipping, heavier batteries create more energy consumption, so a carrier with a higher specific energy per kilogram is very valuable. Conventional jet fuel is 43MJ/kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Chemical_reacti...) while lithium-ion batteries are up to about 0.8MJ/kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Electrochemical...).
Very crudely, an airplane whose weight is mostly jet fuel can fly about 50 times as far as a rechargeable-battery-powered airplane if both are going the same speed. Rechargeable batteries are 50 times worse than jet fuel. And they're improving slowly; the last time that difference halved was with the invention of lithium-ion battery, which went mainstream about 30 years ago. The previous major improvement was the lead-acid battery 120 years earlier.
However, promising alternative synthetic fuels other than paraffin include aluminum, magnesium, and zinc, which can be burned in aluminum-air batteries, magnesium-air batteries, and zinc-air batteries, respectively. Aluminum and magnesium are 31.0 and 24.7MJ/kg, respectively, but burning them in metal-air batteries instead of in heat engines allows you to extract about twice as much useful energy from the reaction, so they are in practice higher in energy density than current jet fuel.
Current aluminum prices are US$2828/tonne (https://www.lme.com/Metals/Non-ferrous/LME-Aluminium#Overvie...) which works out to 9.1¢/MJ. A barrel of oil is 6 gigajoules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent) and US$58.78 (https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/crude-oil/light-swee...) which is about 0.98¢/MJ. So the price of aluminum would have to drop by about a factor of 5 to make this appealing. It's plausible that this will happen, but not before 02040.
Magnesium is 17050RMB/tonne (https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/magnesium), which is US$2410/tonne, working out to 9.8¢/MJ.
In California, grid-tied rooftop solar was putting energy prices into the negative so often that they reconfigured the NEM to discourage export back to the grid and encourage battery storage.
It seems to have worked, too.[1]
Batteries are the invisible change in the power business. They don't take up much land area. They're not visible to the public. Just being able to charge batteries during low power cost periods changes the whole economics of the industry.
Whether battery banks should be allowed to sell back to the grid is a tough question. Texas says no.[2] It's potentially "dispatchable" power, but only until the battery runs down.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-17/califor...
[2] https://www.ercot.com/mktrules/keypriorities/bes/ktc8
And it's messing with our utilities in BC because we were buying the daytime oversupply in California and selling the hydro generated power back at night. They've had to adjust plans as battery storage comes online.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46074192
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/us-electricity-2025...
Already does in some cases but the utility companies have fought back and they can buy laws and regulations to slow down the process and protect profits.
Imagine being the CCP and you’ve managed to turn your industrial capacity into the world‘s single largest renewable energy source. PV‘s Saudi-Arabia.
Yeah but I think advanced economies can figure out to produce the same things if there's a strategic need - and absorb the cost - you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody, so China doesn't really have that much political leverage in how you use it.
There's also huge internal competition inside China between companies, so they have a harder time fixing prices.
> if there's a strategic need
Nope. A defining mechanism in energy markets is the cost to extract it. There's a reason Saudi Arabia dominates oil, if you can extract it with a shovel. And directly counter to your point, there's a reason, say, Germany can't just kick start a shell gas/oil industry even if it does have the deposits underneath.
> harder time fixing prices
Eh, it's not like the CCP didn't do heavy handed market interventions before, right? I mean some would even argue "fixing prices" is already embedded with the ruling party's name.
> you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody,
What is this even suppose to mean? Of course you can. That is the whole point of having geopolitical leverage.
There were similar comments on HN. The argument goes that since it takes energy to produce PV panels and wind turbines, China effectively is an energy exporting country. What’s even better is some of the PV and turbines are produced with renewable energy. And unlike oil and gas, which are used only once, PV panels and wind turbines generate power for many years.
The argument also has a geopolitical component: PV panels wear down, and by the time yours have too, the energy infrastructure around you will have shifted towards PVs. I.e. your (country’s) energy will be dependent on China.
That is another aspect of “the Saudia-Arabia of PVs”
Unpopular opinion: this is so contentious because it’s more about control.
It's crazy to think that thanks to Starlink, EVs, renewables, a small-ish rural community could become almost independent.
Just missing water and sewage and garbage/recycling, but a rural community does gain some independence via those things you mentioned.
Nah, it's about power (heh!).
Politicians need votes to remain in power. They lose votes if electricity is expensive. Lower demand and therefore low revenue in the face of fixed grid maintenance costs mean prices have to rise. Higher costs to voters terrifies politicians.
Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
It’s similar to how the British empire hated subsistence farming, and always wanted colonial subjects to be economically interacting with either trading companies or the state apparatus.
> Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
All well and good, provided the homeowner opts out of the system. Part of the problem comes when the grid connection is not severed. Using it as a backup option (at the same time as other people, for when the weather is bad) or demanding the grid takes their excess production are counter-productive to the system as a whole.
The payback periods get me confused. A relative set up solar a year ago in one of the sunniest places in Europe, the Canaries, cost €7,000 for 6KW. He just ran the math on it and found out that the payback period is 15 years. The only way to make it profitable is government subsidies. How can it be profitable to install solar in continental Europe where taxes and labor costs are much higher while having much less sun? Why are we using taxpayers' money to subsidize such negative NPV projects?
Your comment appears to be unrelated to Pakistan and, due to the confusion of units, has been reduced to nonsense. Moreover, your implied calculations don't work out.
If we assume that you meant €7000 for 6 kilowatts peak (not 6 kelvin wurtzite henries or 6 kilowatt hours, neither of which is sensible) the probable answer is that your relative paid 25× the current market price for their solar panels and therefore got 25× the payback time. However, if we assume €0.12/kWh and a 20% capacity factor, 6 kilowatts peak would average 1.2 kilowatts, which is 10520 kWh per year, which works out to €1260 per year, which would be a payback time of 6 years, not 15 years.
Moreover, another way of saying that the payback time on a durable investment is 15 years is that the investment returns 6.7% per year. That would be a highly profitable investment, even without government subsidies.
sorry yes. He told me, installation is 6,000 W and is about 91% efficient at peak. 12 460W panels. panels point in optimal direction. In spain he sells excess to grid at €0.04 per KHW. Lowest cost of importing is €0.085 for KHW at night, about €0.22 at peak hours. He ran the numbers on power not bought (self consumption) + power sold, over a year. He said it comes to about €500 for the year. He added this really surprised him and he started asking around, and this seems to be typical for rooftop solar in the Canarias.
That's a 7% yearly ROI, which is a pretty decent number, better than you'd do on average in the stock market and more predictable. If he had a little storage so he didn't have to sell any, it would improve further. But also 6000W of panels in the low-cost category now costs €300: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
You need more information to calculate the ROI. I gave you the peak efficiency, Which comes from clean panels and no clouds. The average efficiency is closer to 70%. While the canaries are pretty sunny, the panels get dirty very quickly (fine dust from Sahara), Actually, if you count cleaning costs, the ROI goes down even more. And also consumptions is at its peak in the evening when there is no sun. He was thinking about getting storage, A Tesla Powerwall 3 installed is about €11,000, No way that is worth it. My impression is that places where ROI is much better is also places where you get more than €0.04 per KWH.
That isn't the efficiency, which is a number somewhere under 23%, dividing the number of joules of light into the panel by the number of joules of electrical power out of it. Maybe you mean that at peak he gets 91% of the advertised 6kW, i.e., 5500W?
Anyway, you said they paid €7000 and get back €500 per year, which is enough to calculate the ROI at 7.1% per year.
Powerwalls are indeed extremely overpriced. But battery prices are down to below US$70/kWh (US$19/MJ, €17/MJ); if we assume the maximum production in a day is about 25%, that's 36 kWh (130MJ), so it would be about US$2500 for that amount of battery. But probably even €500 of battery (7.2kWh) would make a big dent. That would be 1800 watts for four hours in the evening.
Depending on the type of evening consumption, it might be possible to ameliorate it dramatically with various kinds of thermal storage, or even plugging the washing machine into a timer. Those are much cheaper than batteries.
yes 7% ROI if no depreciation, but neither panels nor inverter are expected to last much beyond ten years. I was actually chatting with him just now since I got into this discussion, and he said he also needs a maintenance/emergency callout and cleaning contract, thats about €250 a year. In spite of this, he was still happy with doing this, good for the planet, even if not for this wallet. He also put up a large screen with the relevant numbers to train others in the house to use appliances at optimal times.
Panels are normally warranted not to drop below 80% of rated output after 25 or 30 years, although some are defective and crack within a year or so. But they don't start dropping off more rapidly at that point; rather, their output declines more slowly after that point. Those panels will be fine 50 years from now if he doesn't throw them away.
Inverters are a different problem, and they do in fact die after a few years. But you don't need the inverter to use the energy.
> the probable answer is that your relative paid 25× the current market price
Where do I get 450W panels for $12 each?
pvXchange, but they're €23 because you fucked up the math: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
€12 would be 44× cheaper (7000/6000/(12/450) ≈ 44). Maybe in a couple of years.
I assumed 7k installed, so roughly half for the panels.
So how many do you need to buy to get that €23 price?
A twenty-foot container, I imagine? Retail for onesies seems to be about 4× that.
Typically panels account for about a third of the cost of a turnkey solar power system, but that's largely because of historical design features that are no longer necessary.
> You seem to have created this account just to troll
I find it fascinating that someone is willing to pay for accounts to swing opinions or seed FUD on a topics like solar panels.
It’s happening here, it’s clearly happening everywhere on every topic.
Or someone who lurks here, but never posts. Not everybody has an account here. I was just curious because I was talking my friend who has the solar just earlier today and he was a bit upset when he ran the numbers.
HN accounts don't require payment.
Someone is paying either real people to do this kind of thing, or for bots or LLMs to do it.
Someone wants to sway opinions, and they think it matters enough.
(Accusation removed from parent.)
Those numbers sound wrong.
I have 7.8kw in Canada, and if I paid out of pocket payback would be 6-7 years.
We pat $0.13 per kWh from the grid, get a one for one credit on anything we feed in. System makes 7.8Mwh in a year.
What are your friends numbers?
Grid price is also pre-approved to increase not less that 5% a year forever, so it will only go in my favour.
In spain he pays more than that on average, and only gets €0.04 for sold KWH. If it was one-to-one credit offset, as you have in Canada, it would certainly be very profitable.
So then just use most of your power during the day and you’re better off than Canada.
It’s not hard to use heavy power appliances only during the day.
I got 1kW for my balcony for 250€. Did your friend pay 5000€ just for the mounting?