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Comment by lliiffee | Hacker News Reader

The project cost £1.66m. With a total of 83 residents, that's about $25,000 per person. It would be interesting to compare this to the total investment needed for a typical non-renewable power infrastructure. This doesn't seem outrageously expensive, though (as the article mentions) this might be out of reach for communities in developing countries.

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Yeah but the developing countries do not have that much of a power requirement. In India most villages would be fine with just the fans and lighting. 5 units (kWh) should be sufficient for the whole day for a household. I am not sure how much of £1.66m was on solar.

5 kwh still sounds like a lot. Our house in the Netherlands uses about 10/day with a family of 6.

Actually a large part of rural India still uses 60/100W light bulbs (filament ones) instead of LEDs as they are much cheaper(1/15th). I took 75W ceiling fans + 100W for the bulbs ~ (75W20hrs + 60W10hrs)*3rooms. I agree this is still on the higher side as all fans won't be running all the time and would be zero during winters (~3 months).

If we look at Google Fiber and start applying that kind of costing model... Most of that money went to digging and laying the underground grid to every building. While not doing it underground would be cheaper, there's still going to be a big outlay in materials and time to run overhead line to every building.

Strikes me that the benefit is more likely to lie in seeing this as a small scale trial of running an entire community largely on renewables? The project cost is a rounding error in EU budget terms.

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