In Lebanon, solar power is booming
sapiens.org
sapiens.org
Electricity distribution companies would keep on increasing prices to make up for lost revenue from stealing. On other hand, stealing kept on increasing.
In recent years, huge chunk of public have pivoted to installing solar panels for water heater etc. When I was a kid, solar water heater was found only on upper middle and politician's home. Now it's very common. This is welcome progress and inadvertent good for environment since the real motivation is to free self from manipulation of electricity companies.
a. Tier 1 would be state capitals, Tier 2 would be prominent cities in that state, Tier 3 would be rest of district headquarters.
I have never heard that before, cities like Ranchi can hardly be described as "Tier 1". The HRA classification given on the Wikipedia page[1] is much better guide to what my intuitions are on what people mean by tier 1-3.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_cit...
Finally someone starting from the bottom of the latin alphabet to categorize something that can grow over time (i.e. Delhi becomes even bigger, much more bigger than other X cities, it will move to a W category).
Yes, I'm looking at you, European energy classes system and yours A+++++++++ classes.
"This gauge system originated in the number of drawing operations used to produce a given gauge of wire."
And the scale needs to be changed regularly anyways because the criteria are not the same, so a 8 now would not even be guaranteed to be a 8 tomorrow.
The European system already resets the scales after a while (for instance the new ones don't have a + yet) and it is not just about changing min and max but many things are reevaluated based on new knowledge, so an item that was B can no be D while another one that was C stays C. Be it number or letters it is a breaking change so you might as well go with the intuitive system that matches most people's intuition
You will know that, when measuring something, the higher, the better, for whatever definition of "better" applies (less CO2, less Watts, more good nutrients etc). If the scale changes, or the definition of "better", you now have "9" appliances, which will be better than "3" appliances with their 15 years old label still attached to them. With the current system you have to check "oh, it's A+ from 2017, I need to check the actual numbers anyway".
And yes, I understand that those labels are mainly directed at new items bought right now, and only as "local" comparison. And that if you sell a "new" appliance today manufactured 5 years ago and the labels have changed, you need to update the labels on it. Still, it's cumbersome. You either update the scale ever 2 years or keep adding "+" for a while.
EDIT: also, houses. those fuckers tend to last for tens of years while being sold and bought all the time in the meanwhile.
Further when you change the scales you can't compare old and new. Is my A+ rated fridge better or worse than a new A rated fridge. Is it worth me updating it?
A system of 1 to 5 can scale upwards. Alternatively set A as the best possible score as allowed by the laws of physics.
Yeah, no. There is no state in India that has exorbitant electricity prices for domestic consumers. Virtually every state discom sets the base tarrif below cost. People steal electricity because they can, not because they can't afford it.
My parents have had solar thermal collectors for hot water on their roof in Lebanon for 3 decades now... other than a few days in winter when you need to use the electric heater, its been a near perfect fit for purpose.
https://saice.org.za/downloads/SAICE-2022-Infrastructure-Rep...
Cant argue with it being good for buisness, its just bad for the people living in such a society.
South Africa is not falling victim to US lobbying. Its problems in this area are as listed by previous poster.
As for the other countries: it's very difficult to keep any state services running well. They have to constantly resist bloat; budget defence strategies; policies that make it impossible to remove low-performing employees; and they have little or not incentive to do any of those things. The only way they ever worked was when run by personally motivated leaders who wanted to run them leanly, or (more often) on fabulously wealthy economies that can afford them. Sadly those economies have taken huge strain for various reasons.
There's no need to invoke silly anti-US conspiracy theories.
> Cant argue with it being good for buisness, its just bad for the people living in such a society.
You've taken a sliver of truth and ran away with it into the abyss.
It's not privatized at all, it's a state-owned monopoly. So basically the exact opposite of what you're complaining about.
Privatization, i.e. selling off individual power plants to private entities and allowing private entities to generate more power is probably the best way out of their electricity crisis.
That's not to say that nationalized or majority-government-owned companies can't fuck up either, France's EDF or Germany's Deutsche Bahn prove that, but at least the government there can be held accountable by the general public in elections.
The problems Europeans complain about are on a much higher level and can't be compared to having 2 to 4 hours blackouts every day for the majority of the year, or to having the water cut off regularly or various other examples of state failure.
> but at least the government there can be held accountable by the general public in elections.
This is tenuous at best in advanced democracies and practically non-existent in many developing countries, like South Africa.
South Africa has had rolling blackouts since around 2007, and the same government that's caused this mess is still in power.
Not disputing that - but I fear that allowing private/venture capital to intervene will further solidify existing discrimination issues in the long term, even if it may show quick improvements short term.
South Africa's discrimination issues are largely due to the state and not private capital or the private sector.
The private sector on the whole would be happy to hire and provide services to any race or ethnicity, but the state has always aggressively intervened in favor of certain ethnic groups. During Apartheid it was intervening in favor of white people, today it's in favor of black Africans.
Many of the current discrimination issues are a result of the (Apartheid) state actively impeding the economic development of black people.
The current electricity crisis is in no small part due to the current state actively discriminating against skilled white employees (forcing them into early retirement, hiring based on race and not skills, forcing Eskom to procure from black-owned companies who are often just middle-men adding huge markups due to their regulatory capture).
But I can tell you that the current situation is only making the divide between rich and poor greater. The worse it gets the greater the divide will grow as basic things like water and electricity become more scarce.
It’s not about allowing private/venture capital to intervene. People are going off grid because it’s the only choice. Unless you’re talking about allowing private companies to provide power to the grid? I’m not sure what the solution is there.
However now with many more highrises being built they no longer are as popular and we are forced to use electric heaters.
From what I understand, the Lebanese are used to working around the failings of their government in all aspects of life: work, shopping, now banking, and even education where possible. I don't know about water supplies or roads, but from what I heard the Lebanese view their government more as a siphon of their earnings and resources than as a provider of services and order.
That’s fascinating! Can you say more?
It's likely a safety issue in the case of grid-connected solar installations. These panels are designed to send excess electricity to the grid, and if the grid is down, the utility needs to make sure that busted cables are not carrying electricity... for the safety of the repairmen.
https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/do-blackouts-...
You need to move up to more expensive models that support “islanding” to be able to use solar power while the grid is down. For some reason it appears that this type of inverter isn’t legal in Israel?
In case the main grid goes off, your equipment is supposed to stop working so that it doesn't feed power backwards into the grid while some person is trying to fix whatever broke, so unless you have a battery/UPS and a large switch to flip, your solar panels "die" along with the grid.
The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up.
Totally separated solar panels would also mean you barely have any electricity on that circuit for half of the year.
Another option is an inverter that can sense the net and switch that flip automatically, but they are more expensive and still not legal everywhere because it's not really needed in Western European countries.
The installation had to be certified by the electricity company to ensure that it operates safely in the event of a grid power outage, but (in theory as we've not had a power cut since installation) it should all work fine.
Many a datacenter outage could have been prevented had there been more regular testing of all the components involved.
AFAIK the latter part is now less and less true in Germany because the price for selling excess back is only a fraction of the cost of getting power out of the grid, so people are installing batteries, heat storage and controllers that switch heavy consumers like their heat pump according to other loads in their house.
The naive solution would be to have a small 12v automotive battery and 240v inverter to generate the sine wave, and to use it only after fully disconnecting from the grid. However the sine wave that 240v inverters create are "digital" sine waves - they are easily discerned from the real analogue sine waves that a power station produces with spinning armatures and flywheels.
"My parents have had solar thermal collectors for hot water on their roof in Lebanon for 3 decades now"
For 30 years now your parents have circumvented the state. Welcome to Lebanon.
> Basically, Lebanon had 30 years to figure out how to build basic infrastructure like a proper electrical grid and production (from 1990, the end of the civil war to present). Instead, crooks, thieves and fraudsters figured out how to bilk the nation of billions while leaving subpar services in their wake.
Why do you put "environment" and "pollution" in quotes? My guess is you don't believe, or mean to convey that you believe, that these are phony concepts or issues, but that lower income people treat these as someone else's concern.
I find this linguistically interesting. Someone could write a paper about this. Perhaps someone has.
That's the sad truth.
I mean, they do care about them, but their lives already suck a ton so distant doom is not really on their radar when faced with constant, present doom.
Simple example: EVs are arguably less polluting. So there might be a need for a policy to ban ICEs, which are much, much less expensive monetarily. That would mean poor people wouldn't be able to buy and use cars, at all. So poor people will obviously vote against that. It both makes sense and it's sad at the same time.
Oh, to clarify: rich people also pollute a ton and don't care about the environment, but they have the luxury of not caring if environmentally sound but more expensive policies are adopted (they can go "whatever" and do the right thing with no major personal loss for them).
On top of that, it is the rich people's responsibility to find environmentally sound policies which are acceptable to everyone, since they're the ones with most of the power.
Edit: Oh, you don't have to believe me. Go talk to 100 low income people (construction workers, cooks, waiter, nannies, agricultural workers, etc) about the environment, it will be quite eye opening for ivory tower folks.
People once had no writing system at all. Then they had no way to represent speech sounds. Then they had no way to represent individual phonemes. They had to invent spaces between words, punctuation, capital letters. I expect the Egyptians had no way to represent what was represented here with quotation marks. I'm curious how long and how widely quotation marks have been used this way.
> The use of a graphic symbol on an expression to indicate irony or dubiousness goes back much further: Authors of ancient Greece used a mark called a diple periestigmene for that purpose.
> In certain Ethiopic languages, sarcasm and unreal phrases are indicated at the end of a sentence with a sarcasm mark called temherte slaqî, a character that looks like the inverted exclamation point (U+00A1) (¡).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
> Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes, sneer quotes, and quibble marks) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense.
> Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression "so-called"; they may imply skepticism or disagreement, belief that the words are misused, or that the writer intends a meaning opposite to the words enclosed in quotes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) wrote in his Etymologiae that the diple was used to mark quotations from the Bible. He mentions how diple periestigmene (dotted diple) were used to mark dubious passages.
A much more interesting piece than I expected, though I will note that some European countries have been hard hit in the energy sector of late as well, what with France rationing power this winter, for example.
Edit: Let me once again suggest we rely too much on generated electricity and should shoot for a return to passive solar design and daylighting to help stabilize the world economy.
Said like that it sounds like rolling blackout and the state enforcing energy consumption at gun point.
There was a lot of noise because the government planned some of these things. But in practice it meant reducing the temperature of public swimming pools a bit, reducing/shutting down public lighting deep in the night, reducing temperatures in office building by one or two degrees.
I would even say this "stressor" will be beneficial, at least at a local level.
The real downside is the increased energy bill for people.
Finally, a large part of this issue is self-inflicted as a failure to plan power plants maintenance.
IMO what's bad is some people's expectations. One of the countries within the power grid is at war. Some people expect that to have no impact on the grid.
The problem, at least for the sorry state of electricity prices, isn't that Ukraine was at war... it was/is that the French did an absurdly large bet on nuclear power while at the same time tying at least 40% of heating to resistive heating, but failed to have a backup plan other than "hope the rest of Europe has excess capacity" once it became clear that Flamanville was under massive delays, and on top of that they massively neglected maintenance of their aging nuclear fleet even before Covid hit and prevented maintenance. They also did not plan ahead for climate change-induced massive droughts that led to an almost complete lack of cooling water for the plants.
They were essentially closing their eyes to the pile-up of delays at Flamanville and as a result they had a "perfect storm" event in the summer.
And which is my main issue with nuclear power: it isn't distributed, but centralized and heavily dependent on governments and extreme long-term-planning. Which is a recipe for disaster. The chance that Flamaville would be delivered late is about 100%. Reacting to rapid changes like a war (spiking fuel prices or making NG unattainable) always slow, and always late if possible at all.
So, aside from all the other arguments against nuclear power, it is slow, expensive, centralized and heavily dependent on governments; it's the closest you'll get to a government-ran electricity production. All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite.
The entire opposite is solar: heavily distributed, privately owned and immensely fast. Wind is somewhere in-between, cheaper and faster to build than a CHP, but obviously more centralized than solar.
They are opposites on "centralisation" vs "decentralisation". With solar, I, a private citizen, can generate electricity, store it, sell it, expand it, mine bitcoin with it, and so fort. With Nuclear, I'm completely at the whims of a government and a semi-private monopolist. "Free-market-nuts" should therefore hate Nuclear and love solar. Yet the opposite is true. And I find that remarkable.
That one is actually easy to answer: Most of the European left does not like nuclear because of cost externalization - let's be real: it's not today's rate payers that are going to fund the decades worth of work needed to dismantle the plants (e.g. the AKW Greifswald in Germany has already been taking 30 years with at least 15 more years planned [1]) or to safely store all that nuclear waste for likely hundreds if not thousands of years, it's the tax payers of the future. On top of that come the enormous and un-insurable financial risks of disasters: Chernobyl happened 35 years ago and still you can't eat game or shrooms in Bavaria without running them in front of a Geiger counter (not to mention that Chernobyl is in an active war zone with radiation-releasing disruptions having happened as a part of the war, as are about a dozen other plants that are, to make it worse, even being actively shot at), the cost of the Fukushima cleanup is estimated to run into 200 billion dollars.
In contrast, the European right wing loves nuclear precisely because it is so "cheap" on paper with ~13 ct/kWh... it's their usual playbook of conveniently ignoring the above-mentioned externalities.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/2021/42/rueckbau-kernkraftwerke-atomauss...
It took decades of massive government subsidies for solar panel production to scale up and advance enough to make solar as affordable as it is today. The same could be achieved with nuclear, with the additional benefits of not having the additional costs of storage and transmission infrastructure, which push up the real cost of solar to "$472 per MWH":
https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine the price of gas and electric power in the European Union has gone up enormously.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/drastically-reducing-our-powerbi...
We still use too much gas to heat our homes, but I believe if we had had the capacity expected we could have reduced that substantially by having people use electric heaters without raising everyone’s electricity bill hugely .. but alas not enough plants online have lead to France feeling the pain like everyone else.
You can actually smell a difference. I live in non-industrial North of the country basically in the country side. Nearest town has 5k people and even here when temperatures dropped I could smell shitty coal being burned when I went to town. I know the smell because I have a hobby forge and I use (good) coal sometimes. I have to say this is the first time in my life I could actually smell it in the air used by other people here. This is a heavily forested region and most people used wood as fuel. However with current prices and availability, coal (and shitty one too) is back.
As for prices I can assure you it could've been much worse if not for the state subsidies that were put in place very quickly and the state bringing in coal on massive ships from abroad. I heat my house with wood pellets and a "smart" furnace that has very high efficiency. Also I have a benefit of good insulation. In previous years I would pay about $500 for a year's supply of fuel (this is just house heating, water for bathrooms is heated with electricity). This year I bought before the majority of the price increases hit and I paid $1200 (this is for 2.5 tons of the "premium" version of the stuff). Then I got $800 back from the state as heating subsidy. So overall it cost me less than in an usual year.
Then there is the state sanctioned freeze on the price of gas for private people (not businesses) and same for electricity until you use up 2MWh.Imagine how bad it would be without it. Still this cost is well worth it.
Source: I've spent a lot of time in West Africa.
This became a bigger problem in South Africa with its reliable load shedding schedules.
But if you can't get the energy to the consumer because of theft, then only people who can afford it and have space can use it.
I also suspect one needs grid scale to balance out the fluctuations of renewables to be honest
I would suggest bringing a decent powerbank though to keep the phone charged.
Unfortunately most lebanese live in apartments, and if a resident or two already called dibs on the roof, you’re out of luck.
Tangent, price of fuel/diesel used to be fixed by gov subsidies. Most of our (very tiny) amount of money left has been smuggled across the border to Syria. Same applies to bread, flour etc..
Is there a precedent for this happening in the US, i think insulin is way cheaper in mexico but I dont hear stories about it being smuggled to the states
Plenty of cases like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/03/06/this-cou...
Alot of local government health plans started using it, but it is now illegal for most purposes.
https://www.healthcarelawinsights.com/2015/11/court-strips-i...
Actual prescription drugs being imported wholesale is rare because the penalties are pretty high for that. There is a somewhat related "diverted drugs" industry which is basically where people who get HIV medications for free from the government/insurance sell for them like 5 cents on the dollar for cash only for those to be resold a bunch of times to "wholesalers" before ultimately ending up in a pharmacy again - these kinds of sketchy secondary wholesalers are where counterfeits/illegally imported drugs would probably end up though. Nothing on the scale of what happens in Lebanon but if you read https://www.drugchannels.net / the WSJ it shows up every now and then.
Wind loading is often very large. Structural engineers are aware of this, the general population isn't.
Basically, a really shitty situation is driving something that you are seeing as good. Lebanon at this point is pretty close to a failed state. The solar power boom is basically the populace losing faith in the government to provide basic infrastructure.
I'll be investing in solar powers and portable generators next. Me and my motorbike are gonna go full-solar this year .. and I live in a wealthy nation that is in relatively good stance, energy-sector -wise.
The benefits outweight the disadvantages and effort required. There is nothing quite so satisfying as to navigate traffic silently, not contributing to everyones' lung disease as I pass by ..
In western countries, and especially in the USA, people mostly want to live in a private house, with two or more cars. If those vehicles are electric (and that's the future we're pointed to), I think solar panels would provide a tiny share of the electricity required for this way of life.
When living in a large city building, the energy required for each family is much smaller since cars are not needed and since heating etc is lower than in individual houses. In that case, solar panels are more useful, though not enough to be independent.
Solar/wind in combination with natural gas is very profitable in the UK as long the natural gas is cheap enough. Right now that is not the case so the cost of the energy grid in UK is extremely high, and much higher than in solar heavy countries located next to deserts that don't need to use natural gas to cover all those rainy and snowy days.
The technology is improving so rapidly you can't use stats from last year.
There would be generators owned by mafia type people that would sell electricity to neighborhoods.
Once we ran out of dollar currency to buy gas people resorted to solar
Syria’s Surprising Solar Boom: Sunlight Powers the Night in Rebel Idlib https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/world/middleeast/syria-so...
With starlink the third world will have options for internet too. Now, starlink probably can't serve billions of people, but it can still be an option, especially for rural.
For new cells, probably the best option is to try and find a good deal on LFP cells, though in the U.S. at least they tend to be really overpriced. A BMS will be needed too.
Connect a few V2G cars to the apartment building as well to soak up the excess supply in the daytime and demand at night, and pretty soon we have a robust solution.
V2G (or generally, electric) cars are absurdly expensive even in Western countries.
The advent of the sodium ion 150 wh/kg (CATL in mass production this year) should drop the price and increase availability without the Lithium supply issue. Also, LFP / LMFP will hit 200+ wh/kg this year in production (CATL as well, and others) ... needs lithium, but don't require cobalt or nickel as I understand it.
The first world smug answer is that the second and third world will tolerate less reliability. They apparently already do, but they gain more control with the panels.
Gravity based storage (flywheels or heck, pulleys) may be good enough for non-first-world expectations as well. Generally it won't work for first world expectations. Flywheels would probably be sufficient.
The market should be huge though, in the billions of people. Again, a smug first world answer is that the "decarbonization" problem needs to be prioritized, so as much solar/wind/storage needs to be focused on the first world grids to get consumer transportation and power generation on BEVs and solar/wind as quickly as possible.
But again I like to think that solar (home panels on roof) + wind (in the sense of a village megawatt turbine in a rural village) + personal BEVs (electric scooter, e-bike) + starlink terminal should be so empowering to a rural second/third world community.
Heck, think about Australia, a "first world country" but basically a bunch of cities and very very rural surroundings. It has all the infrastructure / distance / spreadout issues that America has but on steroids.
Now, I don't live there and don't know the terrain beyond the fact that it is grassland / desert in the middle of the country, and a lot of it. You know what that's perfect for? Solar and Wind. Australia could likely start to economically develop more of its interior without huge infrastructure projects like transmission lines and huge amounts of cell towers and the like: starlink for communications relays, some local 5g towers for distributing the bandwidth to villages, solar for homes, a village wind turbine for more "local grid" power, and that leaves: storage and uh... water.
And roads.
I really do view this as a very empowering opportunity for tribal and indigenous populations which almost always exist in minority political positions in central governments. What is the primary means of denial of opportunity and resources to these political minorities? Infrastructure.
The fact that power and communications can be so effectively decentralized and locally controlled for wind / solar / battery / starlink is a fundamental game changer to these people. Look at our native american populations: the poverty in these communities (if they don't have the casino deal) is striking, and they are far away from centralized infrastructure.
I'm not saying having your own wind/solar/starlink comms will solve all the problems, but it is empowering to a community and individual people that may live there.
The tragedy of the strong Republican character of rural America is that the same thing effectively goes for almost all rural communities: cheaper and better power, cheaper and better communications, improve the appeal of moving urban and suburban workers to more remote rurals and improve their economic quandry of aging populations and population loss. At the same time, increase housing availability and affordability to more people by making the rural areas more accessible.
Wow, that was meandering, but anyway, I think the focus on alternative energy is getting too far towards grid centric just because it is a bit cheaper on cost/kwhr. There should be strong focus on home / community solar/wind/battery storage and development.
And home storage is a key aspect to it. IMO, it is largely solved technologically for the 1-2 days of storage with sodium ion batteries, you just need the scaling. Maybe you have a gas generator for really long periods, which isn't ideal for carbonization, but this is kind of like the hybrid car situation: use smaller batteries to maximize the available total battery supply across as many cars as possible to maximize the daily miles that are all-electric, but still have an ICE for long trips. That way you get 90% electrified miles, 10% for the extreme.
We missed the boat on that in cars. That should have been policy enacted 15-20 years ago to get the ball rolling (five years after the prius and insight), now all the car companies are jumping to pure-BEV (because otherwise the CEO gets fired... see: VW, BMW, etc).
We can still do the same with home storage: handle 70-90% of the load levelling with a 1-2 day battery, and the other 10-30% you use grid power or if that's not available, a gasoline or natural gas or diesel generator or fuel cell or whatever.
You can enjoy him being roasted here: https://youtu.be/X4gt7jL0rP0?t=54
I grew up in that part of the world too and our government completely failed to provide basic electricity and everyone resorted to either solar or generators.
I have resisted the idea of Li-ion battery in the house because of fire risks and costs. If Na-ion battery tech or one of the many promising battery tech being talked about every week comes to life soon, I'd jump on it.
The vast majority of battery backup solutions in 2022 and forward are LFP tech, which is much safer than cylindrical Li Ion cells.
It also doesn’t help when political class is protected by foreign governments (USA & Iran) so change is unlikely also dangerous.
Our problem is that we’re too diverse and fixated on religion. I worry about America if they continue fixating on identity politics with race and genders
I disabled our shower by forcing the taps shut with spanner, the tap washers I prefer are ok for this.
Attached a shower head hose to the bath tap, so now all we have is a shower head you have to hold and mostly sit or squat to use it.
This has eliminated certain individuals from emptying the hot water system while washing their hair, and my own tendency to use a fair bit of hot water while standing in the shower.
Bit of a hack, YMMV.
Vs alternatives like using a flash boiler, or convincing your government to reduce the water that the agriculture industry can use, or adding a timer on the shower?
I don't care about water usage, it's extremely cheap here and highly recyclable. That's why I framed my comment with the energy conservation context.
I guess this makes at least some sense though? A sizable proportion of the heat from shower water must go into water vapour that evaporates into the air as the droplets fall from shower head to floor drain. If you go into an unventilated room where someone has had a shower & you’ll find the air both very warm & very damp!
Using a heat recovery system like this also means you don’t need to pull cold dry air into the bathroom from outside in order to avoid condensation problems - the heat recovery also pulls the water out of the air - so it saves a considerable amount of energy that way too.
Whether these are enough to offset the installation cost I don’t know.
In winter one would like the hot humid air from the bathroom to be heat exchanged and heat dumped back into the property. In summer perhaps feed the input airflow for a water heat pump and again dump out the humid air.
Either way, we leave a lot of efficieny the table.
https://www.homedepot.ca/en/home/categories/building-materia...
As for the hot humid bathroom air, that also exists in the form of ERV (energy recovery ventilators). For well sealed houses you route all the exhaust and intake for the home to one place where there is a heat exchanger to minimize the losses from getting fresh air into the house.
I expect the worst of it to be when (former) middle class residing in suburban sprawl realise they cannot afford a car any more : think yellow vests (aka "roundabout folks"), but worse.
* due to political instability and mismanagement the economy is unstable and unable to support fuel imports for the grid
* the same economic instability makes it hard for private actors to import fuel for generators as well
* Solar doesn’t require ongoing imports of fuel priced in foreign currency
How do I use as much electricity as Elon musk does running the Twitter servers?
Start your own cryptocoin and promote it. Then other people will spend megawatts of their own electricity to make you money. Er, make themselves money.