Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

The unstated statistic in this article is that Indonesia's reliance on coal has grown from 20% of national energy production to 40% of energy production over the 2005-2020 period, which accounts for most of that 85% to 97% growth factor.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indonesia-clings-coa...

The slow growth of renewables particularly in remote locations is certainly a good thing, but the actual nation-wide picture is just business-as-usual:

> "The government has pledged to increase the renewable share to 23% by 2025. Still, data from energy think-tank IEEFA shows that about 16 GW of new coal power capacity is expected to come online between 2021 and 2030."

I'm not convinced that this is a case of leapfrogging.

Off grid solar+storage is great when you and everyone around you is using very little electricity. It lets you go from "nothing" to "lightbulb at night" very cheaply, which is a huge improvement.

Once you're using tons of electricity, list a 1st world home does (refrigeration/ac/microwaves/electric ovens/electric stoves/washing machines/vehicles/...), storage would have to be absurdly cheap for it to not be worthwhile to start hooking homes together to load balance and reduce (not eliminate) the need for storage. And then the same logic applies to hooking up cities/towns/villages. And in the end it almost certainly turns out that by the time you're a huge consumer of electricity like the 1st world you have a grid.

A different path, but the same end result.

This sounds nice but in reality you need sophisticated grid controlling measures to have a fixed frequency for many things. This is doable just good to be aware of it.

In many parts of the world the grid is a combination of unreliable or not there at all. And the required level of investment to fix all that is at least short term not keeping up with the increase in demand. So, things are getting worse for people dependent on the grid. And where grids are actually available, they aren't necessarily cheap, which incentivizes people that use a lot of power to invest in alternatives. You see this with e.g. companies exploiting vehicle chargers. They all end up installing solar panels and investing in electricity infrastructure rather than just paying per kwh to their local grid provider. The grid is a last resort for them. This is going to be true for any business where energy is a big component of their cost.

To get reliable and cheap power, people have to invest in their own generation. That's still expensive but increasingly more feasible and critical for especially small businesses. If you run e.g. a small shop and you have perishable goods in a fridge in a tropical country and the power goes out, you basically have a lot of melted / rotten goods after a few hours. Not great. If that happens a lot, your business dies. In the same way, having the AC on or off in a hot country can mean the difference between having your place full of customers or not. It's not optional. If grid power is only available a few hours a day, your business is at risk unless you fix a more reliable supply. Many grids in e.g. Africa are very unreliable and don't have enough capacity.

In many countries people are still relying on generators for this but increasingly solar and batteries are becoming a viable alternative. The upfront cost of this is a big obstacle for many smaller businesses. As is the availability of components. But generators and fuel are also not free. And they break down and need maintenance too. And the exhaust fumes cause health issues.

However, solutions in this space actually have a value and return on investment. So, providing lines of credit for this is actually something that is potentially a profitable business and not just charity. Plenty of entrepreneurs in Africa, the Middle East, parts of Asia, etc. that could use that to bootstrap their businesses and would be able to pay back loans with interest.

I'd say micro grids will be a reality long before, if ever, people figure out cheap, reliable grid power in many of these places.

> analogized to how developing countries leapfrogged to wireless telecom without the expensive wired last-mile telecom stage

Another example of this sort of dynamic are skipping credit cards for app based payments. Or not having much of a postal service because email.

In all these cases I think its more of a shortcut than truly leapfrogging. Not as good in terms of redundancy (good for reliability) and interoperability.

Don't really see why people with solar that are connected to the grid actually want to install batteries at all. There's the cost, fire risk, and just the simple alternative of selling excess production for free/discounted grid usage at other times. You're still saving the planet to the same degree, and doing it more cheaply too, with fewer things to go wrong.

If even battery fire risk bothers you, you should really reconsider burying bombs in your backyard.

Compressed gas cylinders are _terrifying_, a larger one with an inert gas could level your entire house, and a hydrogen one could level the entire block.

I can get quite a lot of night time light out of a $65 100Whr lipo and a $50 inverter. That sounds much better to me than a generator.

From TFA: 97% of Indonesians are on the power grid; those are the ones who'd ostensibly be selling back (not these microfinanced units in the remaining 3%).

This was kind of the rural electrification challenge the US faced. Opting to wire almost everyone up was a costly endeavor at the time. But one we take for granted now.

Given where the world is now, given how much easier decentralized solar & renewable are than the massified power generation of yore, I'm more conflicted today than I am comfortable with. The idea of sprawling microgrids, communities giving local access maybe cheap may grow up, but likely undrr diverse & inconsistent & biased policies... Likely as an Uberified enshittifying take on what a public utility ought be.

I find it more likely that the poor will want to disconnect from the grid, because the grid is fundamentally about reliability. When your own systems fail, you still want power while you are waiting for repairs. At least if you can afford it.

I hope to get a battery system to offset some of my costs, but I can't forsee not being connected to the grid as backup and to sell some excess energy back anyway.

I don't have an electric car either, so while my current solar system (6.6kW) could power my current household energy use basically year-round (if I had sufficient battery capacity), I would only be able to slow charge solely off that, so I expect I will still be buying energy from the grid once I get an EV for times I want to fast charge (probably 11kW three phase), even with the solar and a hypothetical battery.

This is already happening in South Africa. The grid pretty much can't provide and is now turned off for people for up to 40% of the day.

So over the last decade, a huge amount of solar installations have made people a few small steps away from going off grid. But separate to that, they're paying less and less (0 in some cases), so "the grid" is stuck keeping: subsidized customers, customers who use almost 0 and customers that use lots illegally and don't pay.

The power utility's answer: tax users that don't use any electricity. And not just a connection type flat fee. They want to punish people that use very little, ironically after begging people to "please stop using so much electricity".

For most people in urban and suburban areas, a grid connection is going to be sufficiently financially attractive that the rational thing to do is keep it.

For one thing, maintaining sufficient storage at home to fully recharge a car overnight would be prohibitively expensive, but maintaining a grid connection to allow you to do so is cheap.

The process of ripping up the grid is more likely to occur (and in fact is already starting to happen) in remote areas. Traditionally urban consumers have cross-subsidised some remote electricity connections but in many cases it’s cheaper to buy those consumers off-grid systems or independent microgrids than maintain grid infrastructure connecting those locations.

The key use for grids that can't be replaced is industrial use. Some companies need very-high quality power, in terms of frequency stability or downtime. Other companies require high volumes.

For these users, it's much easier to buy service than to start a dedicated service within the company responsible for, essentially, setting up their own grid.

Once you have that, connecting nearby homes cheaply is easy, and it's really a rich person's pastime to build an off-grid alternative with equivalent quality if you can get connected.

It's just evolution. At this point the price of solar on your roof with some batteries is getting low enough that it earns itself back even without subsidies. As this stuff gets cheaper, more people get access to this stuff and the market grows. As it does, prices drop further.

It's not happening overnight so people and grid suppliers have a chance to adapt. But yes, bad things generally happen to people and companies that can't adapt to changes. Ironically, people that are in developing countries tend to be more adaptable. If something works, they'll be all over it.

The monopolist's response to this is indeed to push for things to be illegal and expensive. Which ironically just speeds up their demise. Places where this happens simply become less competitive.

People move to where the jobs and economics are better. Also politically. Politicians blocking sane policies on this front are going to have a hard time. People are going to call out their bullshit and point to neighbors where the grass is greener and ask hard questions. Inevitably a few less enlightened politicians are going to insist on finding this out the hard way and then get voted out of office. The rest will learn from their examples; that's already happening. Republicans like cheap power just as much as Democrats. This is not a left-right topic anymore. People still bicker over climate change. But cheap power is something everybody can agree is a nice thing to have.

Doesn't kerosene burn more cleanly than diesel though? You might save lives from fires but lose them from poor air quality.

My Bahasa Indonesia is not strong enough to read that article but it seems to be referencing this:

https://www.ahp.id/brighter-days-ahead-as-indonesias-ministr...

Reading the details is seems like it is still pretty true that there are regulations that don't allow households to sell power back to the grind. There are not regulations forbidding the practice but even with these reforms the practice seems regulated in a way to make it difficult and give the power generation and distribution companies total control:

"Like the previous regime, the New Regulation limits the capacity of the rooftop solar system installed by the customer of such system within the business area of a state-owned entity holding an IUPTLU to 100% of their connected power. However, rooftop solar customers whose systems are connected to other IUPTLU holders besides a state-owned entity may be subject to a different limitation as determined by the relevant IUPTLU holders. These holders must declare their respective limitation on an annual basis.."

My reading of this is that it is now possible for a IUPTLU to allow someone to offset more than 100% of their electricity usage but it is not required for any of them to provide that option, just register the terms with the regulator.