A $90B world bank plan to electrify Africa has started | Hacker News Reader

A $90B world bank plan to electrify Africa has started

bloomberg.com

25 pointsCapstanlqc13 comments

It seems like each time I am in a call with a colleague located near Chennai, India, the call will have a high chance of being interrupted by a power cut. It serves as a good reminder that access to a reliable electricity grid is awesome and should not be taken for granted.

Like mobile networks being easier to build than landlines; now is a great time for Africa to electrify more. Solar and battery storage has never been cheaper, more portable, or more useful.

That seems like a non sequitur. Meaningful electrification that enables industrialization will require building a real grid, not just isolated islands of solar power generation and battery storage. Grid infrastructure construction and maintenance isn't getting much easier.

Why?

Why isn't it possible to run heavy industry with purpose built solar/battery arrays?

Is this unique to Africa or is it a global thing?

When you have a connected grid, it needs to ensure the entire grid operates on the same frequency. Production and consumption affect the frequency, so they have to be perfectly balanced. This is a hard problem when it needs to be done at scale of entire countries or continents.

Traditionally this has been managed basically in an analog way by having huge fossil- or nuclear-powered steam turbines that spin at the desired frequency. Apparently a spinning mass is so good at stabilizing grid frequency, that massive flywheels are being added to the grid to replace the role of the fossil turbines.

Our old power grids make solar and wind production merely follow the existing grid frequency, rather than dictate one, so at least in our grids pure solar couldn't work. I don't know if there's a solid technical reason for it, or that's just how it's been set up.

That's a global thing. Batteries are simply too expensive and not available in sufficient quantities to provide reliable base load power for heavy industry. Perhaps that might change in a few decades but that's the reality today.

So you're saying that African countries could run heavy industry without a national or international grid if they used non solar/battery to generate the power?

No, that's not what I wrote. In theory it's possible to build a power plant on site as part of a larger industrial facility as long as there's a reliable energy source (i.e. something that still works when the sun isn't shining). But that usually won't be cost effective compared to pulling power from a stable grid.

Why isn't that cost effective?

I'm coming from the perspective of Alberta where they often do this in heavy industry because the resource they're mining happens to be fuel.

What happened to the Grand Inga Dam project? I thought that's what this story is about.

https://archive.is/zuVdE

I see more Mercedes-Benz and Toyota Land Cruiser sales on the horizon.

Hopefully they start with property rights.

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