So yes, rich people can obviously have more of it all, like with everything else that money can buy. But is this really a point worth going in deeper here?
I see the point as in "solar power plus battery is good", creates resillence, please more of it.
Unfair distribution of wealth is a different problem.
And here concreteley the article lacks for me details, what exactly the work on the grid means, if it is really about fossils vs solar, but microgrids that can connect to each other sounds like a pragmatic solution to me.
Unfortunately, all problems are eventually going to come down to this. Or many problems are, if not "all"
We can't fix a lot of the problems facing our society and our planet with "only wealthy can afford this" solutions
And I think, we can't fix a lot of technical problems if we make everything about money distribution.
Besides, solar plus battery became really cheap. And get cheaper every day.
And this work to connect such microgrids is potentially beneficial for poor areas all around the world.
But no, it doesn't solve the issue of extreme poverty, but why would it?
Bigger ones have a better tradeoffs, so I'm not so harsh on towns having their own grids. Still unsure whether it's a good use of funds.
In places like that - that but not necessarily specifically China or Asia, local proprietors would head to forested mountains unfit for residences, and actively desertify it to put on PVs to collect incentives, if incentivized. The cost is externalized and paid collectively in such forms as raised atmospheric CO2 levels and micro disasters like mountain landslides.
Resilient solar-battery off/micro-grid is great if you live "by yourself" in relative sense and doing so would allow removal of electrical transmission lines with own costs and externalities, but it's far from panacea, if not opposite - it's a specific and somewhat radical solution to specific problems.
Now, as to whether such dystopian Bladerunner cities on Earth that has to rely on fission/fusion should exist in real life, it's probably deeply wrong that they do. But we're not cutting down Earth's population by 90% to fix that, and wealth redistribution is a minor part of the reason it would be wrong.
Can you give me one example, where PVs contributed to desertification?
Usually it is the contrary, in the shade of the PVs, more can grow than in direct burning sunlight.
And there are plenty of non forest land, or literal dessert land tp put PV there and if forest gets cut, than for other reasons than PV. And china is actually quite active in combating desertification with green belts and recently, PVs.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/sci-tech/mountaintop-solar-farm...
www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/birds-eye-view-of-the-solar-power-plant-and-lush-royalty-free-image/1338844539
www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/aerial-view-of-solar-power-station-royalty-free-image/1045649830
https://www.ecoportal.net/en/carpeting-mountains-with-solar-...
Just go look at it if you were looking for shocking images. Notice how suspiciously flat patches appear in the mountains just for the PVs and notice how panels often seem recessed below top of existing trees. The process of solar farm construction in such areas begins by clearing out existing life. That's how it's done. It doesn't go like, you just pick a dead land on map and giving out a free nice shed for local scorpions.
I mean, look at even East Coast of the US on Google Maps. Pick any areas just off a city and zoom in. There would be towns, farmlands, forests, mountains, or combinations thereof. If you do the same in the West Coast, you are more likely to hit such suitable flats that can host mega electricity farms and benefit from it, sure, but that's not even universally American thing.
Then you'd ask, can't those deserts like Gobi or Sahara or whatever provide enough land for PVs and PVs be good for those? Maybe, but that's terraforming scale of projects. Not microgrids.
It's not like skyscraper residential buildings exist solely because it's convenient to confine workers near factory sites or because the laborers own nothing - it starts appearing when it becomes impossible to simply distribute immediately available lands and land had become a contested resource. Think why they don't just expand cities outward or build new city cores. They don't because those buildings are solution to that becoming impossible. And with that, think again why they just go out and build those microgrids in cheap unused flat areas outside the city. Because there is no cheap unused flat areas outside the city.
I am not a fan of building much on top of the mountains in general, but the claim was about desertification and at least that link provided nothing about it. Are the others more worth it?
The gettypictures just show solar panels on what was grasland before.
And more people affording their own panels is still a lot more expensive than fixing the grid.
Server rack style, 1200 USD for 4.8 kWh = $250/kWh. Wall-mount, 14.3 kWh for $3.3k = $231/kWh.
These guys seem to be the biggest DIY solar equipment supplier in the US.
Afaik you can get batteries from China (AliExpress) for quite a bit cheaper too.
I set up the batteries and inverter myself, but paid a local installer and his 2 helpers a grand total of $45 to install and ground 10 x 600w panels on my dangerously high metal roof.
If it's the ancient practice of crediting on a one for one basis, yeah that doesn't help. (A look around says that's probably where PR is now). If they credit power delivered to the grid based on conditions when it was delivered, then that might help. With appropriate controls, storage can increase grid stability. It would probably be more cost effective to do utility scale storage projects, but project management is difficult in PR; letting those with personal capital hook up solar+batteries and send some of that onto the grid when demand is high seems useful?
The fact that you can add to the grid by installing solar and battery and connect to the grid in a single afternoon makes it pretty easy these days to have an elastic market that grows until you hit the limit of decentralized production vs. existing transmission architecture... but with the right equipment you can have community sized islands that can be much more immune to instability.
That is not how the electricity market works, in Australia anyway, and somewhat fundamentally everywhere. The network needs to maintain a frequency and voltage for it to be reliable. These change as load and production change. So consumers don't get a choice of which electrons power their house, only who they pay. They pay a 'retailer' who usually has nothing to do with production for a known cost per kwh + fees ahead of time. The market then operates where agreements between parties including retailers and produces (traders and others as well) has a 'market rate' that essentially arbitrage between longer term fixed rates and market rates.
The fact that the stability is tied to frequency and voltage (and infrastructure) means there is a limit to the rate of production and consumption, not to mention electricity is a necessity in the modern age.
In Australia at least we are finding out the hard way about what happens when you privatize a necessity. People will pay whatever it costs, and since the market needs a high level of regulation just to function, a market IMO is just a bad fit for trying to bring costs down rather than just rent seeking.
> The fact that you can add to the grid by installing solar and battery and connect to the grid in a single afternoon
That has become harder in recent time due to areas being over saturated by solar. Cities in Australia can deny you connecting to the grid if there is too much, as well as we have high network voltage detection on inverters which now kick in on many sunny days due to again, too much solar. Electricity network operators pay a large amount of money to services to predict/model how much of the power in their network is coming from solar and where because they commonly don't know, so it becomes a difficult balance of how much solar you are allowed to connect.
> but with the right equipment you can have community sized islands that can be much more immune to instability.
Agreed, but due to the required _shared_ infrastructure for this to work will need public land to connect these islands or even within an 'island', as well as the now private vested interests in rent seeking, this will be a fringe solution only available to those with larger amounts of land like communes or other rural setups. Again, speaking to Australia.
Well regulated markets enable this, charge consumers 0 or even pay them to use energy during the solar maximum, same for industry. People will build storage to make money.
You must have variable pricing driven by markets when you have a lot of variable renewables, fixed rates just don't work. Too much electricity is one of those good problems to have if you manage it correctly. Free or very cheap energy could be a huge competitive advantage for Australia.
In 2022, a lot of retailers nearly went under due to the max price of $14.4k per MWh ($14.4 per kWh, which is usually ~$0.25 for households) being sustained for a longer period cause a few producers had the market over a barrel. The federal government needed to step in and restrict the maximum price for gas (despite Australia exporting >10x more than in produces, we still have to buy it at international market rates), which flowed down to gas peakers which during times of lower than expected energy production act as short term stablisers. In this case we had multiple coal plant failures due to their age/poor upkeep, and likely some manipulation by producers.
Your average household doesn't want to have their energy consumption behaviours dictated by a market. We have a national battery program that creates a VPPs (Virtual Power Plant) and other mechanisms to enable households to somewhat benefit from these market prices and theoretically provide stability to the grid, but it is all quite complicated, and suffers from being able to be gamed. There isn't a simple solution when a market is involved because you have a group of people acting in bad faith to extract the most value for a shared resource that relies on shared infrastructure.
If the network and producers were publicly managed (like the electricity networks use to be and still are in some states), the incentives are a lot better aligned with a stable grid that is affordable for the most number of consumers. It still would be complicated, but a bunch of problems would be simplified, likely traded off for other issues.
One alternative is decentralization, and the article talks about that:
> The town’s local environmental nonprofit Casa Pueblo teamed up with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to develop a way to connect multiple microgrids to exchange power with one another, all without having to be hooked up to Puerto Rico’s grid. The strategy, called grid orchestration, ensures that if power is knocked out on one of the installations, the others aren’t compromised.
Is it the wealthy that are doing that? Maybe? Probably? But isn't that how any R&D technology investment starts?
It's also involving a government-funded lab to re-envision how these systems could work to achieve resiliency through coordinated decentralization. And if there's any truth to trickle-down economics, it would have to be in something that allows for a decentralized approach accessible to many, not a centralized approach that only rewards r > g accumulation. Sounds like a good use of government research funding to me.