Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year
reuters.com
reuters.com
Pakistan's grid prices tripled or more since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, because the extremely mismanaged and poorly designed electricity system+economy could not handle the energy price shock. This spiraled into rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which exacerbated the grid problems even more.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@31.3611237,74.2493456,357m/data...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@24.8014179,67.0460688,415m/data...
how it exacerbated problems exactly?..
I’ve only ever rented though. Are connection fees something that homeworkers think about?
Possibly we will have to see changes to account for this sort of stuff at a more granular level, as the grid becomes more dynamic. But, that’s a future we should be actively looking to design for, as the energy supply mix is going to change whatever anybody thinks about that. Can’t beat energy falling from the sky, on price…
My monthly electricity bill in Sweden, averaged over a year to 1600KWh/month, is approximately €90 production, €50 transmission fee, €25 fixed connection-size fee (25A, 400V), €70 national electricity tax and €50 VAT for a total of €285/month.
We'll be moved to yearly-peak-based transmission tariff in 2027 (European law), but for now I don't need to worry about plugging in the car to chargeon cold days or taking shower when someone is cooking.
It basically pays off the grid stability provision bids for fast-response power, and the transmission itself.
It'd likely be helpful if the peak part could be regulated in a way that's more condusive to match the actual impact you create on transformer sizing, not the worst-case impact you might have. Because there's a difference between a mostly-uncorrelated peak of shower+cooking vs. the car+cold day, because your neighbours don't shower the same time, but the several hours of charging do often overlap and the cold is the same across a neighbourhood that shares a local substation.
But yeah, for the most part, transformer size isn't that large of a contributor to overall electricity provision expenses, so I don't expect that to be a significant problem by that 2027 law.
The grid becomes an insurance policy. In that case it is justified to ask for the insured party to pay their share of the system costs; both an energy fee and transmission/distribution/generation capacity fee.
[1] There is a price for the first 50 units you consume, then a higher price for the next 150 units, etc. Similar system to income taxes.
Alternatively it's also practical for such solar situations to bill for market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately; this doesn't correctly attribute transformer and other transmission equipment expenses between solar houses and non-solar houses, but it's still handling the grid tie solar load on the grid's power plants during periods of very little sun.
What an interesting metric. Wouldn't even a very cheap and small battery (definitely small enough to keep inside an appartment) provide enough smoothing to, like, halve this peak number? You could rig it to not even output energy until you are beyond the current year's peak usage... How much money would you save this way?
I just feel this number is so prone to small mistakes (grandma plugs in the wrong things at the wrong times) and hacks (like the above) that the relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate.
> market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately
I am currently on a plan with 5 minute market rates, can buy and sell in (sell prices can go negative - as can buy, actually), all automated. At least I feel we am working with the grid, not against it, and we make a small net profit (before depreciation).
Like namibj mentioned, this does not apply for residential contracts.
It's still much closer to the real costs for the grid operator than $/kWh. The fundamental problem that rooftop solar has revealed is that people think they are paying for the electricity, but they are not. Electricity is dirt cheap. Most of what they are paying for is the maintenance of the grid, and simple usage based billing crushes the system because of freeloader problem once rooftop solar is added.
Long term, the likely thing you pay for will be the size of the main fuse that connects you to the grid. Because that's the thing that scales with the costs you impose on the operator.
Of course, how does the electricity company determine which user was first in this situation. A tariff that depends on the order of connection may not be practical for domestic situations, although it may be OK for very large users, e.g. factories, data-centres.
Using fuse size seems a more reasonable and fair proxy for cost, assuming the same load patterns as the rest of the users. Then again, consumers with EVs might argue that their load pattern is different to the average user (e.g. filling up with off-peak electricity). Also consumers with air conditioning might argue for special treatment given their usage correlates with solar output (except where it does not).
Punishing a mere "large enough to not worry about popping it" fuse by billing shared infrastructure based on it (not just billing the stub line from the main in the street to the fuse/meter box in one's home in relation to what wire gauge is needed based on the fuse choosen) is pretty stifling. If e.g. your furnace fails in the middle of the winter and the repair guy tells you it needs replacing, you might want to get some space heaters and run them for a few days until your actually-wanted new furnace/heatpump/whatever can get delivered, instead of having to get installed whatever the HVAC guy has in the local storage, because if you wait more than on the order of 12 hours, you'll start to get frost damage from pipes and such.
Having to be beholden to an electricity company having time to upgrade your fuses on such short notice so that you can plug in the space heaters without blowing them might be a problem. But paying say 300 bucks extra because you did that for like 3 days or so would easily be cheaper than the cost of temporarily installing an available loan furnace and then having to remove it again to make way for the actually-wanted one.
They do though bill you if you make them dig the street up to say pull a medium voltage line into your factory that previously just got low voltage from a shared street transformer, but now that you've plans to use a lot more, you'd need the higher feed. Then they bill you and if within like 10 years or so someone else orders service that can piggyback on what capex you paid for, then you'd get a proportional refund from them having to pay off part of your share. But that's not for just getting normal basic electric service to a normal residential building in a city, that's for building a new farmhouse on the other end of some field where there never was electricity, or for getting unusual service that wouldn't be in the street if you didn't request it. Merely sizing the transformers/substations to handle the aggregate current of the users attached is not typically handled by the above mechanism, especially because it only covers initial buildout.
The 15 minute chunks are due to the German and much of the European grid market being in that chunk size.
The steps are pretty coarse - on my rate plan there are just 3 steps: 0-10 kW, 11-15 kW, 15 kW+. You're not going to surpass peak 10 kW in an apartment anyway.
But there is a bit more. Almost all power plants in Pakistan are built with state-backed dollar-denominated loans (reason govt incompetence+corruption). This means if grid demand goes down, power plants don't go out of business like they would in a market based system. Instead, they keep collecting dollar-denominated interest paid by the state, even if they produce zero power.
The state mitigates this by increasing electricity prices (in rupees). I have forgotten how this helps.
Or else I don't see how the power plants are collecting the interest?
1. State of Pakistan
2. Someone with dollars (the investors)
3. Local businessman who are willing run the power plant.
The three parties come to an agreement on what the minimum returns should be on the investment. Say 10% annual. Then the investors give money to the businessman, who then import the power plant equipment and start operating it. The state-run electricity distribution companies buys from the power plant as needed and pays them the unit price set by the State of Pakistan. Part of this is converted into dollars at some pre-agreed rate and transferred to the investors.
In all this, if the total returns to the investor are above 10%, then all is good. However, if the grid demand has fallen, and the distribution company didn't buy a lot of units from the power plant, then the State of Pakistan has to step in and give the investors the difference to make up the 10% returns.
Yes, it is an insane system.
The narrower point I’m making is about economic rationality. Without market prices for capital goods generated through profit-and-loss entrepreneurship, there is no way to know whether those projects were the best use of scarce resources, or merely a use that happened to raise output from a very low baseline.
In very poor countries, almost any large capital investment will increase measured output because there are so many unmet needs. That means growth can occur even under badly misallocated investment. The fact that development happened does not tell us whether it happened efficiently, or whether alternative decentralized uses of those same resources would have generated more value.
That’s also why I don’t find higher variance persuasive as a defense. Occasional success doesn’t validate a mechanism that lacks systematic feedback. Without prices and profits, planners can’t distinguish luck from competence, or learning from error. Things such as malinvestment and moral hazard result. You only know concrete and steel were poured, not whether society is richer than it otherwise would have been.
So my claim isn’t state capitalism always fails, nor is it a moral argument about atrocities. It’s that infrastructure success alone doesn’t answer the calculation problem. Growth from scarcity is compatible with irrational allocation, and therefore doesn’t establish a positive expected value for centralized direction as a general development strategy.
Generally speaking, if you invest your money in a historically kleptocratic country, you can expect your investment to get confiscated if it's profitable, and possibly even if it's not, which is what happened to my retirement savings. Even if you make your investment at a time when the country is governed by non-kleptocrats, you will probably lose it after the next coup or election in which new kleptocrats come to power.
In that environment, where private investment in long-term infrastructure projects is irrational and languishing in poverty for many generations is the normal state of affairs, state capitalism frequently works.
I don't think moral arguments about atrocities are somehow orthogonal here. Power plants and electrical grids are often worthwhile investments, not because building monuments to Westinghouse is a pious sacrifice that pleases the electrical gods, but because they promote human welfare by providing material abundance. That's how we measure whether society is richer, not, as you say, by the amount of concrete poured. If human welfare is your yardstick, the possibility of economic catastrophes like the Holodomor greatly diminishing human welfare must necessarily weigh on the negative side of the balance. The inhabitants of Auschwitz and the Congo Free State were not enjoying even the material abundance they had enjoyed previously.
So we know that central planning carries risks to human welfare that decentralized systems do not. However, it also has opportunities to promote human welfare that decentralized systems do not. The variance is larger. I don't think we know enough to measure the expectation.
But that's not a bug of decentralized markets; it's the poison of political interference and weak institutions, which state capitalism only doubles down on by swapping entrepreneurial discovery for bureaucratic fiat, still without solving the calculation problem or providing systematic feedback beyond "stuff got built."
Look at Hong Kong in your list: it boomed precisely because of its hands-off, free-market approach with top-tier economic freedom rankings, unlike more interventionist tigers that rode credit-fueled waves but crashed in '97 or stagnated like Japan post-bubble.
Atrocities are the dark side of concentrated power touted as enabling opportunities, jacking up variance with no way to gauge if human welfare gains beat the unseen costs of foregone innovations.
Without prices and profits guiding resources, we're left guessing expectations, but history shows freer systems deliver sustainable abundance when institutions let them, not coerced escapes that often loop back to poverty or worse.
Perhaps, if you could obtain political power that you could retain stably for decades, you could make pretty big changes there, but only at the cost of further concentrating power, creating opportunities for even greater corruption profits for whoever can wrest power away from you. Nobody has ever held power for decades in Pakistan's history. Even Nawaz Sharif didn't make it to 10 years in power over his three (non-consecutive!) terms. If you simply liberalize economically without eliminating the confiscation risks that kill private investment, private investment will not magically materialize without the private investors, who are sensibly investing their savings in a 7-11 franchise in Cleveland, Ohio.
So, what can you, hypothetically governing the country, do under these constraints?
A proven strategy is public investment, like Airbus, like the military contracts that sustain Boeing, like the Hoover Dam, like the Rural Electrification Administration, like federally guaranteed student loans, like the interstate highway system, like Volkswagen, like Tupolev, like Rosatom, like Industrias Aeronáuticas y Mecánicas del Estado, like the Apollo Program, like Huawei, like Westinghouse's nuclear power division, like the ARPANet and NSFNet. Certainly the money won't be invested as wisely as if savvy entrepreneurs like Warren Buffett were directing it, and neither Warren Buffett nor Juan Perón is going to do a good job at investing in unforeseen innovations; but, even if most of that investment is wasted like Project Huemul, it can still dramatically augment the economic productivity of the country, under circumstances when private investment is unavailable. Often such productive capacity will eventually make the country more appealing to private investors, but that can take a long time.
In this situation, you aren't faced with the choice between state capitalism and regular capitalism. You're faced with the choice between state capitalism and no capitalism.
Thus, state-guaranteed loans to build power stations.
My condolences and sympathy to the people of Pakistan caught in the mess. The global energy transition will be volatile.
Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01356-y | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01356-y - May 26th, 2022
Rethinking Energy -- 100% Solar, Wind and Batteries Is Just The Beginning - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM2RxWtF4Ds - January 2021
Who owns the distressed fossil generation collateralized debt? China. Where is Pakistan importing cleantech from? China. There is some IMF debt in there as well, for accuracy.
How Chinese loans trapped Pakistan's economy - https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinese-loans-trapped-pakistans-ec... - August 2nd, 2024
Emeber Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (updated monthly)
> default on it and hand the stranded assets back to creditors
Argentina doesn’t make a habit of hosting its creditors’ troops [1].
[1] http://eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114/TopStories/16353167.htm...
Power companies in Pakistan also don't have easy access to international money markets, and thus, it makes sense for the government to back those strong currency loans as a subsidy on infrastructure.
This is not exclusive to Pakistan, this is the routine of infrastructure financing on developing countries. J.P. Morgan is not really eager to lend money for PakiPower Incorporated, but it is willing to lend to the government.
> But 45 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, putting solar panel systems well beyond their reach. The pool of customers for the national grid has gotten smaller and poorer, and the costs of financing old coal-powered plants have increasingly been passed on to those who can least afford it. [1]
1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-pakistan-s-solar-en...
With solar, you can feed back into the grid much more easily, to the point that this is the default. This sort-of doubles the load on the grid (not exactly, but you get the idea), since both 'consumption' and 'production' need to cross the same wires.
This is a problem even in, like, Germany, where the grid operator can send a "kill signal" to local solar inverters to shut down. In Pakistan, I can't even imagine...
Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources.
Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro.
But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time.
Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs.
Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception.
AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.
Nobody would bother to install rooftop solar if daytime power was super cheap on every sunny day, yet expensive at night when their solar isn't working.
Changing the utility to a market sort of defeats the point of trying to optimize the utility.
Just they might pay more in some hours and less in others.
Some market systems have gotten bad press over huge bills (eg. Texas), but that only happens when only a small chunk of users participate in the market, whilst others are on fixed pricing and therefore don't care about usage.
When everyone participates, supply and demand make sure the price never goes super high, simply because there are enough people who will turn off stuff to save money.
A lot of muslim and African states are in that boat. If the US, yes, the international monetary system is under US control, frankly because nobody else will pay for it. If the US ever decides not to cover Pakistan's debts starvation is exactly what will happen in Pakistan.
The largest battery systems in operation are primarily designed for short-duration grid support rather than long-term, multi-day backup. They can even bridge a single windless night.
And this is talking about short term mismatch between supply and demand in a 24 hour cycle. If you consider the need to account for the yearly seasonal generation variation (which is far more dramatic as most of the developed world is situated on high latitudes) battery storage becomes even more problematic due to the absurd capital expenditures for a resource that you'd have to charge with a dramatic production supply during the summer months to slowly discharge during the winter.
People have been misled with the convenient lie of LCOE for too long, when what really matters are the true system costs. We don't even have in place the supply chain to sustain this, and I am not even talking about Lithium or Cobalt, I am talking about plain old Copper.
Then, there are the capital requirements for recycling and decommissioning, as the useful life of such systems is unfortunately not something to write home about.
Think about it. We have spent too much time and money on solar and wind, money that could have been spent on nuclear power. The clock is ticking, replacing our grid with solar may be the wet dream of big finance, but it is not a reasonable solution, it is about time we stop wasting our time with it.
I don't know why you're even talking about nuclear when that's not something an individual can do at their scale. It's not relevant to this conversation. But everything you've just said about it is wrong.
LCOE, when LCOE is calculated correctly, is absolutely the right measure and absolutely includes the true system cost including storage to bring it up to a similar level of availability and decommissioning (incidentally decommissioning is way higher cost for nuclear than batteries so it's weird that you try to cite it).
Even if we switch gears from talking about individual generation to grid scale generation nuclear done safely is simply too expensive. Solar and battery storage are cheaper than it in sunny places today, they were cheaper than it in sunny places a year ago, and their price is and has been consistently falling exponentially while nuclear's price stays about constant.
Those prices are including the absolutely massive subsidies that are given to nuclear, in every form from government investment in the technology to government absorbing the vast majority of the insurance cost by not requiring they are insured to anywhere close to even a small fraction of the full amount of damage they could cause in a worst case disaster.
The only fantasy here is that nuclear is somehow going to suddenly buck the trend of staying at about constant price and start falling in price even more exponentially than solar and batteries have been to catch up. Spending money on nuclear only serves to prolong the climate crisis by taking away money from actual scalable solutions like solar that can outcompete with fossil fuels on cost.
You don't build storage for yearly cycles, you build it for daily cycles (which is affordable today) and overbuild solar to account for seasonal variation in generation and demand. Note that even things like nuclear have to be overbuilt for seasonal variation in demand, and to account for the fact that there is maintenance and sometimes some of your plants are down.
I have solar Li-ion and hybrid inverters at my home, basically because I foresee more frequent blackouts in the future. Part of the cost of my system is generously paid by poorer consumers, because I still have net-metering in my country (talk about subsides).
Nuclear power is one of the most insanely regulated industries due to the misinformed work of science denier green militants and populist politics. Talking about subsides ignoring all the red tape nuclear is a common tactic behind the propaganda of big finance and big green corrupt interests.
LCOE is absolutely the right measure only in two cases:
1) You have a financial interest on selling intermittent power or/and 2) You're hopeless ignorant about both the physics and the economics of a power grid.
As demonstrated by the fine article, it is not the only scale that matters.
> Nuclear power is one of the most insanely regulated industries due to the misinformed work of science denier green militants and populist politics.
Nuclear power is a highly regulated industry for two very very good reasons
- It's incredible destructive power if you cut corners. See chernobyl and then realize that it was far from a worst case and every nuclear power plant has the capacity to do 1000x worse than that if enough corners are cut. No other form of energy, not even fossil fuels with global warming, comes close in terms of potential downside per kwh generated. And humans inevitably cut corners in the absence of a strong regulatory regime.
- It's incredible destructive power if weaponized, potentially resulting in species ending wars.
You're showing your own ignorance with regards to LCOE.
The duck curve is a rounding error when discussing energy storage.
It also scales down better (though not perfectly).
Either you can afford it (both storage and solar), or you can't afford power at all, or you don't live in a sunny place.
Ignoring sunk capital costs into other energy infrastructure of course. If you already have a working nuclear power plant you're not going to save money by randomly turning it off and switching to something else, for instance.
The math actually gets worse once you get into combined cycle natural gas at scale.
You I suppose could make an argument that load curtailment is cheaper than planning for the current grid reliability everyone has gotten used to over the past 50 years, but it would be a societal shift.
Seasonal energy storage is what is interesting to discuss, and of course is where that last 2% of grid reliability comes from. It’s also the most expensive part of running a grid. The first watts are basically free, the last are very expensive.
I’d love to be proven wrong within the next decade though! I just personally don’t see the battery storage price going down at the same rates it has been simply due to structural raw material input cost reasons - short of a breakthrough in chemistry. I think we are getting close to the maximum savings achieved by economies of scale with current technology.
Seasonal energy storage is uninteresting, you just overbuild the energy production instead. This is already done for every existing type of energy production to account for seasonal variation in demand.
If batteries became cheap enough where you could do days instead of hours affordably it pushes this sort of calculus into less sunny places as well, and there's every reason to think that they will become that cheap (perhaps not cheap enough to make weeks reasonable though).
It’s the only thing that is interesting, considering you just hand-wove that last 3% of reliability away with vague “backup generators” and “transmission lines to other places”. Both immensely expensive items if they are idle 97% of the time.
I’m not interested in the least about having my grid availability at 97% - in a cherry picked location ideal for solar.
I’m totally fine overbuilding nameplate capacity for my solar field - already plan to by about 8x due to where I live. Panels are cheap! At least that problem seems more or less solved.
The issue is I have no realistic means to store that energy for even days much less weeks when the sun doesn’t shine. A small wind turbine can help a bit, but doesn’t get rid of the need for a backup generator.
The same holds true at grid scale currently - which is both a more important topic and more interesting to discuss than some rich tech bro being able to brute force his off-grid solar+battery install.
Someone needs to back that last 3% with something like a combined cycle natural gas plant. That amount of capital investment sitting idle is exceedingly expensive. The only thing you are saving much money on vs. running it all-out is fuel costs - you still need to staff it.
A national grid sounds pretty neat, but would both be crazy expensive and is so politically untenable that I don’t expect to see it seriously even discussed in my lifetime. Just a small amount of time spent in the rural areas of the country made me realize how utterly impossible it would be due to NIMBY.
Again, to me at least that last 3% is where everyone hand-waves and makes it someone else’s problem. At some point though you run out of other people’s power.
I do wish we had not destroyed our nuclear industry into irrelevance, as 50 more years of experience and hands-on construction knowledge pushing that tech forward might have had us in a far different place today!
And fwiw I do hope I’m wrong. Perhaps energy storage gets to the point we can keep a fully reliable inexpensive grid for the common folks and industry to rely upon. I’ve certainly been wrong before!
The last 3% is left alone because it's the fair comparison to other energy sources... tilted in the direction of favoring the other energy sources.
> It’s the only thing that is interesting, considering you just hand-wove that last 3% of reliability
The 3% issue doesn't come from seasonal variation, it comes from short term weather patterns where you might have a week of heavy cloud cover. Seasonal variation is trivially solved by simply increasing the multiplier on nameplate capacity (and the 6x for Los Vegas includes that increase). It's always going to be easier to generate an extra 25% energy than to store 25% of your energy produced in summer and use it in winter.
> “backup generators” and “transmission lines to other places”. Both immensely expensive items if they are idle 97% of the time.
On the contrary both things that exist anyways. Every place that cares about consistent power already has backup generators for when nonsense happens like power poles being blown over. Transmission lines exist to allow sale of excess production. It's only at tiny scales where these things aren't pre-existing and at those tiny scales overbuilding solar and batteries even more is so much cheaper than the alternatives (like building redundant gas plants disconnected from the grid, or even just redundant diesel generators) that they win by a mile.
An understated win of the storage model here is that these generators don't have to be able to supply the entire load, they just have to be turned on in advance when the weather forecast says there might be a problem to slow the drain on the batteries.
PS. I don't know what country you're from, but it seems a bit crazy to me that you apparently used to have a nuclear industry but apparently don't have a national grid... If you have actual weeks where the sun doesn't shine and no grid... you aren't in a sunny place... so you can still brute force it of course but done efficiently a lower percentage of solar makes sense.
You keep on citing dubious numbers from the Big Green lobby, but the reality is. There's not a single place on this planet where after a certain threshold of penetration solar and wind haven't made supply less reliable, haven't caused economic sustainability issues to generators and haven't made power absurdly more expensive to customers.
Not to mention the frequently forgotten issues of toxic waste in production and decommissioning, the toxic fire hazard of giant battery banks and the pathetic short useful life of intermittent power infrastructure. Not to mention the environment impact of such big land gobblers, cynically overlooked by the same folks that decided to destroy nuclear with mountains of bureaucratic red tape deliberately created to suffocate it by ignorant green politicians.
Solar may have a bigger place, in countries with plenty of sun like Brasil, the Middle East or North Africa where residential and commercial consumption peaks with air conditioning usage during peak solar production, and with long days, but even then, absent some magical storage technology that doesn't exist yet, with limits.
Cherry picking Las Vegas - a desert - for solar is also somewhat silly. The midwestern US would be much more like a global average. I could also choose Alaska if you want silly arguments.
Seasonal also doesn’t mean seasons - it means seasonal in the mathematical statistical sense where every 5-10 years in a spot you get a week or two of both sun not shining and little wind output. No amount of overbuilding capacity will ever solve for that - you need energy storage or available dispatchable sources in the form of chemical, hydrocarbon, hydro, or nuclear.
The last 3% is almost all that matters when you are talking grid reliability for the masses and industry. Factories cannot operate without reliable sources of power, and asking every major consumer of power to have backup generation on-site is a massive amount of capital overhead. And completely untenable for perhaps 60% or more of residential consumers.
I’d love to be wrong, but watching everywhere that is getting close to solar and wind saturation is pretty telling. Basically every watt of solar at this point needs to be backed by a dispatchable power source or it’s going to end horribly. It’s great that we were able to replace burning fossil fuels when conditions are favorable - but we need to be real and recognize the costs involved here.
Investing in the natural gas power industry was the easiest layup I ever had investing since this was so predictable in the 2020-2021 green power delusion era. It was obvious to anyone that if solar projects went ahead as projected that natural gas was coming along with it.
I love solar and wind generation and want to see it spammed everywhere possible. I just hate the grifters that currently are endemic to it.
I went an looked and it appears Pakistan imports ~110 containers of LNG a year. And their natural gas plants are running as 50% capacity.
Personal belief on big reason for a country to install solar, wind, and batteries to be able to tell the criminals at the IMF to go f' themselves.
20, 23, 25, 27, 28, MDR 7, 32, 33, no name at all, 39, 40
And they're not even unique...they recycle them a kilometer further. WAT
Street 6, for instance: I've found it twice so far.
But they're still distinct, in that one Street 6 is within Block M 3 B, and another is within Block M 7.
Which appears to suggest that blocks are more important at identifying an address than a street name is, and if that's the case then that works just fine.
And indeed, a distinct address appears to be something like this: Plot 15, Block M 7 Lake City, Lahore, Pakistan. Plug that into Google Maps and you'll see what I'm seeing (and note that the string doesn't include a street name at all).
It does seem weird to my wee little Ohio-trained brain to identify a building by what block it is on more than the street it is facing, but then: Canadian post codes and Hungarian addresses also look weird to me, and also work fine in the places where they're used.
Some larger societies are first broken up into "phases" and then into sectors/blocks.
Street numbers are typically not required in an address, but are often provided as helpful guidance.
Not a great system, but still better than Calgary's system (where I studied), which might be the worst system I have ever seen. You can't navigate at all without a map.
In Calgary, the streets are numbered and it's super easy to navigate between "16th St NW" and "18th St NW". Certainly easier to understand than "Go from St. Catherine's Street to Peel" in Montreal.
Where they are not numbered, they at least have the name of the community. Edgemont, for example, has no numbered streets but the name usually starts with "Edge", making it clear what part of the city you are going to.
I don't think it is perfect but I have also lived in Tokyo where the system is literally impossible without a GPS because the locations are not as neatly arranged as here.
Even GPS and being a native speaker of Japanese isn't enough to successfully navigate somewhere in Japan sometimes often enough that it's super common for businesses to include detailed access instructions on how to get to their business.
The amount of times I've seen my wife not even be able to read a place name here makes me wonder why they don't just do something slightly more sensible. A recent funny one was when city hall sent her some mail advertising some seminar and she couldn't read the name of the train station on the pamphlet, so she called city hall and enquired about it and the person she talked to couldn't read it either.
- What is a 'society'? Is it like a community that pays for upkeep and has other advantages or just a name for an area?
- Do tell about Calgary!
The administration of the society is usually done by the original developers. They decide how big the plots of land are, decide the rules houses must follow in their design. The houses themselves are built by the owners of the plots.
They society collects monthly fees typically. It is usually responsible for trash pickup. Richer societies will arrange water supply and even backup electricity plants. Larger societies create commercial areas and parks within their bounds as well.
They are not always gated as the parent states. Only the ones rich enough to hire security.
[0] https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
First thing I did upon finding it was to add it to the map lol
Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable.
Also the national grid is notorious for it's frequent blackouts (load-shedding) since the early ’90s. Solar allowed us to have uninterrupted supply in the mornings and longer backups during night.
I was more concerned about having reliable power and reducing my electricity bill.
The daily 2-hour power cuts were getting out of hand, and I was running my business from my home office, so the tax incentives helped slightly.
The grid is more stable now as new power units became available but a big chunk of middle-class consumers using solar are using way less power now, so the local town councils are having problems balancing their books (town councils re-sells electricity from the national operator).
So we’ll just pay what we would have for power for those years ~$1000 a year, then we’ll have free power for 20 more, saving something like $20,000 for $0 investment.
And I wish Pakistan the best in taking advantage of those and/or their home-grown ingenuity!
Conversely the easiest possible demand to meet is localized constant and high demand. Basically AI datacenters or industrial users. These guys are basically paying for the grid and residential have it as a subsidy.
The supermajority of the price of electricity is fixed costs related to installing and maintaining capacity. The marginal problem of increasing generation or utilization is cheap. I believe it's like under 20% even for gas power where you have to buy gas. For grid solar it would be even crazier because marginally its basically free they really don't care how much you use it even goes negative but the fixed costs are everything.
So what causes a lot of social problems is when wealthy people get their own private solar because the whole current pricing structure revolves around wealthy people using a lot of electricity and paying down the connection costs for poor people. If they have solar the poor people are fronting the maintainence cost which destabilizes everything.
Net metering is overall just entirely stupid as a concept; measure inbound and outbound flow separately if you can't just measure the 15 minute chunks; bill grid fees on the energy price on inbound and only pay energy price on outbound. Or even bill grid fees on outbound up to one of many available large substations, and thus handle the issue of demand across large distances making buildout of solar in a convenient but far away place not being disincentivized vs. more-demand-local buildout.
For those that don't have the cash, financing is available.
Have you read this, about SunKing and SunCulture in Africa, recently posted on HN: https://climatedrift.substack.com/p/why-solarpunk-is-already...
Their smallest solar products are small lanterns. Simply having a pollution-free source of light is already a quality of life improvement for some people. One step up is to add a USB port to charge phones.
Low Chinese prices are making it more and more possible though. I hope the future will be really different.
“Responsible for my own power generation” = I do literally nothing. Nada.
I get $1000 a year for free.
Please show me someone who does not want $1000 per year for absolutely nothing.
Even if people don't go to the lengths I do (I like to watch the current generation and will slightly delay my use big loads like the washing machine, dishwasher, dryer etc. to try and use as much as my solar as possible), it's still very common for people to choose to do things like set the dishwasher timer in the day to use solar - which is great because it's also taking load off the grid.
Such a model is extremely resistant and there’s less system infrastructure necessary. It’s quite feasible to redesign the system around a “distributed first” model.
We simultaneously hate utilities and want them to redesign and pay for a distribution system that was not intended for bidirectional load flow.
Our municipal distribution systems are barely adequate. Net metering produces essentially no revenue but imposes a huge load on that infra.
The section "1.1.3 Bringing large savings on grid expansions" [1] has a good explanation.
1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
A major change like that would be astronomically expensive. The only reason it kinda works now is that very few people do grid connected generation after the meter. Once that becomes more widespread it's time for a huge investment, on the order of what the transmission system needs, but it all has to be paid for by local utilities, very few of which can get the capital together to do major projects like that.
Enough to keep the lights on, a fan or charging a phone. Not to run an AC or dishwasher but enough for the basics.
ROI for 24/7 solar+battery is negative in almost all residential cases using current technology and prices.
The difference between off-peak and on-peak rates there is about $0.21/kWh in the summer and $0.29/kWh in the winter, so assume an average delta of $0.25/kWh.
Assuming no solar panels, if you charge the battery on the grid at off-peak rates and discharge it completely at on-peak rates, you break even after using about 3200kWh. Assuming 2 kWh used every day during peak rates that's a breakeven period of 4.38 years.
Maybe my calculations are wrong somewhere, and I'd love to learn if that's the case.
I also acknowledge some big assumptions: namely, that you will always need to use all your stored energy day at the peak time (reasonable in the summer when the AC is running) and that you can use all your battery power for those loads instead of grid power. On the other hand electricity rates tend to go up over time and batteries last for years.
But rates will likely increase. So will the delta between off-peak and on-peak rates. I think the true payback period is between 5 and 8 years.
Granted this includes a government rebate for the battery, but overall the prices have plummeted. Any government that isn't pushing for renewables and energy storage at this point is actively working against it's citizens.
It's a fantastic way to solve oversupply; give it to everyone, including those who have batteries in areas where the weather restricts solar output.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-03/energy-retailers-offe...
Think a bandwidth of 50-80$ per kwh cost levels for the manufacturer with a margin on top in a market where there's over production and prices are still trending down and margins are probably under quite a bit of pressure. That's the widely publicized cost levels for Chinese manufacturers that dominate the world supply currently. Some of the sodium ion batteries that are coming to market now are already at the lower end of that price bandwidth and could go to 10-20$/kwh over the next 5-10 years; maybe faster.
At those prices, anyone can afford plenty of battery to survive the sun not shining for days/weeks. Which in places like Pakistan would be redundant. It's far south and you can count the number of days that you shouldn't be wearing sunglasses outside per year on the fingers of one hand. Even when it's cloudy, there's plenty of light filtering through in that part of the world..
Prices you might be seeing in the US tell you more about the local politics there than the economics of batteries. The US has it self to blame for bad economics like that. Places like Pakistan aren't going to slow down because the US can't figure out all this new stuff. For them this is economic growth unlocked by vastly more energy than they've ever had access to. All they'll ever need basically.
ROI for 24/7 solar+battery is negative in almost all residential cases using current technology and prices.
This is quite cheap compared to (say) the fully loaded cost of energy from a nuclear power plant.
Smaller units will be more expensive per kWh, but not so enormously so as to render them impractical. And they will get cheaper quickly like all electronics do.
ROI for 24/7 solar+battery is negative in almost all residential cases using current technology and prices.
I can confirm that prismatic 1kWh LFP cells cost ~$60 in single digit numbers.
We may see industrial users preposition themselves in locations with ample nearby PV potential. If I were building a factory in the US (or a data center) I would think twice before putting it in a higher population density area.
We may also see local microgrids develop. This would still have distribution costs, but not transmission.
I think grid should start moving into selling storage as a service. Just put a bunch of bulk storage at every transformer station and buy solar from consumers at solar peak, sell them back say 80% of it (or whatever margin is required to pay for it) off peak.
That way utility no longer have to haul megawatts all the way from the power plant all the time, any peak can be hauled from the batteries and let the other types of power plant more time to spool up, and the grid is more resilient to outages (assuming you were lucky and battery bank local to you still had some charge
"Watershed moment:" Big battery storage prices hit record low in China auction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504630 - July 2025 (4 comments)
IEA: The battery industry has entered a new phase - https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-battery-industry-has-en... - March 5th, 2025
Naxtra Battery Breakthrough & Dual-Power Architecture: CATL Pioneers the Multi-Power Era - https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html - April 21st, 2025
China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/china-alread... - April 19th, 2024
I think you may be dramatically overestimating how much container shipping costs.
If you can accept low power/current output (which EVs cant, but homes can), this isn't so bad.
Some people have managed to trick their cars into reverse charging via solar hybrid inverters and some custom hardware and it works as advertised - which is no surprise since its a lithium battery charge controller charging/discharing a solar battery.
If you could use your 60kWh EV battery on top of the 10-20 kWh you have at home, it would be a game changer, most people could power their homes for a week on that sort of capacity.
BTW, this will mean that EV charging is going to have to have variable rates, or else people will just ride over Dunkleflauten by charging up their EV at a charger, driving back, then using it to power the home.
If it's only half, the problem it's not going to stop residential installs. By the time that utility power gets to them here in Australia it costs about 3 times as much, so they are going to install their rooftop systems anyway.
I can't speak for elsewhere, but here in Australia residential installs tend to be over provisioned. A small'ish install is 5kW. That generates about 20kWh per day. Typical household consumption is 1/2 that. Newer builds like mine tend to have far more - upwards of 20kW of panels. That's to cater for charging EV's. The result is grid solar installs are getting hammered by roof top solar: https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-hit-record-share-...
I only paid $50 where I ljve, but even with 10x higher labor costs in the US, it should be under $1000.
Where do you live?
Another possibility would be that utility scale solar optimizes to a much large disparity between DC rating and AC rating than does domestic rooftop PV.
- Maybe the SEIA is wrong.
- Maybe utility-scale projects sign contracts to buy PV modules further in advance. The prices were falling rapidly.
- Maybe residential installers were buying low-cost panels with lower efficiency or with no warranty.
I think you mean cheaper for the utility. It is certainly not cheaper for me, the homeowner.
The writing is on the wall that the electric utility business model is a dying business like the career of bus or truck driver. Some countries will take a while to realize due to head in the sand , tariffs and corruption.
Of course. We wouldn’t want the benefit of a public good to accrue to the public now, would we.
That is another aspect of “the Saudia-Arabia of PVs”
There's also huge internal competition inside China between companies, so they have a harder time fixing prices.
Nope. A defining mechanism in energy markets is the cost to extract it. There's a reason Saudi Arabia dominates oil, if you can extract it with a shovel. And directly counter to your point, there's a reason, say, Germany can't just kick start a shell gas/oil industry even if it does have the deposits underneath.
> harder time fixing prices
Eh, it's not like the CCP didn't do heavy handed market interventions before, right? I mean some would even argue "fixing prices" is already embedded with the ruling party's name.
> you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody,
What is this even suppose to mean? Of course you can. That is the whole point of having geopolitical leverage.
Air conditioning is, however, life-changing.
Thermal energy storage can potentially power air conditioning, but it isn't a very well developed technology.
Batteries are the invisible change in the power business. They don't take up much land area. They're not visible to the public. Just being able to charge batteries during low power cost periods changes the whole economics of the industry.
Whether battery banks should be allowed to sell back to the grid is a tough question. Texas says no.[2] It's potentially "dispatchable" power, but only until the battery runs down.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-17/califor...
The right question to ask is whether places like Mexico are going to politely wait for the US to get its act together or whether they'll just go ahead and start electrifying their country and industry and reducing their cost levels. The current isolationist policy works both ways. Very sunny place, Mexico. Great place for solar and batteries. And once you have those, Chines EVs produced locally might work very well. And they can export those further south.
The US importing synthetic fuels is not going to be a huge market for economic reasons. There's no logical reason for tax payers to pay Mexicans to make really expensive fuel for them. Just so they can pretend battery electric doesn't work north of the border.
Synthetic fuel at scale is just really expensive. And battery electric is going to take a sledge hammer to any misguided plans around that topic. It's going to get progressively more awkward to build a case for that. All those things where people still hang on to the believe that "surely batteries will never work here" are going to melt away over time. Batteries are going to get a lot cheaper and better over the next decades. And they are pretty good already.
Your mention of aviation fuel is relevant. That's a context where batteries are not pretty good already, although they are viable for short hops; in aviation, as in shipping, heavier batteries create more energy consumption, so a carrier with a higher specific energy per kilogram is very valuable. Conventional jet fuel is 43MJ/kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Chemical_reacti...) while lithium-ion batteries are up to about 0.8MJ/kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Electrochemical...).
Very crudely, an airplane whose weight is mostly jet fuel can fly about 50 times as far as a rechargeable-battery-powered airplane if both are going the same speed. Rechargeable batteries are 50 times worse than jet fuel. And they're improving slowly; the last time that difference halved was with the invention of lithium-ion battery, which went mainstream about 30 years ago. The previous major improvement was the lead-acid battery 120 years earlier.
However, promising alternative synthetic fuels other than paraffin include aluminum, magnesium, and zinc, which can be burned in aluminum-air batteries, magnesium-air batteries, and zinc-air batteries, respectively. Aluminum and magnesium are 31.0 and 24.7MJ/kg, respectively, but burning them in metal-air batteries instead of in heat engines allows you to extract about twice as much useful energy from the reaction, so they are in practice higher in energy density than current jet fuel.
Current aluminum prices are US$2828/tonne (https://www.lme.com/Metals/Non-ferrous/LME-Aluminium#Overvie...) which works out to 9.1¢/MJ. A barrel of oil is 6 gigajoules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent) and US$58.78 (https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/crude-oil/light-swee...) which is about 0.98¢/MJ. So the price of aluminum would have to drop by about a factor of 5 to make this appealing. It's plausible that this will happen, but not before 02040.
Magnesium is 17050RMB/tonne (https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/magnesium), which is US$2410/tonne, working out to 9.8¢/MJ.
Politicians need votes to remain in power. They lose votes if electricity is expensive. Lower demand and therefore low revenue in the face of fixed grid maintenance costs mean prices have to rise. Higher costs to voters terrifies politicians.
Sometimes these captured interests can even block and harm progress that's better for society. I'm sure I don't have to break this down for you further. Surely you can identify examples.
It’s similar to how the British empire hated subsistence farming, and always wanted colonial subjects to be economically interacting with either trading companies or the state apparatus.
All well and good, provided the homeowner opts out of the system. Part of the problem comes when the grid connection is not severed. Using it as a backup option (at the same time as other people, for when the weather is bad) or demanding the grid takes their excess production are counter-productive to the system as a whole.
For waste, you have a septic tank, you get bottled water from the store next village (and gas canisters for cooking).
For garbage, we needed to collect it and take it to a recycling point a couple km away every week or so.
It was a surprisingly manageable level of hassle, and this is how people used to live not so long ago outside of cities.
You could've gotten far more automated with things like solar, greywater recycling etc.
Going totally off grid is likely very hard, but reducing your dependence on civilization to a once a week trip is pretty manageable.
I believe the future will be a return to efficiency via reducing dependence on the wasteful aspects of civilization which are many. I think we will see a constriction in our wasting and over consumption as a species but especially as Americans - maybe you agree we are seeing that right now.
If we assume that you meant €7000 for 6 kilowatts peak (not 6 kelvin wurtzite henries or 6 kilowatt hours, neither of which is sensible) the probable answer is that your relative paid 25× the current market price for their solar panels and therefore got 25× the payback time. However, if we assume €0.12/kWh and a 20% capacity factor, 6 kilowatts peak would average 1.2 kilowatts, which is 10520 kWh per year, which works out to €1260 per year, which would be a payback time of 6 years, not 15 years.
Moreover, another way of saying that the payback time on a durable investment is 15 years is that the investment returns 6.7% per year. That would be a highly profitable investment, even without government subsidies.
I find it fascinating that someone is willing to pay for accounts to swing opinions or seed FUD on a topics like solar panels.
It’s happening here, it’s clearly happening everywhere on every topic.
Someone wants to sway opinions, and they think it matters enough.
Anyway, you said they paid €7000 and get back €500 per year, which is enough to calculate the ROI at 7.1% per year.
Powerwalls are indeed extremely overpriced. But battery prices are down to below US$70/kWh (US$19/MJ, €17/MJ); if we assume the maximum production in a day is about 25%, that's 36 kWh (130MJ), so it would be about US$2500 for that amount of battery. But probably even €500 of battery (7.2kWh) would make a big dent. That would be 1800 watts for four hours in the evening.
Depending on the type of evening consumption, it might be possible to ameliorate it dramatically with various kinds of thermal storage, or even plugging the washing machine into a timer. Those are much cheaper than batteries.
Inverters are a different problem, and they do in fact die after a few years. But you don't need the inverter to use the energy.
Where do I get 450W panels for $12 each?
€12 would be 44× cheaper (7000/6000/(12/450) ≈ 44). Maybe in a couple of years.
So how many do you need to buy to get that €23 price?
Typically panels account for about a third of the cost of a turnkey solar power system, but that's largely because of historical design features that are no longer necessary.
I have 7.8kw in Canada, and if I paid out of pocket payback would be 6-7 years.
We pat $0.13 per kWh from the grid, get a one for one credit on anything we feed in. System makes 7.8Mwh in a year.
What are your friends numbers?
Grid price is also pre-approved to increase not less that 5% a year forever, so it will only go in my favour.
It’s not hard to use heavy power appliances only during the day.