[HN Gopher] Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid de...
___________________________________________________________________
Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some
hubs next year
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 171 points
Date : 2025-11-27 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://archive.today/48P6c
| pfdietz wrote:
| What this shows is solar is increasingly threatening the electric
| utility business model. Even without net metering, demand
| destruction will cause the traditional model to stop working.
| thfuran wrote:
| Will it? I'm not sure how the utilities structure their prices
| wrt the actual cost, but they definitely separate the baseline
| connection cost from usage on bills (at least in the US), so
| they may not be killed by people using very little power as
| long as the connection fee actually covers things.
| kingstnap wrote:
| The hardest possible demand to meet is random, reasonal, and
| spikey demand spread diffusely over a large area. Which is
| more or less homes.
|
| 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.
| jaltekruse wrote:
| Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed
| cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive"
| in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been
| paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the
| effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of
| these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own
| power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big
| of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread
| have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a
| subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine
| financially. I want green energy, and I think that
| decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard
| to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing
| and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a
| video discussing this problem -
| https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720
| namibj wrote:
| What you could do is bill per energy in e.g. 15 minute
| chunks, and separately bill for transformer/line capacity
| by e.g. the peak usage in any such chunk over the contract
| period, like they do in Germany for atypical load profile
| industrial users since decades ago.
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Most people aren't interested in being responsible for their
| own electrical generation. Especially with payback still being
| on the order of decades
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Most people don't have the capital to be responsible for
| their own electricity generation, except the rich.
| andor wrote:
| It's really not expensive anymore. There's a Black Friday
| deal on amazon.de for an entry-level Anker Solix system
| with 4x500W panels and a 2.6 kWh battery. 1200 EUR.
|
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Oh I'm sure, Pakistan has alot of trade with China also
| so it's probably cheaper than in the west. But it would
| still be expensive for the poorer Pakistanis, and would
| require some investment, they simply have less ability to
| do that than a richer middle class Pakistani, so the poor
| pay the poor tax because they can't invest capital to
| bring their costs down.
|
| Low Chinese prices are making it more and more possible
| though. I hope the future will be really different.
| AngryData wrote:
| A lot of people in my area are interested and it would be a
| net positive for them long term, but the area is poor so few
| can afford the initial costs despite knowing the money they
| would ultimately be saving.
| testing22321 wrote:
| My payback is 6-7 years in Canada with $0 invested.
|
| "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.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Visit Australia, plenty of people are! When the real paybacks
| are generally 4-8 years (depending on what we're talking
| about) why wouldn't people be? We have 4.2 million solar
| systems (for reference there are almost 11 million
| dwellings). Just this year the Federal Government started
| giving out grants for home batteries and over 55,000 people
| have already taken that up and at least 90,000 home battery
| installations exist so far according to these stats:
| https://cer.gov.au/markets/reports-and-data/small-scale-
| inst...
|
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| There's a business model where distributed solar production and
| storage is the norm and central grid based generation and
| delivery is the minority.
|
| 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.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Where do the massive upgrades to the distribution system
| required for this kind of setup come from?
|
| 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.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| My understanding is there is less of a need for massive
| grid upgrades in this model due to the use of storage.
| Rather than having to be able to distribute peak loads from
| solar, requiring a larger connection, you can smooth out
| the supply and distribute an even amount throughout the
| day, using a smaller connection.
|
| 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...
| UltraSane wrote:
| What will people do at night?
| newsclues wrote:
| Shift usage to daytime and rely on battery storage.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Batteries are very expensive.
| newsclues wrote:
| Couple used car batteries or usb batteries are cheap.
|
| Enough to keep the lights on, a fan or charging a phone.
| Not to run an AC or dishwasher but enough for the basics.
| davyAdewoyin wrote:
| For my experience a lot of installations really doesn't
| have much battery capacity cause batteries are pretty
| expensive at least here in Nigeria, but a lot of people are
| really happy with the system as long as they get
| electricity even if it's only during the day.
| peppersghost93 wrote:
| overprovision for their needs during the day and utilize
| battery power at night.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Solar panels are cheap but batteries are very expensive.
| peppersghost93 wrote:
| They can be depending on your needs. Lithium iron
| phosphate batteries are pretty cheap for their capacity.
| If you build your own power station with them you'd be
| surprised how far your money goes.
| UltraSane wrote:
| It is much more expensive that just buying electricity
| from the grid at night.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| In Australia, if you have the space for rooftop solar,
| it's far cheaper in the long run to buy solar+battery. We
| did the math for our household and even if grid prices
| are stable (which they aren't, they're fast increasing)
| we're still going to make money back on the investment in
| less than 4 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.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Batteries are dirt cheap already and getting cheaper all
| the time. Pakistan would be buying them at the Chinese
| prices without a lot of tariffs or nonsense that might be
| misleading you into believing otherwise.
|
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| Batteries are cheap in developing world prices, cheap in
| rich country prices. They continue to become cheaper
| every year.
| davyAdewoyin wrote:
| I think I can answer that, though I'm not a Pakistani but as
| a Nigerian in a developing country, you might also have a
| petrol generator for night times. But for the majority of
| people just having your phone and power bank charged for the
| night is pretty ok, a plus if you can keep a handful of bulbs
| on also.
| kragen wrote:
| At night, what people will do is wait until the morning to
| run the washing machine.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I think in most countrys, you already pay one bill for the grid
| and one for the used electric power.
| ghc wrote:
| Commercial and industrial use already makes up a large portion
| of demand. While the model will change to cater less to
| residential needs, overall demand for stable, high voltage
| generation is not going to go down.
| jasonsb wrote:
| Commercial properties often have enough roof area to meet
| most of their daytime demand on-site. And industrial
| consumption in Western countries has been flat or declining
| for years, so "stable, high-voltage generation" may face less
| demand than assumed.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| if the same solar also had enough battery capacity, sure. But
| they do not, they still need to buy at out of solar peak and
| that just causes problems for both sides.
|
| 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
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| LFP chemistries are approaching ~$50/kWh, and CATL's sodium
| chemistry is supposed to be ~$40/kWh (per CATL); soon it will
| be more expensive to ship the battery storage than the
| storage itself.
|
| _" 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
| kragen wrote:
| Currently "Sodium Battery Cell" is priced at US$50-70/kWh
| on the Shanghai Metals Market, which gives every appearance
| of being a real thing: https://www.metal.com/en/markets/43.
| They list LFP batteries currently at US$38-52/kWh:
| https://www.metal.com/en/markets/42
|
| I think you may be dramatically overestimating how much
| container shipping costs.
| sagarm wrote:
| Sodium batteries have significantly lower round-trip
| efficiency, so they have to be cheaper to win against LFP.
| triceratops wrote:
| In most places in the developed world utility-scale solar is
| much cheaper to build than rooftop solar. And there's value in
| having a stable grid to fall back on. I think the demand
| destruction story is overrated.
| kragen wrote:
| Balcony solar is even cheaper to build than utility-scale
| solar.
| cheema33 wrote:
| Utility-scale solar needs land and has to deal with line
| losses. Rooftop solar does not have to deal with either.
| testing22321 wrote:
| > _solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility
| business model_
|
| 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.
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| Excellent results, even if the source article is a bit
| government-optimistic-press-releasy. The less-good news is that,
| even with abundant solar, you still need a functional grid (even
| more so than in traditional top-down energy distribution schemes)
| in order for everyone to take advantage of it, but this is a
| problem that lots of rich nations are working through right now,
| so affordable off-the-shelf solutions are bound to appear in the
| near future.
|
| And I wish Pakistan the best in taking advantage of those and/or
| their home-grown ingenuity!
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I would encourage people to go look at satellite view of random
| "rich" neighbourhoods in Pakistan, and note how many solar panels
| there are on rooftops. Here is the first one I scrolled to in
| Lahore [1], and one in Karachi [2]
|
| 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...
| riku_iki wrote:
| > rich people just buying rooftop solar systems, which
| exacerbated the grid problems even more.
|
| how it exacerbated problems exactly?..
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| I'm guessing: fewer people buying from the power
| companies/grid => the fixed costs of these companies are
| pushed onto the poorer customers, who already couldn't afford
| much.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Don't they charge a minimum just for keeping the wires
| connected?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think most places the service is priced under the
| assumption that usage is enough to pay for the grid...
|
| 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...
| namibj wrote:
| In a random German apartment usage tends to be on the
| order of 30-ish EUR per person, and the connection fee is
| typically around 10 EUR per month.
| apelapan wrote:
| Is the EUR30 usage fee going directly to the producer of
| electricity, or is part of it a variable transmission fee
| that goes to the network operator?
|
| My monthly electricity bill in Sweden, averaged over a
| year to 1600KWh/month, is approximately EUR90 production,
| EUR50 transmission fee, EUR25 fixed connection-size fee
| (25A, 400V), EUR70 national electricity tax and EUR50 VAT
| for a total of EUR285/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.
| namibj wrote:
| Both, currently; notably it's mostly not what goes to
| your local grid, but rather mostly to the larger scale
| grid. It's about a 60/40 to 70/30 split between
| production/"grid-usage-fee" ("Netznutzungsentgelt").
|
| 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.
| manmal wrote:
| Usually that's included in per-kWh fee, so indeed usage
| dependent.
| phkahler wrote:
| When they start charging that way, the rich will buy
| batteries and disconnect from the grid entirely.
| gus_massa wrote:
| It's good until a Wednesday afternoon your home system
| dies and you have no electricity until Monday. I guess
| more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee
| just in case.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I heard that they are trying to restructure the billing
| in this way for next fiscal year (July 2026- ), but its
| really difficult to find a non-regressive scheme.
| Electricity per-unit prices in Pakistan are set by the
| government, they vary depending on how much you consume
| [1], and they play a pretty significant role in
| government popularity.
|
| [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.
| namibj wrote:
| Grids in Germany if you're not a "typical
| household/office" with therefore atypical grid usage bill
| for peak power and energy separately; the billing related
| peak power is measured by averaging power over 15 minute
| chunks, and taking the worst one of a year.
|
| 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.
| andyferris wrote:
| > averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the
| worst one of a year.
|
| 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).
| distances wrote:
| > Wouldn't even a very cheap and small battery
| (definitely small enough to keep inside an appartment)
|
| Like namibj mentioned, this does not apply for
| residential contracts.
| namibj wrote:
| I don't think it's necessarily impossible to get that
| billing model as a household; it's just not an
| interesting one to have as it's not competitive for the
| usage patterns of a household.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > relationship between users' reward/punishment and the
| grid's health seems wildly disproportionate.
|
| 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.
| namibj wrote:
| Actually the local cost is not the fuse size, but how
| much smaller the first transformer after you could be if
| you weren't there. Though it's often more fair to
| determine such for each user; then take those as a
| relative scale, then split the transformer's actual TCO
| by the determined share sizes between the users. Because
| the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size;
| the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size,
| which is lower as they won't use it peak at the same
| time.
| namibj wrote:
| It's legacy tactics; against the hacking the comparable
| thing for internet connections has historically been iirc
| 5 minute chunks and then taking the 95th percentile
| (like, charging not the highest, but the one 5% away from
| the highest). Not sure about the 5 min aggregation tbh.
|
| The 15 minute chunks are due to the German and much of
| the European grid market being in that chunk size.
| riku_iki wrote:
| its easily fixable, utility company can charge fee for
| fixed cost those who connected to the grid, and if all rich
| decided to disconnect, then they disconnect neighborhood
| eliminating fixed cost.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| This is correct.
|
| 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.
| jstanley wrote:
| So the power plants lend dollars to the state so that
| they can pay to build the power plant?
|
| Or else I don't see how the power plants are collecting
| the interest?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Usually there are three parties in these agreements.
|
| 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.
| bofadeez wrote:
| State capitalism like you described totally undermines
| the price system by replacing profit-and-loss-guided
| entrepreneurial calculation with political allocation of
| resources, thereby rendering economic calculation
| increasingly impossible and eroding the coordinating
| function of the market process.
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, but nobody has found a more effective way to build
| infrastructure in poor countries. State capitalism as
| described is how infrastructure development happened in
| Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan,
| Vietnam, Thailand, etc.
| bofadeez wrote:
| The fact that infrastructure was built under state
| capitalism does not demonstrate the superiority of
| central planning, only that capital accumulation occurred
| despite intervention, often financed by prior scarcity,
| foreign savings, or coerced transfers; absent market
| prices and entrepreneurial profit-and-loss, the state
| cannot know whether the infrastructure created was the
| most value-productive use of scarce resources, only that
| concrete and steel were poured.
| kragen wrote:
| I think it demonstrates the increased variance of central
| planning. The Congo Free State was also centrally
| planned, and so was the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the
| Armenian Genocide, Suharto's mass murder of suspected PKI
| sympathizers, etc. But the _expected_ outcome for poor
| countries is that they stay poor and don 't develop into
| industrialized export giants the way my laundry list of
| countries did.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It is unfortunate that the government of Pakistan and
| their investors (China and the IMF) made poor investment
| decisions. They should feel free to go back to debt
| holders to renegotiate the debt, or default on it and
| hand the stranded assets back to creditors. The death
| spiral is of their own making, and will only accelerate
| as solar PV and battery cost declines continue.
| Electricity consumers will simply go off the grid. Such
| is the risk of unsophisticated investors not
| understanding the market in which they invest. Capital
| being at risk is an inherent component of investment.
|
| 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)
| elzbardico wrote:
| The reason power plants in Pakistan probably require this
| kind of financing is because Pakistan doesn't have the
| industrial capability to make the equipment that you need
| to build a power plant, so, dollars are a requirement.
|
| 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.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| The following isn't a grid problem (more of a demand issue),
| but maybe they're referring to this:
|
| > 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...
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| Previously, pretty much everyone (not just 'rich people',
| although, well, 'rich' is relative here, of course...) had
| diesel generators, which were not connected to the grid,
| since that would be seriously expensive, plus syncing would
| be pretty much impossible anyway.
|
| 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...
| elzbardico wrote:
| Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every
| GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another
| GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times
| when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the
| night or during large spells of bad weather).
|
| 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.
| k1musab1 wrote:
| This exact issue lead me to follow the grid orchestration
| research out of the Oak Ridge Laboratory. The building
| blocks already exist to enable this. An interconnected
| smart network of renewables can become a stabilizing force
| in the overall grid. Off-peak storage would still be
| required, but would no longer need to be "stabilizing"
| (turbine or other similar generator), and can be simple
| batteries.
| londons_explore wrote:
| All these problems become solved if you have realtime
| market pricing.
|
| 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.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| Wouldn't this model price out poor people? Doesn't that
| mean the most vulnerable people cant afford the services
| when they need them most, ie max hot/cold?
|
| Changing the utility to a market sort of defeats the
| point of trying to optimize the utility.
| londons_explore wrote:
| A typical user still pays the same on average in a
| market.
|
| 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.
| gpm wrote:
| This is all true except for the fact that storage is not
| incredibly expensive anymore, which invalidates every
| single conclusion you reach. Storage is now reasonably
| affordable, and the trend suggests it will soon be
| incredibly cheap.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Which will make the problems of the rich disappear and
| the problems of the poor and the state ... worse.
| (because the costs of the state are paying off loans for
| expensive generation, costs which they recover from the
| poor)
| triceratops wrote:
| The state can default on the loans too. It sucks and it
| will make future financing more difficult. But it remains
| an option. No such thing as risk-free lending.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Price of Chinese PV panels and inverters and batteries have
| dropped so much and there has been financing schemes available
| where you get the installation for free and pay per usage
| cheaper than what the utility company charges and it is more
| realiable.
| Havoc wrote:
| Did whoever named those streets have a stroke?
|
| 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
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It appears that the recycled street numbers each appear on
| different blocks.
|
| 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.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| That's correct. In Pakistan, typically cities are broken up
| into housing societies. Each society is broken up into
| sectors/blocks, which are typically indexed by the
| alphabet(A, B, C, ...), but occasionally, one will see
| block M7 or sector B2 etc. In each such sector, each house
| has a unique numbered address.
|
| 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.
| purerandomness wrote:
| Reminds me of "Falsehoods programmers believe about
| addresses" [0]
|
| [0] https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-
| believe-a...
| SECProto wrote:
| You have an inbuilt assumption about the purpose of a street
| name. Compare it with addresses in Japan [1], where some
| streets don't even have names. I don't know anything about
| Pakistan, but i wouldn't be surprised if the street name is
| solely to differentiate within some small geographic area.
| Looking at street view[2] from a nearby real estate
| development supports this
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
|
| [2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/sfoKSP5yRU41yS8w5
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| How many years before this happens in parts of the United States?
| hamdingers wrote:
| In California, grid-tied rooftop solar was putting energy
| prices into the negative so often that they reconfigured the
| NEM to discourage export back to the grid and encourage battery
| storage.
| Animats wrote:
| It seems to have worked, too.[1]
|
| 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/cali
| for...
|
| [2] https://www.ercot.com/mktrules/keypriorities/bes/ktc8
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| And it's messing with our utilities in BC because we were
| buying the daytime oversupply in California and selling the
| hydro generated power back at night. They've had to adjust
| plans as battery storage comes online.
| newsclues wrote:
| Already does in some cases but the utility companies have
| fought back and they can buy laws and regulations to slow down
| the process and protect profits.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Up to the locals in the US. Depends what their pain threshold
| is for falling behind and looking a bit behind the times. I
| think FOMO is going to be a big driver in a few years. This is
| not a left vs right topic. It's a money topic. And my
| impression of the US is that they love getting stuff on the
| cheap. Solar energy should be such a thing and it's getting
| painfully obvious that the US is paying a steep price where the
| rest of the world isn't. If I'm reading the situation correct,
| that is already annoying the hell out of a lot of traditionally
| republican leading states and not because they are tree-
| huggers.
|
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| Mexico could start producing synfuels with abundant solar
| energy and exporting them to the US, but that is far from the
| course plotted by President Sheinbaum, even though (or
| perhaps because) her doctorate is in the use of energy.
| Instead she's doubling down on oil drilling.
| neebz wrote:
| We switched to solar in 2021 expecting a 3.5-year payback.
| Electricity prices rose so fast that we recovered the investment
| in under two years.
|
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Rough location (if you feel comfortable sharing ground truth)?
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| South Africa - load shedding is a curse word here :).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Great to hear about the fast payback period, wishing you
| reliable power :)
| kragen wrote:
| tibbydudeza didn't post about a fast payback period.
| Maybe neebz is his wife?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Broadly speaking, payback period in South Africa is very
| fast due to similar grid economics to Pakistan.
| kragen wrote:
| But neebz may not be in Pakistan either. Oh, they are:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622584
| phreeza wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622584
| testing22321 wrote:
| We got roof top solar 1.5 years ago in Canada. Payoff will be
| 6-7 years, but we got an interest free loan to cover it.
|
| 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.
| applied_heat wrote:
| Where in Canada?
| woodpanel wrote:
| Imagine being the CCP and you've managed to turn your industrial
| capacity into the world's single largest renewable energy source.
| PV's Saudi-Arabia.
| infinet wrote:
| There were similar comments on HN. The argument goes that since
| it takes energy to produce PV panels and wind turbines, China
| effectively is an energy exporting country. What's even better
| is some of the PV and turbines are produced with renewable
| energy. And unlike oil and gas, which are used only once, PV
| panels and wind turbines generate power for many years.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Great, you can easily switch them off or even better, store heat
| under ground for the winter.
| kragen wrote:
| Lahore doesn't really have a winter as such:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore#Climate
|
| Air conditioning is, however, life-changing.
|
| Thermal energy storage can potentially power air conditioning,
| but it isn't a very well developed technology.
| SackSolStr wrote:
| The payback periods get me confused. A relative set up solar a
| year ago in one of the sunniest places in Europe, the Canaries,
| cost EUR7,000 for 6KW. He just ran the math on it and found out
| that the payback period is 15 years. The only way to make it
| profitable is government subsidies. How can it be profitable to
| install solar in continental Europe where taxes and labor costs
| are much higher while having much less sun? Why are we using
| taxpayers' money to subsidize such negative NPV projects?
| kragen wrote:
| Your comment appears to be unrelated to Pakistan and, due to
| the confusion of units, has been reduced to nonsense. Moreover,
| your implied calculations don't work out.
|
| If we assume that you meant EUR7000 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 25x
| the current market price for their solar panels and therefore
| got 25x the payback time. However, if we assume EUR0.12/kWh and
| a 20% capacity factor, 6 kilowatts peak would average 1.2
| kilowatts, which is 10520 kWh per year, which works out to
| EUR1260 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.
| testing22321 wrote:
| > _You seem to have created this account just to troll_
|
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| HN accounts don't require payment.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Someone is paying either real people to do this kind of
| thing, or for bots or LLMs to do it.
|
| Someone wants to sway opinions, and they think it matters
| enough.
| SackSolStr wrote:
| Or someone who lurks here, but never posts. Not everybody
| has an account here. I was just curious because I was
| talking my friend who has the solar just earlier today and
| he was a bit upset when he ran the numbers.
| kragen wrote:
| (Accusation removed from parent.)
| SackSolStr wrote:
| sorry yes. He told me, installation is 6,000 W and is about
| 91% efficient at peak. 12 460W panels. panels point in
| optimal direction. In spain he sells excess to grid at
| EUR0.04 per KHW. Lowest cost of importing is EUR0.085 for KHW
| at night, about EUR0.22 at peak hours. He ran the numbers on
| power not bought (self consumption) + power sold, over a
| year. He said it comes to about EUR500 for the year. He added
| this really surprised him and he started asking around, and
| this seems to be typical for rooftop solar in the Canarias.
| kragen wrote:
| That's a 7% yearly ROI, which is a pretty decent number,
| better than you'd do on average in the stock market and
| more predictable. If he had a little storage so he didn't
| have to sell any, it would improve further. But also 6000W
| of panels in the low-cost category now costs EUR300:
| https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-
| preis...
| SackSolStr wrote:
| You need more information to calculate the ROI. I gave
| you the peak efficiency, Which comes from clean panels
| and no clouds. The average efficiency is closer to 70%.
| While the canaries are pretty sunny, the panels get dirty
| very quickly (fine dust from Sahara), Actually, if you
| count cleaning costs, the ROI goes down even more. And
| also consumptions is at its peak in the evening when
| there is no sun. He was thinking about getting storage, A
| Tesla Powerwall 3 installed is about EUR11,000, No way
| that is worth it. My impression is that places where ROI
| is much better is also places where you get more than
| EUR0.04 per KWH.
| kragen wrote:
| That isn't the efficiency, which is a number somewhere
| under 23%, dividing the number of joules of light into
| the panel by the number of joules of electrical power out
| of it. Maybe you mean that at peak he gets 91% of the
| advertised 6kW, i.e., 5500W?
|
| Anyway, you said they paid EUR7000 and get back EUR500
| 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, EUR17/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 EUR500 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > the probable answer is that your relative paid 25x the
| current market price
|
| Where do I get 450W panels for $12 each?
| kragen wrote:
| pvXchange, but they're EUR23 because you fucked up the
| math: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-
| modul-preis...
|
| EUR12 would be 44x cheaper (7000/6000/(12/450) [?] 44).
| Maybe in a couple of years.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I assumed 7k installed, so roughly half for the panels.
|
| So how many do you need to buy to get that EUR23 price?
| testing22321 wrote:
| Those numbers sound wrong.
|
| 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.
| SackSolStr wrote:
| In spain he pays more than that on average, and only gets
| EUR0.04 for sold KWH. If it was one-to-one credit offset, as
| you have in Canada, it would certainly be very profitable.
| testing22321 wrote:
| So then just use most of your power during the day and
| you're better off than Canada.
|
| It's not hard to use heavy power appliances only during the
| day.
| mannanj wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: this is so contentious because it's more about
| control.
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