Indonesia has brought electricity to millions of people in recent years, going from 85% to nearly 97% coverage between 2005 and 2020, according to World Bank data. But there are still more than half a million people in Indonesia living in places the grid doesn’t reach.
While barriers still remain, experts say off-grid solar programs on the island could be replicated across the vast archipelago nation, bringing renewable energy to remote communities.
Helping kids study, parents make money, people get together to watch shows on cell phones. It's a big deal and helps them connect to the larger world.
The unstated statistic in this article is that Indonesia's reliance on coal has grown from 20% of national energy production to 40% of energy production over the 2005-2020 period, which accounts for most of that 85% to 97% growth factor.
The slow growth of renewables particularly in remote locations is certainly a good thing, but the actual nation-wide picture is just business-as-usual:
> "The government has pledged to increase the renewable share to 23% by 2025. Still, data from energy think-tank IEEFA shows that about 16 GW of new coal power capacity is expected to come online between 2021 and 2030."
It's not stated because it's not related to offgrid power, which is the article's topic.
It's a good reminder that not everyone has access to very high-quality, high volumes of electricity. For the people lacking either quality or quantity, solar makes a big difference.
At least from the quoted text, it does sort of imply that the solar programmes on the mainland are responsible for the increase. Saying two things next to each other doesn't explicitly mean that one causes or is related to the other, but it does seem at best unnecessarily obfuscatory.
This is particularly sad since Indonesia is volcanically very active and has tons of potential for geothermal power. Many of its islands are also quite dry, which couples with the equatorial location makes them great for year-round solar.
With 2,356 MW of installed capacity as of year-end 2022, this puts Indonesia in second place in the world after the United States in utilizing geothermal power,
By 2025, Indonesia aims to produce more than 9,000 MW of geothermal power, becoming the world's leading geothermal energy producer. This would account for 5% of Indonesia's total energy needs.
Nearly 60% of indonesias population and most of its industry are on Java, the most densely populated island in the world. 150m+ people on a place the size of Pennsylvania or Mississippi. Its absolutely not easy to find space for solar at scale in such a space constrained environment it would really require some massive infrastructure to a solar farm in the sea or another island.
Singapore is a good comparison - a much richer country also space constrained they are only starting to develop renewables seriously now (solar farms in the sea etc.)
Less populous islands sure but its a small proportion and they tend to have less money to tackle these issues also
Natural gas is much better than coal in terms of emissions. Doesnt have to be solar. Obviously it would be more expensive for them, perhaps too expensive, but lets take the opportunity to at least acknowledge that natural gas is a great step away from coal.
It sounds like there's going to be an ideal density where there is room for solar (not blocked by neighbors) and for trees, yet still with walk-to-able neighborhood services.
I live in an archipelago of volcanic islands and asked the same from an enginner working in the power company. According to him, geothermal is only viable above a certain amount of power which restricts it to the largest islands. For the smaller islands (up to 15 thousand inhabitants) a combination of solar, wind and diesel is used instead.
Which makes this a great time to observe that electricity != clean. That’s a non-sensical conclusion because electricity doesnt have the capacity to be clean nor dirty. Its a storage format. Stored energy in gas just sitting in your gas tank doesnt really emit either. It’s ridiculous to conclude energy is clean by simply ignoring its emissions.
Replacing an ICE vehicle with electricity isn’t necessarily lowering emissions. Its entirely dependent on how the electricity is generated. There is nothing inherently clean about switching from gas to electric. But many people only care about squeezing the balloon intil they cant see or know about the emissions.
But most things have to be electric to be able to be clean. If we want lower emissions, most stuff needs to be electrified and supplied with cleaner electricity. The latter is increasing all around the world, the former is the more worrrying bit.
But there are only few countries around the world where it's cleaner to run an ICE vehicle than an electric vehicle, due to the large inefficiencies of engines.
(There are other approaches that don't involve electricity, but most very likely won't work or won't make sense on a large scale)
Gas from the ground can never be clean. Electricity can. That’s why electrification is key to getting where we want to get. We need to both electrify and get electricity generation carbon emissions to zero.
Also: electrification additionally offers efficiency gains in many places. Heat pumps and EVs, for example, are both (in general) more efficient than gas stoves and ICE cars.
> electrification additionally offers efficiency gains in many places. Heat pumps and EVs, for example, are both (in general) more efficient than gas stoves and ICE cars
This is the kind of comment that makes the "electrification movement" look bad. You can't use a heat pump for a stove - the very high delta-T means maximum efficiency (COP) approaches 1, and you might as well use resistive. And generating cooking heat by burning gas at the point of use is certainly more efficient.
Perhaps you meant to say that generating electricity from gas to run heat pumps is more efficient than gas boilers/furnaces for heat. From my vague recollection this is questionable, but it's at least close. The real argument is forward looking, especially with EV's intrinsic storage being able to utilize intermittent sources.
"Gas stoves" has only entered the zeitgeist due to the culture war tempest in a teapot from New York phasing out municipal gas. Which is another ignorant overreach by the state - they should have focused on the collective problem of gas leaking from distribution pipes, and allowed for propane tanks at new single family homes that really want a gas stove. That would have preempted 90% of the valid criticism.
I'm guessing the original commenter was confused between heating with gas and cooking.
Using electricity for cooking is much more efficient when using induction heating (which is the only kind of electric cooking anyone should use). Cooking with gas might be very efficient in converting gas to heat, but more than half of the heat gets lost without heating the pot/food and escapes by the side (approx. 40%), so using induction is about twice as efficient as using a gas stove (and conventional electric stoves aren't much worse). With the typical efficiency of a combined cycle gas plant, this cancels out to be approx. the same but gets better when more renewables are used (and, of course, worse with coal).
Gas stoves still do have a lot of other valid issues and I am kind of amazed a culture war broke out over it (when e.g. in germany less than 10% of households use gas stoves without a massive demand for new gas stoves).
> and allowed for propane tanks at new single family homes that really want a gas stove
As far as I can tell from the reporting [1] this is stopping new gas hookups (maybe including the equipment at the time of construction?) but there seems to be at least nothing stopping you from adding a gas stove and powering it from propane. I was unfortunately unable to find the text in the bill (or the exact bill), but as far as I can tell nothing suggests otherwise and if that is the case:
> That would have preempted 90% of the valid criticism.
Point taken about heat getting into food versus going up the side of the pot, but the break even still ties into my point that the real gains are still forward-looking rather than immediate.
> I am kind of amazed a culture war broke out over [gas stoves]
Hah. I am very not surprised. A seemingly-harmless everyday item in people's homes that the "big government" is "taking away"? There's certainly valid top-down arguments about the indoor air quality in the inefficient rental market, but they don't apply to single family homes (in the US paradigm it's fundamentally a personal choice).
> I was unfortunately unable to find the text in the bill (or the exact bill)
Same here, which is doubly unfortunate with all of these more-heat-than-light topics where the "news" articles drown out the primary sources. Some of my digging did indicate that propane was included, but it's hard to know if that was just a hallucination (in the large language model sense, regardless of whether the articles were written by silicon LLMs).
I know personally if I just had to have a gas stove in new construction, I'd get a few 20 pound propane tanks and plumb it myself. I actually considered doing this if I wanted a gas stove (versus paying a monthly fee for municipal gas), but ultimately decided against gas because the less flammable stuff in the house the better (moving appliances with those flex lines always gives me the willies as I think about metal fatigue). But solving your own problems isn't really relevant in the culture war...
That was just a vocabulary issue, sorry. I’m not a native speaker. I meant heating with gas vs. heat pump, obviously not cooking with a heat pump, that‘s absurd.
That had not occurred to me because the rest of your comment was so clear. "Boilers" and "furnaces" refer to heating, and "stoves" generally refer to cooking. Exception: "wood stoves" are generally used for heating (indoor cooking with wood isn't common any more).
No, electricity can’t be clean nor dirty. It can be generated cleanly. But it does not follow that it IS generated cleanly because it CAN BE generated cleanly.
Thats all I'm saying. If you drive an electric car and you know the energy mix that generated the electricity then maybe you can conclude its cleaner (although that’s not the only factor). If you dont, then you are definitely just guessing.
> Replacing an ICE vehicle with electricity isn’t necessarily lowering emissions. Its entirely dependent on how the electricity is generated.
This is wrong, however a common misconception.
There are really two reasons you would want to replace an ICE with an EV. One is that electricity can be green, but the other is that an EV is a lot more efficient. Your ICE is not just burning fossil fuels, it also uses them mostly to produce hot air and only a fraction of the energy ends up in turning the wheel. ICEs are so inefficient that it's practically impossible to have grid electricity so dirty that the ICE would win.
But CO2 emissions are not the only criteria for moving to electric cars. Ease of production, ease of repair, simpler technology than ICE, reduction of distributed emissions and pollution (air in the cities), just to count a few more...
Even if CO2 emissions were the sole factor, it is very much possible to evolve the mode of electricity production to something more sustainable over the years. Electric cars may be running on coal-generated electricity today you can just change the source at any time immediately changing the overall equation.
It is fine, even if all the energy is created by fossil fuel plants:
1) Large power plants + transmission + charging your electric car + driving your wheels is usually more efficient than small ICE engines.
2) Even if the grid is dirty, if many cars are electric, once we make the grid cleaner, those cars automatically become cleaner. Otherwise, we would have to replace grid power generation & cars both.
3) Power plants are (usually) far from population centers, ICE cars spew exhaust everywhere, all the time.
Electrification of cars is a net good. All the time.
Eventually pollution makes the price well-felt; look at the color of the sky over China's largest cities, or read about vendors of canned oxygen on the streets of Tokyo in 1970s.
You are making a dicotomy falacy with more than two options: it's either "quality of life + smog" or "being poor + clean air". There are two more options: "being poor + smog" and "quality of life + clean air".
Some 50 years ago there was no option to coal as the first source of (cheap) energy. Today you can go straight to solar and wind as a cheap energy source, unless you live on a massive oil/gas/coal field, and that's the choice of "quality of life + clean air" you dismissed.
Certainly coal-fired power stations are better than no electric power at all. They just have pretty visible cost in quality of life: they improve some aspects, but worsen others. As basically everything in life, it's a balancing act.
For years (decade? decades?) this has been the promise of distributed solar and storage, and been analogized to how developing countries leapfrogged to wireless telecom without the expensive wired last-mile telecom stage.
The grid is very valuable, but it's also very expensive, and as storage and solar get really cheap, while grid costs stay stagnant, we may arrive at a future for which decentralized, disconnected microgrids are the cheapest energy solution for large chunks of the world.
I'm not convinced that this is a case of leapfrogging.
Off grid solar+storage is great when you and everyone around you is using very little electricity. It lets you go from "nothing" to "lightbulb at night" very cheaply, which is a huge improvement.
Once you're using tons of electricity, list a 1st world home does (refrigeration/ac/microwaves/electric ovens/electric stoves/washing machines/vehicles/...), storage would have to be absurdly cheap for it to not be worthwhile to start hooking homes together to load balance and reduce (not eliminate) the need for storage. And then the same logic applies to hooking up cities/towns/villages. And in the end it almost certainly turns out that by the time you're a huge consumer of electricity like the 1st world you have a grid.
That sort of lifestyle is really feasible on solar. Rooftops alone are likely enough, or at worst some bit of agrovoltaics.
The vast majority of Western energy is wasted, rejected as waste heat. Solar electrification skips over a wasteful thermodynamic conversion of heat to electricity. Even the rare case where fossil fuels seem at first glance as efficient, such as for heating water and homes, it turns out that 99% efficiency of conversion of fossil fuel energy to heat still requires 3-4x as much energy as a heat pump to get the same result. And don't get me started on how incredibly wimpy and inefficient ICE cars are.... unreliable bad machines.
And the only, literally the only time I have seen somebody come up with napkin math to say that solar would be hard to install in sufficient quantity to meet existing lifestyles in countries with normal insolation, it has been using total energy, rather than the actual useful amount of energy.
Solar and storage are gigantic technological marvels compared to the tech that delivered energy to us in the 20th century. Unless one's earning are tied directly to spreading FUD about these new technologies, it makes no sense not to acknowledge both the amazing tech curve of the past decades, and to speculate won the wonderful places that solar and storage in future will take us.
As I said in another comment, once people can afford a better lifestyle, they aren't remotely likely to choose to keep living the worse one.
On the other hand, I too am a fan of solar and electricity. I completely buy the solar + storage + grid is sufficient for a western lifestyle. I'm not arguing against solar, I'm arguing against lack of grid, that connecting houses, towns, and cities together can save more money on storage than it costs to run the wires. You want to plan for very-close-to-worst generation + storage >= very-close-to-worst-case load over all time frames, and grids smooth over variations in both generation and load, which makes the worst cases go way down, which means that that equation requires a lot less storage (not none, but less).
Incidentally I also think that "solar + wind + storage + grid" is an even better combination... and that wind power only works with a grid (because the scaling rules around them mean you want giant wind turbines that put out enough power for many houses)... but even with only solar grids just make too much sense.
My home in the wet tropics is solar powered. A small array of eight 325w panels supports 3 people, a regular AC refrigerator, electric kettle, electric hotplate, washer/dryer, and continuously running ceilings fans for moisture. In periods of cloud cover we still generate some power, we just switch to propane cooking and being frugal with our power budget. Solar is a no brainer in the tropics.
I think misinterpretted your comment, as well as make a serious error when I said "vast majority" rather than "vast chunk" of energy is wasted.
Your position is reasonable, though I think that we will find that a lot of places that don't have grids will be just fine without them in the future. For those of us that have already invested heavily in them in the last century, we will probably continue to use them, but in many cases they will greatly raise the cost of energy as we rely on them rather than cheaper alternatives. Though we do see some "non-wires alternatives" already in the US, which are places where storage is beating out building more grid, the incentive model for most utilities will favor them building unnecessary and expensive grid infrastructure instead of the best option for ratepayers. It's going to take very vigilant advocacy groups to force regulators to hold utilities to make better decisions.
You kind of completely skipped your fellow commenter's point, which was not about production method, but about the benefits of a grid when you have important storage needs.
Yes, I misunderstood, which his other comment really drove home.
But I think that storage is not the bottleneck here, there's a wide array of cheap options coming online. And even at today's prices it's quite possible to get $100-$150/kWh LFP that plugs right into the inverter.
All the pictures in the article are Sumba island, which has an area of 11k km^2 and roughly 800k people (slightly less population density than the state of California), I'm not sure that really counts as small.
Yes island interconnects seem reasonably unlikely. Similarly Hawaii has no interconnects between the main islands [0] despite being a first world locale. A different geography leading to a different grid structure the mainland US isn't "leapfrogging", it's just a different geography leading to a different grid structure.
Indonesia has around 10,000 inhabited islands, although around half the population is on Java and most of the rest on the next big five (Borneo/Kalimantan, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Bali, Papua).
A lot of places in the developing world have a large rural population that is widely spread out. You may have a family dwelling every 100m surrounded by a small farm with each dwelling connected by foot tracks. It is like taking a large city in America or Europe and spreading the population out across the entire county. This is a different challenge to connecting urban areas and small towns to a wider grid.
IMHO it would be useful to have grid technology that could work as a web of low voltage/low current connections. Something that could be installed without needing lots of expertise and be intrinsically safe. Maybe even in the same package as water pipes.
The reason that high voltages are used is transmission efficiency.
Low voltage = high current = less inefficient, less dangerous. High voltage = low current = more efficient, more dangerous. There's good reasons why overhead power lines are very high voltage.
Maybe it makes sense to truly integrate generation and storage with your neighbor. Between two towns separated by forty miles of roads?
I don't think you get to the same end result. When production is in the same location as consumption, the interconnects can be way less expensive and in a disaster the grid has more redundancy. Plus it bootstraps way better, locally people get access to the initial benefits before the entire grid has been planned out.
And as others suggest, those interconnects might go mostly unused, storage and generation is pretty impressive nowadays.
But even besides the timing advantages, you just end up in a situation where the power grid is closer to the internet in architecture where sources and consumers of electricity are all over. We have the technology to handle that.
Since there is a limit with what the solar system can provide the user/community will work with that. No need to say it can't accommodate a wasteful western way to use the energy.
Wasteful is relative. Our house produces 250-300% of our usage most days, but 5-50% of our usage some weeks.
Heating and cooling (and the computers that manage the batteries, which draw about 200W, including internet!) is hard to timeshift, but everything else is easy to move to sunny days.
Anyway, on those sunny days, electricity is literally free. I wish I could just dump it into a magic box that pulled charcoal out of the atmosphere.
At some point I got an itch and looked into what it would take to run such a magic box myself.
The lightbulb moment was realizing that of I did manage to pull a ton (or 15) of carbon out of the air by whatever method, I would then have to move that carbon... Somewhere. I had been looking especially at algae bio reactors, which leave you with a particularly soupy waste situation. :)
One can shift them by at least few hours using theorem-insulated water tank. It costs money but likely will be cheaper (and safer) than Lithium batteries.
If you mean to say "as long as they can't afford luxuries they'll do without them" that is no doubt true.
However to suggest that once they can afford luxuries that are most cheaply acquired by going beyond a single-household electricity setup, that they will continue to do without them over some attachment to not having a grid, that claim seems almost certainly completely incorrect.
It also needs to be said that electricity isn't just used for "wasteful things", it's used for making things more efficient, so that people can do more. The article talks about this in the context of lighting, but it's no less true in the context of washing machines, and dishwashers, and microwaves, and air-conditioning [1], and mechanized transportation (electric bikes/cars/...), and ...
In many parts of the world the grid is a combination of unreliable or not there at all. And the required level of investment to fix all that is at least short term not keeping up with the increase in demand. So, things are getting worse for people dependent on the grid. And where grids are actually available, they aren't necessarily cheap, which incentivizes people that use a lot of power to invest in alternatives. You see this with e.g. companies exploiting vehicle chargers. They all end up installing solar panels and investing in electricity infrastructure rather than just paying per kwh to their local grid provider. The grid is a last resort for them. This is going to be true for any business where energy is a big component of their cost.
To get reliable and cheap power, people have to invest in their own generation. That's still expensive but increasingly more feasible and critical for especially small businesses. If you run e.g. a small shop and you have perishable goods in a fridge in a tropical country and the power goes out, you basically have a lot of melted / rotten goods after a few hours. Not great. If that happens a lot, your business dies. In the same way, having the AC on or off in a hot country can mean the difference between having your place full of customers or not. It's not optional. If grid power is only available a few hours a day, your business is at risk unless you fix a more reliable supply. Many grids in e.g. Africa are very unreliable and don't have enough capacity.
In many countries people are still relying on generators for this but increasingly solar and batteries are becoming a viable alternative. The upfront cost of this is a big obstacle for many smaller businesses. As is the availability of components. But generators and fuel are also not free. And they break down and need maintenance too. And the exhaust fumes cause health issues.
However, solutions in this space actually have a value and return on investment. So, providing lines of credit for this is actually something that is potentially a profitable business and not just charity. Plenty of entrepreneurs in Africa, the Middle East, parts of Asia, etc. that could use that to bootstrap their businesses and would be able to pay back loans with interest.
I'd say micro grids will be a reality long before, if ever, people figure out cheap, reliable grid power in many of these places.
> analogized to how developing countries leapfrogged to wireless telecom without the expensive wired last-mile telecom stage
Another example of this sort of dynamic are skipping credit cards for app based payments. Or not having much of a postal service because email.
In all these cases I think its more of a shortcut than truly leapfrogging. Not as good in terms of redundancy (good for reliability) and interoperability.
This sounds nice but in reality you need sophisticated grid controlling measures to have a fixed frequency for many things. This is doable just good to be aware of it.
I would really like a setup where my roof top solar panels makes me self-sufficient for energy needs, but the key hurdle is battery storage.
In a town house in Netherlands, for a family of three, I use on an average 250 kWh of electricity (excluding heating by gas) per month.
I’m getting solar panels installed in my roof to the tune of 10 x 420wp panels expected to generate 280kWh of electricity per month.
My primary concern about batteries is the fire risk. Even if I were to take on the risk and have a battery bank in the garden shed, they’d essentially give me a buffer of about half a day’s worth of buffer. This makes it really not worth taking on the risk for such a little benefit, and continue to rely on the grid as my battery.
I’m waiting for that energy storage breakthrough that would allow me to store the excess energy generated in the summer for use in the winter. May be producing hydrogen safely in the backyard or have a tank of compressed air below the garden or some kind of flow battery that can be buried under the garden shed etc.
Hopefully it comes to life while I still make money and have the interest to do all this :-)
Don't really see why people with solar that are connected to the grid actually want to install batteries at all. There's the cost, fire risk, and just the simple alternative of selling excess production for free/discounted grid usage at other times. You're still saving the planet to the same degree, and doing it more cheaply too, with fewer things to go wrong.
"Don't really see why people with solar that are connected to the grid actually want to install batteries at all."
Power load smoothing, emergency backup. I been through a couple of natural disasters, and you quickly realize storage of power is just as key as power generation.
To reduce the storage needs, I think most people could be flexible with their power usage during emergencies, high prices or bad (local) production. For example, I can typically postpone big-screen movie nights, doing the hoovering/laundry, cooking in the (electric) oven, heating the (electric) sauna. For one day every now and then, it's no problem to turn off the convenience heating of the bathroom floor either.
You can check your power consumption during sleeping hours to get a base level. Then, on a normal day, I use 3 to 10 kWh but can fairly painlessly cut it down to 1.5 kWh if needed, which would be more feasible to store in a battery.
Arguably the UK/NL isn't so great for individual solar production anyway. But there are still good options: buy from a on/offshore wind provider, hydro too.
If even battery fire risk bothers you, you should really reconsider burying bombs in your backyard.
Compressed gas cylinders are _terrifying_, a larger one with an inert gas could level your entire house, and a hydrogen one could level the entire block.
Many families in the nearby village run generators at night. They can't afford solar panels so they pay 5 soles for gasoline just to have lights on when it gets dark. If they could afford solar they could have lights on every night for a one time cost. Most family don't have the luxury of running generators though.
This project sounds really cool. I wonder if this can be done in the Peruvian Amazon. I'm sure several families could share the same solar panel and battery if they only use it for lighting and charging phones... Funding would be difficult, no one has money here.
That's half the monthly minimum wage, most people here make even less, and everyone has at least a few kids to feed.
Also everything is more expensive because it's so remote. There are no roads so everything has to be brought here by airplane or boat. If you order something from Amazon (the website) to the Amazon (the rainforest) shipping is at quite expensive and then there's import fees too...
In my mind I was comparing versus the alternative stated of buying a generator & fuel for it. The generator will be up-front pricier, weightier, and bulkier, by far on each count. So it still seems like a huge win to me versus what's available now, if the use case is as described.
I think there's also the sunk cost aspect. You saved for a long time for the generator on the basis it would provide power for you for a very long time so an alternative to this prized asset isn't high on your list of things to spend all your savings on (even if on paper it was economically rational to do so)
Yet. It's daunting to me to imagine replacing well known infrastructure with something custom & different. You could try to get a bunch of automotive 12 & 24 lights but there won't be great fixtures. You also need 12v versions of most appliances; fans, fridges, others.
Your upgrade capabilities also seem limited. If grid power does come, you might be stuck with a bunch of abornal choices. Your wire loss is much much higher with 1/10th the voltage or 10x the amps per wire, which limits scaling out on DC, is a counter-inefficiency that grows the bigger your system gets.
I think it's a good idea. Personally if I built a small off grid home or RV I'd probably do 48vdc. But it'd be much more work & require a ton of expertise.
> Solar power is still fairly rare in Indonesia. While the country has targeted more solar as part of its climate goals, there has been limited progress due to regulations that don’t allow households to sell power back to the grid, ruling out a way of defraying the cost that has helped people afford solar in other parts of the world.
Most of the article is talking about homes that aren't even connected to the grid, so there's no grid to sell power back to in the first place. Sure, maybe there's also a law against it, but if the starting condition is "no electricity", it doesn't seem like the law is much of an impediment.
From TFA: 97% of Indonesians are on the power grid; those are the ones who'd ostensibly be selling back (not these microfinanced units in the remaining 3%).
What’s going to happen when the haves can afford to buy solar and go off grid leaving the have-nots left on a grid increasingly void of people who can pay for it? I suspect off grid users will be taxed heavily and/or it’ll be illegal to not pump back into the grid. Will probably be illegal to go off grid in the future
This is already happening in South Africa. The grid pretty much can't provide and is now turned off for people for up to 40% of the day.
So over the last decade, a huge amount of solar installations have made people a few small steps away from going off grid. But separate to that, they're paying less and less (0 in some cases), so "the grid" is stuck keeping: subsidized customers, customers who use almost 0 and customers that use lots illegally and don't pay.
The power utility's answer: tax users that don't use any electricity. And not just a connection type flat fee. They want to punish people that use very little, ironically after begging people to "please stop using so much electricity".
From what I've heard (friends who worked there for a month), electricity in South Africa is demential. For example there's a timetable to know when you will have, probably, four hours of electricity tomorrow and for the next week. You cannot make extrapolations from that.
You are 100% correct. They have planned "blackouts" according to a schedule so that it's fair and everyone gets a turn. However the schedule is based on how heavily the strain on the network is, which they regularly fiddle with. There are even apps now that notify people of blackouts planned for their area and help them make some sense of the chaos.
Luckily (or not) they have huge strain on the network atm so they pretty much said "nope, perpetually stage 6" so at least people know what to expect for the coming days. It still catches so many people off guard and they're forced to make plans for dinner as an example.
And yet they're refuse to allow solar users to push back to the grid easily. It's madness and the government is making itself obsolete, which will medium term affect the poor the most.
> And yet they're refuse to allow solar users to push back to the grid easily.
Grid solar (and even more wind) is harder to handle than a plant that can be modulated. If they can't handle their plants or invest to fix their issues, I can understand that they don't have the means to handle solar.
For most people in urban and suburban areas, a grid connection is going to be sufficiently financially attractive that the rational thing to do is keep it.
For one thing, maintaining sufficient storage at home to fully recharge a car overnight would be prohibitively expensive, but maintaining a grid connection to allow you to do so is cheap.
The process of ripping up the grid is more likely to occur (and in fact is already starting to happen) in remote areas. Traditionally urban consumers have cross-subsidised some remote electricity connections but in many cases it’s cheaper to buy those consumers off-grid systems or independent microgrids than maintain grid infrastructure connecting those locations.
This was kind of the rural electrification challenge the US faced. Opting to wire almost everyone up was a costly endeavor at the time. But one we take for granted now.
Given where the world is now, given how much easier decentralized solar & renewable are than the massified power generation of yore, I'm more conflicted today than I am comfortable with. The idea of sprawling microgrids, communities giving local access maybe cheap may grow up, but likely undrr diverse & inconsistent & biased policies... Likely as an Uberified enshittifying take on what a public utility ought be.
It's just evolution. At this point the price of solar on your roof with some batteries is getting low enough that it earns itself back even without subsidies. As this stuff gets cheaper, more people get access to this stuff and the market grows. As it does, prices drop further.
It's not happening overnight so people and grid suppliers have a chance to adapt. But yes, bad things generally happen to people and companies that can't adapt to changes. Ironically, people that are in developing countries tend to be more adaptable. If something works, they'll be all over it.
The monopolist's response to this is indeed to push for things to be illegal and expensive. Which ironically just speeds up their demise. Places where this happens simply become less competitive.
People move to where the jobs and economics are better. Also politically. Politicians blocking sane policies on this front are going to have a hard time. People are going to call out their bullshit and point to neighbors where the grass is greener and ask hard questions. Inevitably a few less enlightened politicians are going to insist on finding this out the hard way and then get voted out of office. The rest will learn from their examples; that's already happening. Republicans like cheap power just as much as Democrats. This is not a left-right topic anymore. People still bicker over climate change. But cheap power is something everybody can agree is a nice thing to have.
I find it more likely that the poor will want to disconnect from the grid, because the grid is fundamentally about reliability. When your own systems fail, you still want power while you are waiting for repairs. At least if you can afford it.
I hope to get a battery system to offset some of my costs, but I can't forsee not being connected to the grid as backup and to sell some excess energy back anyway.
I don't have an electric car either, so while my current solar system (6.6kW) could power my current household energy use basically year-round (if I had sufficient battery capacity), I would only be able to slow charge solely off that, so I expect I will still be buying energy from the grid once I get an EV for times I want to fast charge (probably 11kW three phase), even with the solar and a hypothetical battery.
The key use for grids that can't be replaced is industrial use. Some companies need very-high quality power, in terms of frequency stability or downtime. Other companies require high volumes.
For these users, it's much easier to buy service than to start a dedicated service within the company responsible for, essentially, setting up their own grid.
Once you have that, connecting nearby homes cheaply is easy, and it's really a rich person's pastime to build an off-grid alternative with equivalent quality if you can get connected.
> Children sometimes studied by makeshift oil lamps, but these occasionally burned down homes when knocked over by the wind.
So a big issue with these is that kerosene has a flash point of 37C to 62C. So at the lower end of the scale, they’re basically like gasoline and capable of lighting up all at once at barely above room temperature (and the burning flame will likely warm it up a bit). Meanwhile diesel is 52C to 93C and would burn more slowly if a lamp burning it were tipped over (and more likely to just get extinguished)
There have been cheap “safety” lamps built that don’t explode when tipped over along with other safeguards for developing countries:
Yes, just pointing out the increased danger from kerosene because not a lot of people know the differences between kerosene and diesel (which can often be substituted)
This is great but also I hope the non-profits have aftersale support for the panels. Considering their "copay" is $3.5 over 3 years it's unlikely the villagers would be able to replace a faulty panel.
I hope this is not the case of "giving someone a fish", instead of teaching them how to fish.
Water turbines can help too. If you combine solar, water, and wind with a decent storage system you could do all sorts of things. Automated irrigation of agriculture. Self-running aquaponics. A induction electric oven and cooktops for a restaurant, let alone the lighting and A/C.
> While the country has targeted more solar as part of its climate goals, there has been limited progress due to regulations that don’t allow households to sell power back to the grid, ruling out a way of defraying the cost that has helped people afford solar in other parts of the world.
I little correction here, Indonesia do have a regulation that allow households to sell power back to the grid[1].
Reading the details is seems like it is still pretty true that there are regulations that don't allow households to sell power back to the grind. There are not regulations forbidding the practice but even with these reforms the practice seems regulated in a way to make it difficult and give the power generation and distribution companies total control:
"Like the previous regime, the New Regulation limits the capacity of the rooftop solar system installed by the customer of such system within the business area of a state-owned entity holding an IUPTLU to 100% of their connected power. However, rooftop solar customers whose systems are connected to other IUPTLU holders besides a state-owned entity may be subject to a different limitation as determined by the relevant IUPTLU holders. These holders must declare their respective limitation on an annual basis.."
My reading of this is that it is now possible for a IUPTLU to allow someone to offset more than 100% of their electricity usage but it is not required for any of them to provide that option, just register the terms with the regulator.
1. (For those on the state-owned retailer/distributor) Although you can't be credited for any generation over 100% (up from 65%), the extra credit does carry over in a 6-monthly cycle (up from 3). Which means, while you can't make a profit out of your generation, it does cater for seasonal variations to keep your bill at zero. Not the best, but not terrible.
2. (For private retailers) As you said, there's nothing requiring them to do anything.
Also of interest is that, even with deregulation efforts in the early 2000s, the state still holds near-monopoly level of distribution/retail - especially in the residential market. The small number of private operators are either remote, or focused on industrial complexes.
On the generation side, there's plenty of major private players, but most of them simply sell to the state (again, because of the near-monopoly).
Unfortunately, despite panels and batteries getting cheaper every year, not every rural household has the financial means to access these solutions. I'm really excited about initiatives creating microgrids with peer-to-peer payment systems, like solshare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v33ERl42VYM
I've worked a bit in this sector, and here are my observations:
1. Solar Home sets range from $5 flashlights with solarcells to $150 home lights+panels+phonecharger+radio to $400 sets with TV. The more expensive sets are usually paid off over time.
2. The impact of even the smallest flashlights on human wellbeing is enormous. You may imagine a village in the third world has a cosy campfire. But in truth it is usually too much effort to collect the wood, so people live in the dark half the day. The mentioned kerosine lamps are already a luxury to many. Having a flashlight so you can spot the snakes and spiders when you go outside at night to have a pee, or make sure you do not slip is life saving. Having a 100lumen light in your bedroom so you can see faintly your wife or husband while you have sex is amazing.
3. So this is about improving well-being. Not industrialising. These solar home systems do not significantly make people wealthier or more likely to become wealthy. It just makes them 20% happier. You need significantly more and cheaper power to start a factory. For that, "Commercial and Industrial solar" is a big deal. Where companies in India/Africa/Indonesia buy $10-30k worth of solar panels + battery + inverter to make sure their factories are always powered. Cost of up-front capital and competing with subsidised energy makes this not always a no-brainer.
4. Grid expansion is... expensive. I do not think we'll see the grid covering everywhere by the end of this century. And microgrids are great, but also expensive. How expensive? Consider that connecting your house to the grid in a developed country costs about $10k. Companies have been able to connect villages under the grid for about $1500 per house. Microgrids (with all their limitations) can sometimes do it for $700. If you consider that a household makes anywhere between $100 and $700 per year, then you see that the only way to be able to do this is with heavy subsidies (development aid) from foreign countries. And then you still need to pay for the actual power and maintain the grid. If that costs $300/household/year, and the household makes less per year, then your economics go nowhere.
One more thing: A related problem that affects the same population is that of clean cooking. Poor people (women) cook on wood or charcoal instead of electricity or gas. Arguably this is the worst problem in the world (yes worse than war, natural disasters, HIV, Malaria and all other diseases together) as millions of people die from it each year. Solutions are similar: Selling small gas stoves.
Tl dr; The real problem with energy poverty is that the people it is trying to reach are unimaginably poor. Way poorer than that great grandfather of yours that grew up in poverty. Solve poverty and you solve energy.
While barriers still remain, experts say off-grid solar programs on the island could be replicated across the vast archipelago nation, bringing renewable energy to remote communities.
Helping kids study, parents make money, people get together to watch shows on cell phones. It's a big deal and helps them connect to the larger world.