points by hunglee2 3 days ago | 0 comments
decentralised energy generation is going to be the way developing economies leap over more advanced ones. Same thing happening in South Africa, can't rely on the national grid, so everyone installs solar, batteries and diesel generators for backup. The outcome is a much more resilient grid energy system. Future is literally bright
[–] pyrale 3 days ago
[–] pfdietz 3 days ago
I think there's a good chance we will actually see decentralization of industry due to very cheap solar. We may also see a movement of industry to sunny locations. This is bad news for northern Europe, and perhaps for all of Europe.
The scale will be set by how large long term storage has to be, which could be as small as 100s of kW. The future grid might be a constellation of loosely connected microgrids. This will do wonders for resilience.
[–] SecretDreams 2 days ago
Yes, all of industry will move to Africa, at great expense, to get the free solar.
Energy input is just one portion of a businesses expenses.. even if this business was fully dark (all robots, since you're not going to get all your HQP to move to Africa), you still would like to have that business somewhat interconnected to the supply chain.
Many businesses won't exist long enough to hit the ROI needed to uproot to move to someplace extra sunny and to pay for the full install of the power required to be fully off grid.
[–] pfdietz 2 days ago
Oh European colonial mindset, don't ever change.
Good luck with running industries on decentralized energy production. That's how things started during the industrial revolution, and the grid was a net upgrade. Reason for that is building a factory is much cheaper when you don't need to also build the adjoined power plant.
Decentralized production works well with residential or low consumption tertiary sector, but not much else. Even then, a working grid will have better quality of service and economies of scale on equipment. The issue with developing countries is that their grid typically is dysfunctional.
> The outcome is a much more resilient grid energy system.
That claim depends a lot on the threat model you're looking at. If your goal is to still have some energy under coordinated attack, sure. If your goal is to maximmize uptime for critical services, not so much. Backup generators, inverters, etc. typically have a higher rate of failure than a well-performing grid.