Pakistan's solar revolution leaves its middle class behind

reuters.com

13 points·alephnerd··7 comments

The roofs of many apartment buildings are designated for water storage and other sanitation purposes, while owners of rental buildings have little incentive to invest in solar connections for their tenants.

"We get some sunlight indoors but I can't seem to think of a way to go solar," she said. "Why must people living in apartments suffer?"

This sounds like a good case for balcony solar. It's popular for German apartments:

"How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels"

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/how-germany-outfi...

Why do they choose the systems which dont export power, which I assume are much more expensive? Is it a chicken and egg problem of unreliable grid, ie only when grid is powered, solar systems export power to the grid?

> only when grid is powered, solar systems export power to the grid?

Worse yet. When grid is down, some grid-tied systems will not allow any local power use either.

Few years back, nearly all grid-tied inverters had this problem. Now situation is slowly improving, with "grid-interactive" systems which do allow local use of solar power with no grid.

Natural gas grids will face a similar problem as people switch to heat pumps.

Not sure about the calculation for home heating, but for hot water it is still ideal to have an instant gas hot water system. Heat pump hot water systems are expensive (to install and to service) and take up a lot of space.

cheap chinese panels & lithium batteries have been a godsend in africa.

for households they're mostly enough. but not yet that cheap to power industrialization - you still need hydrocarbons for that.

https://archive.is/B8xaU

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