Comment on Africa's road map to a bigger, greener power system
poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 weeks ago
This article focusses on utility companies plans, but the real interesting part will be how solar power at individual level will pan out.
Similar to how mobile telecomunication has leapfrogged traditional cable based supply in many of these countries, it is likely that we might see people jumping from no electricity to off-grid solar installations without ever bothering to expand the grid.
This will be an interesting case study to see how viable such kind of developments are on a larger scale.
Wanderer@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I think that will be a waste.
Like if your household usage on average is 100% you might go on holiday and hit 0%. You might have a week where friends come over and you use 200% so you need 200% storage for those edge cases. But as a whole your neighbourhood will use closer to 100% all the time and doesn’t need that extra storage.
So individual is a lot less efficient than grid. Same applies to production.
If the grid is fucked and doesn’t work probably it might be better, but that says more about people controlling the grid fucking up more than it being inferior.