Talking to a friend who works in the energy industry, this is already happening in Puerto Rico. Electricity prices are high enough that it makes sense for a very large fraction of people to get solar, which then pushes prices up even higher for the remainder, and it spirals.
Isn’t it basically a policy choice over there to require net metering and thus make it not economical to get your power over the grid?
Many African countries like Nigeria have a problem that nobody builds power plants and an electric grid because there are laws that forbid that limit businesses to provide that service in a profitable way.
It seems like this would mean that Puerto Rico is going to move into having third-world country energy reliability and a requirement for everyone to deal with buying their own generators like people in Nigeria have to do while in total paying more for energy than they would have to pay if energy would be provided in a more centralized fashion.
But with what reliability? If you don’t mind going without power (or dramatically curtailed power) a few weeks a year, then you could dramatically reduce the battery size, but most people in high income countries don’t want to make that trade-off.
Talking to a friend who works in the energy industry, this is already happening in Puerto Rico. Electricity prices are high enough that it makes sense for a very large fraction of people to get solar, which then pushes prices up even higher for the remainder, and it spirals.
Isn’t it basically a policy choice over there to require net metering and thus make it not economical to get your power over the grid?
Many African countries like Nigeria have a problem that nobody builds power plants and an electric grid because there are laws that forbid that limit businesses to provide that service in a profitable way.
It seems like this would mean that Puerto Rico is going to move into having third-world country energy reliability and a requirement for everyone to deal with buying their own generators like people in Nigeria have to do while in total paying more for energy than they would have to pay if energy would be provided in a more centralized fashion.
But with what reliability? If you don’t mind going without power (or dramatically curtailed power) a few weeks a year, then you could dramatically reduce the battery size, but most people in high income countries don’t want to make that trade-off.