Technology

58061 readers

31 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

India joins rush to renewables, but its rural solar systems fall off grid (www.washingtonpost.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A cautionary tale for a world racing into renewables: The large majority of mini-grids in India no longer work, an environmental group found.

About 4,000 solar mini-grids have been installed in India, of which 3,300 are government financed and owned. Only 5% of the government grids are operational.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Are these problems unique to solar? From the article:

Young village boys have rejiggered the wires so a few phones at a time can be charged. The solar panels still generate energy, but the batteries to store the electricity and the network to distribute it no longer function.

…

A team of Dutch researchers reported in 2017 that in a sample of 29 solar systems in sub-Saharan Africa, only three were fully working. “The reasons cited for failure always point to the same challenges: an absence of local maintenance expertise and a lack of acceptance,” researchers said in an article published by the Conversation.

It seems like these are problems that would crop up with any form of intermittent power generation. And a broken distribution network is an issue for everything and anything to do with power at all. It seems like this could be less an issue with renewables requiring maintenance, and more an issue with renewables enabling rushed implementation of power generation.