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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]

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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.

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[–] [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.