The technology is readily available, people will pay to have access to it. Yet, a lot of people still don’t have this technology made available to them.
In: Economics
PR, USVI and BVI’s are not 3rd world countries and we can’t even keep the lights on.
How can you be so naive to think the technology is readily available?!
One of the core problems in every underdeveloped country is corruption. There is no money for anything, because money gets embezzled and stolen at every possible level. Its the default way of life for all countries that haven’t developed strong rule of law yet.
It might be difficult to understand for most people in developed countries what true system wide corruption really means. Its not just corruption of only politicians or only public sector, its corrupt everyone, at every level of society, from politician down to a janitor. Every profession has ways to steal something and in a properly corrupt country, everyone finds a way.
It’s always, always, always about money.
A powerplant requires steady supply of fuel. Trustworthy staff. Good security. But also maintenance plans and so on.
The power grid requires reliable equipment. Trustworthy staff. And decent security. But also good monitoring systems, maintenance plans and so on.
With a power plant, part of the fuel supply plan is that you need a decent depot where you store fuel so that a fuel transport ship you are waiting for ain’t blacking out the entire country just because some container ship sits across the Suez Canal for a week.
In other words, if you rely on oil, you want to have MASSIVE tanks ande you want to store more than you technically speaking need. Just in case there is an issue with the supply chain. Or, you know, to become less of a victim of changing world market prices.
Oil is not the only fuel, of course. But the principle is the same with all of them. It *will* cost a lot of money initially to purchase so much extra fuel that you can just avoid buying for a month or two when the world market prices suddenly skyrocket.
The less sensitive to world market problems and supply chain issues you want to be, the more you need to be able to bunker by yourself at all times. The facilities for storage will be expensive. The actual fuel in storage will initially be expensive. If your customers are unable to pay for the initial cost, even if over time, it’s out of the question to invest in it.
Another important part of it is that a power plant is a machine. There are plenty of moving parts and there has to be maintenance now and then that shuts down the production. You can’t really avoid maintenance. And you can’t avoid the obviously coming blackout.
Unless, you know, you have several production facilities, that typically run at 60-70% of their full capacity. Because in that case you can shut off one for maintenance. And next week another. And so on.
Then start to look at the power grid. Redundancy in a power grid means that, if you boil it down, you have *at least* two cables that go from point a to point b. Not necessarily alongside each other (even though that definitely happens) but definitely so that you can shut down one of them in case it breaks down and still make do with the other.
Power grid is also built with multiple different voltages. Somewhat simplified, a power lines *transmission loss* (i.e, the power you put in that never reaches the output point at the other end) goes down a lot if you increase the voltage, which means that when you want to tract a long distance, say from a province to another, you want to do that at a voltage in the vicinity of 400 000 V. Between two cities, around 150 000 V or thereabout. Inside a city, 10 000 V to 50 000 V. You are going to have a lot of infrastructure that changes the voltage. Bulky, ugly things that are affected by weather.
A decent redundancy thought for a large city is that you take in that 400kV at a few key locations (say, one in each cardinal direction?) and distribute it towards the city, and that those large substations are dimensioned so that you HAVE four, but NEED two. Eh, or however that equation works well in your budget and defence strategy. If you need more than three of four, you effectively don’t have redundancy any more.
The main idea with reliable power starts at building a system that can deal with something breaking down. Because things WILL break down.
The simple truth is that things break down all the bloody time in electrical supply chains. It should come as no surprise that putting something outside in the weather for fifty years will make it vulnerable and require a committed inspection program, and even then you can’t be entirely sure. Just decently sure.
The difference with a country that is not fully industrialised yet and a country that is, is that the customers are probably not prepared/able to pay for full redundancy. The business model doesn’t allow the expense of building double of everything. Yet.
Or the expense of purchasing six to twelve months worth of fuel for a power plant.
You can also toy a bit with the complicated question about communications equipment for maintenance staff. Is it, eh, depending on electricity to keep a radio mast operational?
Do you need to provide power to a gas station if you want to be able to transport spare parts?
What else do you identify that could be a weak link in the chain?
In many, many countries, this is something that a government agency has asked very to-the-point questions about because they want satisfying answers. You could say that a developing country provides less satisfying questions to some of these questions. Or that less satisfying answers are acceptable for some time to come.
Because that is kind of how it works everywhere. You always, always, always pick the low-hanging fruit first. You don’t really need redundant power lines when you have one outage every five years depending on the power lines and five a year because fuel is suddenly outrageously expensive. And then you work your way down. Until you have something so reliable that customers barely notice that you still keep up the improvement work.
Infrastructure. They are lacking the infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is there, they need to know how to operate it, and maintain it. This takes education. Education requires an infrastructure all of its own… And we just keep digging down until we hit bedrock, and that’s where we start building infrastructure from.
The REAL question is how do countries that have stable electricity actually do it.
It is a small miracle.
In addition to what is being said – the technology is abundant, yup. Education and training is less abundant in developing nations.
So you can build electrical systems with outside help, but you will struggle to perform maintenance without the right number of educated people.
Infrastructure is a multi-tiered problem that requires constant investment. Generating the electricity is rarely the problem. It’s delivering it. Electricity needs to be generated in bulk and then physically transferred to every single home via a physical cable. There’s alot that can go wrong from point A to point B. You need a working grid that can distribute power across a whole area, and the sections need to be intertwined so that if one source of energy falls behind on production, another can step up. The grid needs to be flexible to rapid changes in power use that occur throughout the day. And then there’s what you do when something goes wrong. If a power line fails, you need a robust response system to respond to the incident quickly to fix it. That means you need a large staff on standby. It also means you need roads that are accessible to commercial vehicles. All of the equipment on the grid occasionally needs to get fixed, replaced, and upgraded, which adds up when you’re supplying a grid to millions of people. The technology is not the problem. The logistics are.
Building and maintaining infrastructure does not generate profit. It’s a money sink.
Those with the wealth to do it aren’t willing to throw the money away for something that, at best, will barely break even on maintenance costs
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Corruption. In South Africa, our biggest issue is the lack of maintenance as well as not putting money back into upgrades etc instead money that should go to these things gets pocketed. Buying low-grade coal which ends up fcking up the infrastructure, giving vital job positions away to their mates, awarding tenders (contracts) to friends, family and whoever is wiling to bribe the most. It all comes down to corruption. And as a result we experience loadshedding every day. If we’re lucky it’s 2 hours a day but typically its 4 hours and when it gets bad, it’s easily 8 hours. Stores have dedicated categories for loadshedding (call it stupid names like loadshopping etc.) Where you can buy UPSs (or even a UPS specifically for routers), generators, solar lights, etc. My favorite are those light bulbs that screw into the normal socket in your roof that automatically charge when there’s power then work as normal when the powers off.
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