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by chakerb 2227 days ago
A lot of solar panels were insalled where I live compared to none five years ago. However their only use case here is to pump water out of the ground. The prices of the panel don't make them good investment for home usage. And even the government don't provide enough incentives to invest in them.
1 comments
dwaltrip 2227 days ago
Do you have numbers?
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chakerb 2227 days ago
Well, we have only one company installing solar panels in a ~25 km radius. And they're installing around 3 installation per month, each have 8 large panels.I don't have the exact number of how many watt they generate. But they are capable of powering pumps that pulls 12 liters per second.
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kragen 2227 days ago
You're probably mistaken [edit: no, I was wrong] about whether they're good investments for home usage and whether government subsidies would be needed, but maybe you live in a country where import tariffs make the panels cost a lot more than they cost on the open market.

By "large" do you mean something more like 0.01 m², 0.1 m², 1 m², 10 m², or 100 m²? Any of those is a "large panel" in some frame of reference.

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chakerb 2227 days ago
They're not a good investment due to high cost of the panels compared to the price of electricity. Which to be fair is heavily subsided be the state. I'm looking forward to install ones myself, but I'm in the 90th percentile of people in my country that can afford to write big check upfront for power for home usage. Again most of the usage now is limited to agriculture since it makes sense there financially.

By large I mean around 2m² each. Not sure the best size to capture the most out of the sun. But we're at the edge of the Sahara desert, so the climate is a little bit helping there.

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kragen 2227 days ago
Interesting! Yeah, if electricity is heavily subsidized, you're probably right that solar panels are unprofitable. How much does electricity cost? Why don't the agricultural water pumping folks use the subsidized electricity instead of installing solar panels?
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chakerb 2227 days ago
0.021 usd per kwh. Farmer are sparsely located, so linking them to the main grid is costly as they need to pay for it by themselves.
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