Peter Ka
A buddy posted the following on another forum. I have his permission to post it here:
[INDENT]Many friends ask me the same question. Does it make sense to install solar panels in Indonesia? This may be a good place to answer that.
If you have PLN, it does make NO financial sense. You electricity cost will go up. PLN USD charges around 0.12/kWh. The Solar power that you produce and consume immediately costs USD 0.30/kWh.
If you have PLN, It does make SOMEWHAT Environmental sense. You will use less coal electricity. Most polluting energy in the world. In Indonesia it is un-scrubbed, unlike new coal fired plants in the Western world.
If you don’t have PLN, e.g. Island Resort or remote area, it is still cheaper to run diesel gensets at USD 0.30/kWh versus USD 0.66/kWh for an Off Grid Solar system.
BUT your resort or remote site is truly Green.
Even if Indonesia gets a “Feed In” system (will not happen for a long time), it only starts making sense if FIT (Feed In Tariff) kWh prices from PLN start approaching USD 0.30. Feed In Systems are common in the Western World. It means that an electricity company HAS to buy all the electricity that you have surplus during a day at an agreed price.
PS. I used a 10% cost of capital.[/INDENT]
Smoke
On Lombok they have PLN but noticed lots of outages.
which would you use as a back up for that ? a generator that makes noise or solar panels ? and why ?
Peter Ka
Smoke. PLN backup is a slightly different setup, but again the economics say the same. Use a genset.
Using solar as backup does not work in any way.
In theory one could build a giant UPS that could, say for 12 hours, run the usual power demand for a house or resort, but the the resulting cost for that would be around $0.45 per Kwh versus around $ 0.30 per Kwh Genset (Diesel at rp 10,000/L).
Edit added: But it would be wonderful to do, if you could afford it. Both total solar or the UPS.
Markit
All of these calcs on the efficacy of solar panels is based on their previous efficiency rate of %16, which the amount of sun energy that they can convert to electricity. Or so I understand it.
Just read that the wiz boys have managed to increase that to %42 which seems to put the calculation on its head and speaks more for the use of panels.
Now if they could just get the price down to a reasonable level.
hca
Another thing to be aware of is the seasonal efficiency.
I put 2 large panels giving enough to charge the batteries and run the load in a normal day, the batteries were capable of running the load for 3 days with out charge on a small radio site. The aim was electrical isolation from PLN in lightning season not economics. All up about 14Jt in gear.
It worked great during the dry season but once the wet season got going the system started to run down. Turned out nothing was wrong or different but a look at the solar data from the weather station showed the daily charge was down to as low as 30% due to the prevailing heavy cloud.
I think most know the seasons and rainfall vary around the island but the point in very general approximations is at our location we need about 42jt of gear to do the same thing in the wet months as we can to with 14 in the dry months.
Attached is the solar for this week showing cloudy ad sunny days.
