Malawi suffers blackouts as drought exposes 98% reliance on hydro power

[Eugene]

Source: Agence France-Presse

Malawi suffers blackouts as drought exposes 98% reliance on hydro power

Agence France-Presse
Friday 8 December 2017 02.47 GMT

Large parts of Malawi have been plunged into darkness as water levels at the country’s main hydro power plant fell to critical levels due to a severe drought, according to its electricity company.

The impoverished southern African country which relies on hydroelectricity has been hit by intermitted blackouts since last year, but the outages have recently worsened, lasting up to 25 hours.

The state-owned Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) said on Thursday that power output had been halved as water levels in the Shire river dropped to critical levels.

The water from the river normally generates a total of 300 megawatts of electricity, which is 98% of the country’s supply. “For the past three weeks, the available capacity was 160 megawatts,” said Escom said in a statement.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/08/malawi-blackouts-drought-hydro-power

[msongs]

1. time to add solar n wind to the mix? nt

[NNadir]

2. Well, given that the solar industry is so ineffective at addressing climate change...

...and therefore at being sure to make more extreme weather conditions, this is a good idea for improving the prospects of the equally useless wind industry, since as I understand it, the winds on Venus are tremendous.

And we're getting there; we definitely are.

Hydroelectricity is so called, "renewable energy," except it isn't really renewable, and it isn't really reliable, sort of like wind and solar, neither of which are reliable, effective or cost effective.

One piece of excellent advice would be to insist that poor people add even more unreliable weather dependent junk to their portfolio.

I mean after all, they don't get to use gas like we do when the rivers dry up, the winds don't blow and it's um, night.

People have been crowing about renewable energy for half a century; the amount of money squandered on wind and solar in the last ten years is 400 times as large as the Gross National Product of Malawi, which is about 5.4 billion dollars and combined, these two forms of energy don't produce 1% of the 570 exajoules of energy humanity was consuming per year as of 2015.

We simply don't give a shit in the West about poor people in Africa, and this "Let them eat cake" approach is pure evidence of that.

[Finishline42]

3. Solar is happening all across Africa

The beauty of solar is that it can be had for minimal amounts without the technology needed to build and maintain a national electric grid.

From an article in the New Yorker - The Race to Solar-Power in Aftrica.

I’d come to Daban to learn about the boom in solar power in sub-Saharan Africa. The spread of cell phones in the region has made it possible for residents to pay daily or weekly bills using mobile money, and now the hope is that, just as cell phones bypassed the network of telephone lines, solar panels will enable many rural consumers to bypass the electric grid. From Ghana, I travelled to Ivory Coast, and then to Tanzania, and along the way I encountered a variety of new solar ventures, most of them American-led. Some, such as Ghana’s Black Star Energy, which had electrified Daban, install solar microgrids, small-scale versions of the giant grid Americans are familiar with. Others, such as Off-Grid Electric, in Tanzania and Ivory Coast, market home-based solar systems that run on a panel installed on each individual house. These home-based systems can’t produce enough current for a fridge, but they can supply each home with a few lights, a mobile-phone charger, and, if the household can afford it, a small, super-efficient flat-screen TV.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/the-race-to-solar-power-africa

[hunter]

4. I encounter many promoters of solar energy who have never lived a purely solar lifestyle.

On larger scale projects there is always a big diesel set or gas turbine in the background. On smaller household sized solar projects a gasoline, natural gas, or propane fueled generator is used as "backup" that will in practice produces most of the electricity.

In poor nations these fossil fueled generators tend to be very dirty, and fossil fuel imports are a very significant burden to the national economy.

There are some Mother Earth News types who will use solar to power a small water well pump, and to recharge a tablet or cell phone, but otherwise they live a 19th century American wilderness lifestyle, burning wood for heating and cooking, doing their laundry by hand, and working their gardens using human and animal muscle power.

All my suburban solar neighbors are entirely dependent upon huge utility gas turbines to sustain their first world lifestyles whenever the sun isn't shining.

"Batteries" does not answer this criticism. Anyone who has ever been responsible for the care and feeding of batteries soon comes to loathe them. The sorts of affluent people who discard their cell phones and laptops long before the batteries go bad never seem to understand this. They'll probably be the same with their electric cars. It will be the lower income working people who get stuck with used electric cars having worn batteries they can't afford to replace.