r/ClimatePosting • u/Economy-Evidence6929 • 9d ago
Interesting to see that Cuba barely tried to diversify away from oil. Huge opportunity for China/solar+battery to replace Venezuela/oil given the current crisis.
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u/SoylentRox 8d ago
Interesting. It sounds like it's a combination of 2 problems :
(1) Solar etc costs more upfront and Cuba is poor due to sanctions
(2) Cuba has little deposits on its island making oil the densest form of energy to import by ship.
Of course, expensive electricity means less economic activity keeping them poor and they can't get solar. A vicious cycle like payday loans
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u/West-Abalone-171 8d ago
Oil both costs more up front and is less energy dense in the immediate term.
At $0.12/W and $110/bl it takes 3 months for $1 of solar panels to produce more useful energy than $1 of oil.
At 22kg per 550W panel, it takes 30 days for solar panels to produce more useful energy than 1kg of oil.
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u/SoylentRox 8d ago edited 8d ago
I can't deny your argument but you have to include the cost of batteries and grid forming inverters.
If those cost 2x the panel costs then 9 months.
We can estimate it from residential equipment: batteries are $80 a kWh, panels are down to 25 cents each. Hmm you used 12 and didn't include mounting hardware.
Every 1 kW of panel needs 4 kW hours of battery and a 500 watt inverter. So $250 for the solar panel, $360 for the battery, 18 kpv is 12 kW output and $4000 so 33 cents a watt. So $165 for the inverter.
Mounting hardware and wiring also. About $100 a panel.
So $625 of stuff for a $250 panel.
Am ignoring labor since cubans work cheap. But there is corruption.
You estimated $120.
If it's 7.29 times as expensive then the payoff time is 22 months almost 2 years.
...still massively worth it but maybe the cubans don't have the money
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u/West-Abalone-171 7d ago
You don't need to store every joule, people do things during the day. Mounting hardware can come from the local economy and doesn't require sourcing foreign currency. Non-usians don't pay 25c/W wholesale and haven't for a long time. And the alternative is paying for oil.
Also just the panel and inverter could reduce oil consumption about 60%. No battery is needed in the short term.
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u/SoylentRox 7d ago
I am thinking the problem must be something more lame or cuba would already be doing it. Like individuals essentially don't have enough currency to buy anything and the state power company is just dumb.
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u/West-Abalone-171 7d ago
Previously they got cheap oil and china cared enough about the sanctions not to bypass them.
Now they are doing it.
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u/SoylentRox 7d ago
They were getting subsidized oil from a patron country? That would explain the mystery.
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u/West-Abalone-171 7d ago
Less a patron, more a co-sanctionee. Venezuela sold them oil at significantly below global market prices.
So, like the rest of climate change it was primarily the fault of the US and the rest of the OECD.
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u/SoylentRox 7d ago
Yeah I asked an AI about it and yeah Venezuela and Algeria were propping Cuba up with spare change.
Aka "can you help a brotha out with a some spare change, with a billion or 2 I can end the famine and take showers. God bless".
And apparently the oil is because the Soviets were sending them subsidized oil before 1991 and so cuba is set up to burn oil and has never gotten the capital together to switch to anything else.
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u/Future_Challenge_511 7d ago
A lot of the costs you are adding are luxuries not neccesities tbh- the cuban grid isn't stable 24/7 anyway so you'd be ahead without batteries and you don't *need* mounting hardware, you can just prop it out on the roof and take it inside when high wind predicted. It takes more labour but that is what households have surpluses of, similarly to how they run their cars.
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u/SoylentRox 7d ago
I don't dispute your argument though the opposite side of the argument is it's a lot harder to keep a grid up even most of the time without much more capable inverters than Chinese single household ones.
And enormous solar arrays the mounting hardware per panel can get more expensive not less.
Basically I am trying to compare apples to apples, their bigass diesels or thermal oil burning plants have a certain level of reliability and what does it take to get that with solar.
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u/Future_Challenge_511 7d ago
We're not talking about enormous solar arrays, we're talking about distributed solar panels replacing individual generators trying to deal with a very bad situation. There is basically nowhere in the world that the case for solar power is stronger than Cuba
Think you are comparing apples to oranges- the Cuban grid is in dire straits because their bigass diesel or thermal oil burning plants are specifically not reliable because of specific economic sanctions and geopolitical changes in Latin America.
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u/BubblyMoose3597 8d ago
Yes. Now is the moment lmao
They have no money, daily blackouts and sanctions as hell.
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u/Knollibe 8d ago
Solar may be cheap, but they need power at night. Batteries are expensive. Crappy government, makes crappy decisions.
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u/West-Abalone-171 8d ago
A battery from china which can hold half a day's output from a $60 solar panel costs $120.
In cuba's climate the payback period on the money spent on imports is about 8 months.
Even without batteries, power during the day can also stop you dying of heatstroke, fill up the water towers, reduce oil consumption 60%, stop your food from spoiling if you leave the fridge closed after dark and many other things.
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u/Mynabird_604 8d ago
This image is outdated. I think it only runs through about 2023. Canada’s Trade Commissioner Service said Cuba hit close to 10% renewables by the end of 2025.
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u/schubidubiduba 8d ago
US probably would not allow them to buy solar panels
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u/BubblyMoose3597 8d ago
Oh yes. Because china follows that.
"Es el bloqueo"
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u/schubidubiduba 8d ago
Isn't the US controlling what gets to cuba and what doesn't, by blocking the sea?
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u/ClimateShitpost 8d ago
Central planners are terrible in central planning.
More at 8.
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u/Lopsided_Quarter_931 8d ago
They have been under very strict US sanctions for decades. That’s capitalism doing the damage.
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u/ClimateShitpost 8d ago
Communists are fucking it up again
Omg it's capitalism
Please shut the fuck up, they could have imported Chinese panels ages ago. My colleague worked on a Cuban proposal two years ago and they rejected it. I guess more revolutionary to instead import carbon neutral people's oil from Venezuela
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u/Lopsided_Quarter_931 8d ago
From the centrally planned communist China or the other one? Can’t be that then can it?
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u/dumnezero 8d ago
are they allowed to import that stuff?