5. Electric power companies are being forced into debt amid the loss of sales to panel owners, combined with long-term issues such as excessive reliance on fossil fuels and awkward contracts signed with foreign-owned power plants owners, deepening Pakistan’s national political crisis. The heaviest burden falls on the poorest families who cannot afford panels, who are more expensive and leave constantly reliable grid electricity.
6. In 2024, rooftop solar capacity more than doubled in South Africa. Like Pakistan, rooftop solar is considered a defense against frequent blackouts.
7. There is no comprehensive information on the number of households owned and operated by households outside the rich world, rather than paying to power providers. However, it is clear that household ownership is less common than in countries with richer ownership. In the United States, which has the second largest solar fleet after China, there is a fierce political battle over the conditions for households to sell spare power to the grid.
8. Transaction arrangements include: Netmeter (households own and operate panels; excessive power exported to the grid, and imported power is billed at the same speed). Feed interrif (similarly, but the speed at which the grid pays for excess power is pre-fixed). Total metrics (households own panels, but all electricity is owned by the supply company and is resold to the household). Rooftop leases (the company leased space for panels); Solar as a service (similarly but focused on purchasing household electricity).
Microgrid
Ownership is important because businesses always use technology for their own benefit, not society at all times. See what happened on the internet. Using electricity means ownership of the network as well as the generator.
Is there a basis for capital’s rooftop solar control and viewing it as a potentially liberated technology, as well as utility-scale solar farms?
In my opinion, three technical factors are important.
1. Households and communities view solar technology as a way to reduce their dependence on grid electricity. It’s not just the panels. A survey in India showed that solar water pumps are becoming more widespread and that solar refrigerators, milk chillers, looms, produce dryers and flour mills are used.
Reducing dependence on the grid is a problem outside the rich world. Because the grid supply is insufficient and over 700 million people have no power at all. Energy researchers for energy discovered in 2020 that 3.5 billion people were below the “reasonably reliable” supply threshold. For hundreds of millions of people, stops are much more common than that.
2. As grids improve and distributed generations become wider, the demand for electricity from the power plant decreases, and the overall throughput is reduced. You can twin-in with modern metering equipment for “peak shaving” (avoid unnecessary use during peak times) and other power usage methods. Some engineers see systems of direct current (DC) supplied by solar as a major part of the future.
All such replacements of fossil fuels and energy savings will help tackle global heating.
3. Networks with large shares of variables and distributed generations need to be modernised to deal with them, but overall, these changes make the grid more robust. Engineers see great potential in semi-autonomous microgrids. Researchers have shown that smart network technology makes it even easier to treat electricity as a public good rather than a product that can be sold.
Potential
Beyond these technological factors, there is the social potential of decentralized technology. Rooftop solar can be owned and managed at the community and local level in ways that large coal, gas, or nuclear power plants would not think.
From Pakistan to California, individual households use panels as tools to provide themselves and sell surplus in the market, as farmers do.
However, rooftop solar and other decentralized technologies are also suitable for forms of community, cooperatives and city ownership, with long precedents related to the labor movement and the socialist vision of the post-capitalist economy.
Only a small percentage of the world’s sunlight is owned and managed this way, but that’s how they can achieve their true potential.
This author
Doctor Simon Piranni Professor Emeritus at Durham University in the UK and author of Burning: The global history of fossil fuel consumption (Pluto, 2018). He writes a blog Peoplenature.org. Follow him on Twitter: @simonpirani1.
This article is based on Global Overview Rooftop solar, and a Report Growth in Pakistan, People & Nature Blog. The author wrote Socialist view of electrical network development in Capitalist Natural Socialism last year.
