alt Hacker NewsUnregistered solar is huge in the developing world. In the Philippines, basically no one tells the utility they installed solar, because the net metering application is so expensive, comes with tons of red tape (read as opportunities for government officials to extract bribes), and only gives you billing credits anyway. So people just install batteries and automatic transfer switches. Some even disconnect from the grid completely, or never connect in the first place because it was too expensive to get the line installed. Automatic transfer to a generator is now very simple, and with LPG generators, extremely clean and low maintenance.
As I understand it, this is very common across much of the developing world now. So the tracking of how much solar energy there is in the world is almost certainly a lower bound on the reality.
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I would guess that this is taken into account based on satellite data. Solar must have a direct line of sight to the sun, so it should be fairly easy to detect from the sky.
Seems not to be only an issue in the development world though.
At least in Belgium there’s also a lot of unregistered solar panels to the point that the energy regulator is using satellite imagery to catch and find them…
decentralised energy generation is going to be the way developing economies leap over more advanced ones. Same thing happening in South Africa, can't rely on the national grid, so everyone installs solar, batteries and diesel generators for backup. The outcome is a much more resilient grid energy system. Future is literally bright
A remarkably individualistic trend. You no longer need to rely on the central authority for your electric utility.
Jenny Chase is a renewable forecaster for BNEF (Bloomber new energy finance), and the way she works around that is by looking at China's solar panel export rather than what's reported in each country.
If you're not following her, she's often sharing really interesting stuff.