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As the U.S. starves it of oil, Cuba is pulling off one of the fastest solar revolutions on the planet (www.ctvnews.ca)

submitted 6 days ago by Zapados@sh.itjust.works to c/world@quokk.au

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[–] Spaceballstheusername@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago

Solar costs about 40c/watt installed at large scale and the grid on average uses 2 GW. Cuba gets on average 4.4 solar hours a day let's use 4. So that means you need to install 12 GW of capacity plus batteries. Let's make it 24gw so there's power on cloudy days. That means for solar it would cost roughly 10 billion. Battery storage somewhere around 20 gwh would cost another 4billion. So for 14 billion you could get almost the entire grid off oil and onto solar. For perspective at 100$/ barrel it would only be 3 -4 yrs of oil consumption. It sounds like China could easily make an investment like that especially since it would stimulate chinas economy since they would be making and selling the panels+batteries. I know I simplified a ton but with that much battery storage you could distribute them to maximize the grid. Effectively distributing power more evenly throughout the day. Also the grid is already used to blackouts brown outs so worst case you black some sections out of its been too many cloudy days in a row.