I live part-time in Costa Rica. Brownouts occur 1-4x every day. It’s usually just a few seconds and not all that bad. The worst part is when you have to restart the dishwasher.

Resident here. No issues with brownouts. Costa Rica uses different sources of electricity with several producers hence different experiences by different people

It might not be bad for you but it's pretty rough on your AC motors like fridge compressor etc. Most of them are constant power machines - a voltage drop means a current rise means a hot winding means a failed motor.

I'd always wondered and never asked why turning off a fridge was bad for it. Thank you!

A lot of people in Costa Rica have generators on standby for blackouts and brown outs.

I live in California and I have an APC on standby for when my power company cuts power too. They've already encouraged that I refrain from using my AC during the heatwave of course. People think we in the U.S. are far removed from the experiences of people in other countries, but we aren't really. That's just our biased perception. A lot of LA looks just like parts of central america.

Battery backups as well?

That's probably not accountable as "renewable"...

Seems like an opportunity for a massive battery system similar to the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia that Tesla pulled out all the stops for.

"Massive" Honsdale battery is capable of supplying much less than 1% of grid power in Australia. An installation of that size could help at the margins to prevent some brownout events, but don't overestimate the capacity of batteries compared to grid demand. It looks like Costa Rica has about 3600 MW of generating capacity. The Hornsdale battery is good for 150 MW.

You don't have to supply the entire grid demand - only smooth out the brownouts, which something the size of Hornsdale would likely be able to do for Costa Rica

Note that Hornsdale is also tiny compared to batteries currently being developed in Australia. The new battery in the Hunter will be 1200MW - which is enough to nullify the need for all gas-generated peaking capacity in that state

As someone who knows very little about power systems - is this true? Watts are a unit of instantaneous energy delivery, so if the whole system browns out then doesn’t the battery need to handle 100% of the load? I guess I would expect the entire system not to drop at the same time but worth asking if someone knew this.

I'm assuming a brownout is usually a drop in voltage (a reduction in output power), so a backup battery wouldn't need to handle 100% of the load, just some fraction, for a short period of time.

Worth noting that of that 150MW, only about 70MW over 10 minutes is available to the government to stabilize the grid. The remaining capacity is reserved for the Neoen (the privately owned energy company running the facility) to buffer energy prices by storing excess energy when prices are low.

The battery is for one state, not the country. Batteries only need to cover intermittent load, not 100% of generated load… so the difference in MW doesn’t mean anything without knowing how long generation is reduced for and the net negative that occurs on the grid

Would be good for those 5 second brownouts though

Flywheels are a pretty good solution for ride-through of brownouts. Fairly compact and instantly available.

Where are they deployed at scale?

Literally everywhere. They're standard issue.

The Level3 building in San Diego had a two story iron flywheel that got loose and cut its way through the highway.

They are by far the most common kind of energy storage on Earth. Even in your car, which has both.

https://www.10news.com/news/11k-pound-flywheel-caused-poway-...

Hospitals, datacenters. Plenty of them to ensure that operation theater gear continues to work uninterrupted in case of brown out or the - short - interval during which generators start up if the power should fail.

Teraloop, AFS and others.

I've read about expats praising Costa Rica for its low costs and beautiful properties that foreigners can buy. How was your experience there?

It took about 2 months of us being there to pull the trigger and buy a house.

Costs for most things are low, except for cars. Cars are insanely expensive due to the ~50% import tax. Electricity is also fairly expensive per KWH.

The people are very nice and generally welcoming to foreigners.

You never run out of things to do, either. There’s always another adventure to explore.

Fiber internet is accessible in most areas I’ve been to. Pretty reliable to boot. I’ve never had an issue Zooming etc.

It really is extremely beautiful.

Overall, we have very few complaints about the country.

That import tax on cars is interesting. Several years ago I sold a used Toyota Echo that I'd had for ~12 years, but had maintained nicely. The buyer's whole effort was buying used Echos and shipping them to Costa Rica. I thought that was pretty niche, but I guess a very reliable and quite cheap car finding a home in a place where prices high makes a lot of sense.

Thanks for helping make the pieces fit.

how about the weather and climate?

I don't think foreigners can get a mortgage though, you might have to buy property outright.

If median salary is $9k/year I would assume their housing market to be a lot more affordable than Toronto's.

Actually if thats really the median salary then Costa Rica is far less affordable than Toronto. Look at these prices on this website (albeit one of the first search hits that comes up) (1) I'm seeing 3-4 bedroom homes for at least $500k USD in some cases. If you can afford to pay that outright with no financing as a foreigner in Costa Rica, you can certainly afford a down payment in Toronto's housing market today.

1. https://www.propertiesincostarica.com/homes.html

four brownouts a day is an instant kill for industry

despite that you're okay with it, most heavy users of power aren't

the reason they're omitting this from the reporting is that the reporting just isn't true

Depends entirely on the length of the brownouts and the type of industry, there are long-proven fallback and standby options that can smooth out temporary blips (or just clean dirty power in general) that allow 'industry' to work just about anywhere in the world. The bigger issue in Costa Rica is that they aren't actively courting heavy industry, so their power is very expensive for commercial users -- nearly $0.20/kWh compared to half that rate in a place like Mexico or Colombia, or more like $0.05/kWh in Texas.

Standby = spinning up diesel generators in a lot of cases.

That’s fair. Every grocery store has a massive diesel generator sitting out back. Guess they don’t want their cold foods to spoil.

As a counter point, nearly all brownouts occur after 6 PM. So maybe it affects heavy industry less?

Puerto Rico's 4 blackouts a day stares awkwardly from the distance. Guess the US isn't doing any better.