Comment by rswail

> Then the grid starts to degrade due to lack of maintenance, and the people that can't afford local storage become dependent essentially on a government maintained service.

Many services that we use in our daily lives are government maintained services, so electricity is no different than water, sewage, internet, roads, railroads, post, emergency services, public education, public health systems, trash and recycling services, parks and recreational spaces, disaster relief and response, and others.

We should absolutely ensure these services continue to be funded and maintained, because they're often not profitable to deliver. Especially to the sprawling population of the United States. That’s exactly why government support exists and should exist: to guarantee access to essential services that markets alone won’t reliably or equitably provide.

I do not think this will happen. Getting most households to be self-sufficient is probably not as cost effective as centralized grid. One there's the economy of scale. Second, any peaks and troughs will generally be balanced out between households and the overall buffer (aka reserve) needed could be lower.

If local storage becomes cheaper than the grid but some people can’t afford it (why, capital costs?) then the government would be better off addressing those capital costs directly.

However, you need to consider industrial and commercial use as well as domestic. Can you power a smelter using local solar?

I'm fully off grid today with no issues, even had power company remove power poles. I do heat with wood however. AC in the summer is no issue since that is when I get the most sun anyways.

> Why connect to the grid if you are self-sufficient?

I think that starts to bleed into the "pre paid meter" vs contract argument.

but practically the difference between total self sufficiency and 90% is willingness to fork out cash.

I currently have a 13kwhr battery, which covers my domestic power needs for 75% of the year. (we'll start to draw on the grid in the next few weeks.) but in the dead of winter it'll only cover 20-50% of my daily need (excluding the car)

but for car power, thats a different beast. Even though I don't commute by car, with the charging at home, I now use around the same amount of power as the uk average house. (even with solar and storage. pre electic car era. )

There's a certain type of person who fantasizes about being off-grid, but the few that actually live it know the hassle and generally want to get back on if feasible.

Battery costs might go down, but the space they take up on your property costs money as well, which only gets more expensive the more urban you are.

The island of Eigg has a micro-grid. Not individual houses, a micro-grid.

The UK is going to be a wind power island not a solar power island, and definitely not an individual solar power island.

This doom-loop is often repeated, but reality is far more complicated.

Very few people go fully off-grid, reality is people don't want that. Cost/benefit just isn't there unless you live off in the woods.

So instead, market structures react when penetration % becomes non-neglible. First you start seeing things like fixed-fees (minimum prices to maintain a grid connection, or "first x kWh are included"). And then you start seeing like what's in California with NEM3: the grid-export prices drop to "we don't want your excess solar" so people are incentivized to buy batteries. But because batteries make a system more complicated and expensive, people buy smaller systems overall.

So the "too much solar creates a disconnection spiral and the system falls apart" thing is a bit of fear-mongering. The system adapts, the changes in pricing create different cost/benefit ratios, and if nothing else, new AI datacenters will gobble up any power that doesn't need to flow to neighborhoods.

It's not the way that it was originally meant, but this is another interpretation of the phrase "energy too cheap to meter".