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At least 1 million homes in the USA have solar systems on their rooftops and their use — together with local batteries — is increasing, enabling homeowners the ability to collect energy and store it for later usage on-site. This enables homeowners to cut their dependence on the electrical grid — and their bills. This could be economically painful for utilities. A new McKinsey study predicts two outcomes 1) electrical grid cut off completely 2) primarily local energy collection with the electrical grid as a backup.
The cost of collecting solar energy and storing it on-site makes the incentive too small even for residents of sunny Arizona to cut the electrical grid off. But partial defection from the grid with 80-90% of the demand supplied on-site makes economic sense in 2020 and total defection makes sense around 2028
The prediction by McKinsey is that the electrical grid will be repurposed as an enormous, sophisticated backup. One, where utilities only add energy at those times when the on-site systems aren't collecting enough energy.
My comment: So far good enough. But then why not simple connect to neighbors directly for electrical power transfer and cutting the utilities out of the loop even for electrical fallback needs? A electrical power mesh grid might need some interesting mathematical modeling though.
(As a side note, maybe this will soon make UPS for home use obsolete?)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday July 02 2017, @09:37AM
I have another issue with this post. So let's suppose a million people decide to live off grid. So what? First, they decided that living off grid was a better idea, despite your concern. Allowing people to make decisions you don't like, but is legal is a cost of democracy. You do want that, right?
Second, maybe we should look at why the banding together is supposedly not working in this case? Here, if that many people are deciding to live off grid, it's probably because the "banding together" has failed substantially and being on grid is considerably more expensive than being off grid. At that point, whoever is responsible for grids and banding together should be working hard on fixing that system or ending it altogether, not on trying to keep people on a failed system.