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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: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Saturday July 01 2017, @09:54PM
Some people already cope with electricity, gas or water piped to their household.
They cope with sewage, fresh water, telephones or local police forces.
The problem is not "it can't be done" but "it's not practical to do HERE", or even "people won't do it here".
That translates to everything from not working well enough in other parts of the world, to not supplying basic needs, to not actually having less of an impact (e.g. shipping all that equipment to an off-grid setup on the back of series of diesel trucks, etc.), to people not wanting to live in a low-power household (e.g. a tumble dryer or dishwasher, etc.).
When you trade-off the costs and hassle and maintenance, against actually not living in the back woods chopping up firewood to boil up a kettle, most people will move away from such solutions. The fact that we've got this far as a civilisation means that - of course - NONE of those things are necessary, not even electricity in any form. But people aren't living on the boundary of necessary in first-world countries. They are way past that. Asking them to sacrifice it for inconvenience and a possible future effect that may make little overall difference to them or their family, is really overly optimistic.
You can try to educate, and try to inform, and try to prove that such actions may be necessary so that future generations don't suffer, but that's an uphill struggle and few will heed such things anyway.
It's about finding a trade-off that people will accept, and most people have already decided the point that they will accept, and it's higher than people would like. Solar panels have a LONG way to go before they start affecting that decision - the same as electric cars, etc.
No amount of technology is going to make someone lose some quality of life, in their perception. The problem is convincing them to accept that trade-off, or getting technology to the point that it isn't a trade-off.