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Comment by taf2 | Hacker News Reader

So an obvious maybe long term solution here is to eliminate the need for a grid. The transition to battery solar powered homes would reduce the need for the upstream power supply and larger and transmission lines...

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The grid powers a lot more than homes...

Right but the same logic applies. Rather than 1 single point of failure you now have millions of mini power generators. The impact of one going is significantly less.

So an obvious long-term solution is to reduce the need for the grid. Many commercial and industrial facilities could run at least partly on local wind or solar, and the more decentralised capability there is, the less the vulnerability.

(I'm actually not just thinking about terrorists and suchlike. I'm also thinking about other risks, such as another Carrington event.)

The more decentralized capability, the higher the need to distribute excess production to places of excess demand, hence a higher need for a grid.

There's an important difference between 'if the grid goes down, we will have some inefficiency because of excess production here and insufficient production there' and 'if the grid goes down, everything goes down'.

If your local "grid" can't distinguish between your TV usage and the ventilators at a local hospital then there is no difference between your two conditions. If such a distinction cannot be made within whatever circle you use to define "local" then the two cases are identical. The alternative is to wastefully over-provision each local area.

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