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Comment by etaty | Hacker News Reader

Let's think like internet. Nuclear is the mainframe. Big, powerful, ... but when it goes down everything goes with it. (centralized) Solar/Wind are small unit of production, they don't do much individually, cheap and in a network they improve their reliability. (decentralized)

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Let's think like industry. Factories are extremely efficient, able to produce lots of stuff for very cheap by means of economies of scale, which leads to lots of goods available for consumers. Home manufacturing is very inefficient, wasting energy and material. Which is why nobody does it to produce goods for mass consumption.

Seriously. I'm fascinated by the Internet too, but it's like people are forgetting that centralization == efficiency, distribution == waste. There are ways to achieve reliability without totally decentralizing the grid, and what we need now is not adding few more nines after decimal point of the already 99.999something% reliable grid. We need efficiency all across the board to reduce waste.

With electricity generation, thinking like a regular industry would also be very inefficient. It's well known that there's a lot of wasted energy in the electrical lines to transport the electricity from the centralized plant to the end users, even with crazy high voltage aiming at reducing losses.

An optimal setup would probably be a not-too-fine-grain decentralized setup

Not much loss in high voltage lines and required transformers. (Use Ohm's law.) Much less than inefficiencies inherent in tiny power plants, which can rob you of more than half power in the fuel of it were burnt in an efficient plant. (Cooling on a small scale is especially hard.) Similarly with wind turbines, less with solar.

These losses are accounted for and are a reason (other than problems building really massive plants) why there are more than one in every country.

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