As Economics Improve, Solar Shines in Rural America
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It's really interesting that the push is coming from co-ops. Many people in my town don't seem to understand how important and incredible our local co-op is. They mostly complain about the quality of service (there's more downtime than you would get from a traditional utility, for sure) but don't think about the alternative is a utility that belches coal smoke and outsources customer service to Bangladesh.
We have an electric coop (Greystone Power), and we have no noticeable additional downtime vs people a few miles down the road who have Georgia Power.
Given that my rates are lower to start with, and I tend to get refunds back each year, I see no advantages to using a traditional power company.
A world of co-ops is close enough to anarcho-syndicalism that many Americans get an allergic reaction.
besides, we're talking about the society which is just fine with anarcho-corporatism...
I suspect this is a producer or consumer coop and those are fairly popular in the states many famers for example and part of KFC is a producer coop.
Do you think entrepreneurs give up control and ownership of their companies just for fun?
That's too reductionist. You could apply that logic to anything that a company pays for. Renting photocopiers? Then the capitalists at Xerox are reaping part of the rewards. It might be true, but it's not very interesting.
1: Can't afford it, net of the billion in profits they shovel into their holding company.
The utility companies should probably be investing in EV charging (like the ability to buy electricity from a shared charger, and bill it directly to your home account instead of appearing on the charger operator's meter), in order to maintain/increase demand for their product as solar takes it away.
I think "the grid" has value as a shared-source backup that, personally, I'd rather have than not, but that will come down to how much it ends up costing versus the hassle of the occasional power failure and the costs of buying more storage to cover for them.
Also, the cheaper electricity becomes, the more people will use it, which could put more demand on the grid, or keep demand stable as self-generation increases.
Complex problem, good luck grid operators!
This idea may be worse than just keeping a grid around, but my point was more along the lines that we are not tied to needing a grid itself anymore if we get power generation at every home/business. We still need some sort of backup power system, but it is possible that it takes a different form
My back of the envelope calculations are for a reasonably large house it would cost ~1/4 of the value of the house for the properly sized and set up solar plus storage to go completely off-grid.
That's without any concessions on the demand end, just plug and go. But it seems reasonable if you were sufficiently far off grid. Certainly there are places where it is financially far better, witness some people getting $350k estimates for extremely rural properties to run a power line.
If power generation had evolved differently, and started with self-generation and self-storage, then the grid likely wouldn't have existed in the first place, and other contingencies would have been created.
Since "the grid" is there, I don't think it would make sense to roll it back.
The way you describe "it just starts fires constantly" and "can't afford it" sounds like a problem caused by ultra-capitalism / bad business decisions rather than technical limitations.