This is the stupid marginal ism I am talking about.
Cranking out more solar panels is easy. Actually making the grids larger or have more storage requires the type of planning competence and cordination we suck at.
Solar panels are popular precisely because they don't require that planning competence and coordination. So if we go full solar wind, we will slam into a wall we are utterly unprepared for, despite, yes, getting better at solar and wind themselves with volume.
LiFePO4 packs already started trading below $100/kWh in 2020:
https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/a-no-go-fantasy-writing-...
CATL is pushing sodium-ion batteries:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/catls-new-sodium-ion...
You don't even need a lot of storage to greatly increase maximum stable solar and wind share.
Exiting times ahead of us.
Every person that generates their own electricity stops paying their fair share of maintaining the grid, forcing poorer people who cannot afford their own rooftops to subsidize them. It is actually quite regressive- the denser the population center, the less electricity per person can be generated by solar. The electricity might be free, but the cost of maintaining the grid never goes away.
This isn't true, at least not in Colorado. I pay a number of fees for maintaining the grid and these aren't going away when I have my net meter installed later this week. (hopefully)
"their fair share." What exactly is that for something you don't use?
This is a bit like saying everyone who walks/bikes to work stops paying their fair share of gas taxes that maintain the roads their food arrives on.
I haven't seen people argue this point for people who don't own a car, but my state does have a special levy on electric and high efficiency vehicles to make up for lost gas tax revenues: https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/vehicles/#highwayuse_fee.asp
Nope. Not in California- even if solar covers 100% of your usage, PG&E is collecting money from you. You don’t pay any energy production costs, but you’ll pay ‘your fair share’.
When you go with net metering you still pay a bit, but PG&E sources power at around 10 cents per kwh. The rest of the bill people receive is for infrastructure - around 2/3rds of their bill. They do this to incentivize people to use less electricity.
California's net metering is not sustainable for forever, and you are not paying for the infrastructure you're using. Which I don't have a problem with, it's just something that can't continue forever.
Anyway, in my country for historical reasons all of the electricity production was in one corner of the country. So if any of the generation moves away from there (and remembering that electricity always takes the shortest possible path [0] from producer to consumer) any new generation in any other part than the original producer lowers the demand on the grid.
[0] or to be more precise the lowest resistance
Isn't that paying for the grid?
Yes some people exist who don’t understand the scale of effort needed to get a grid ready to work with just solar and wind and little else. But humanity has done this before.