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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

One fun scenario for the future is rich households progressively going off-grid, leaving poorer households to finance a larger share of the grid costs, which increases incentives to go off-grid until everybody who can afford it is off grid and the remainder struggles to pay for the infrastructure.

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> One fun scenario for the future is rich households progressively going off-grid, leaving poorer households to finance a larger share of the grid costs, which increases incentives to go off-grid until everybody who can afford it is off grid and the remainder struggles to pay for the infrastructure.

I don't think it's going to be rich households vs poor households, it's going to be sparse residential areas vs dense residential areas, respectively.

Because, in all honesty, you aren't going off-grid if you don't exclusively own the roof (for solar). And because solar nets so little power per square meter, you need a lot of panels per household.

A single roof over a six-floor apartment building just isn't going to have enough surface area to let the residents go off-grid.

A single roof over a single-family home in the suburbs is generally enough.

Only really going to be a thing in the far exurbs. There's no point in trying to go off grid in a city. Even people in countries with unreliable grids are still connected most of the time.

I've considered it quite a bit in California. You are charged a nontrivial amount of money just to be connected and consuming no energy. That and the power went out for many days, multiple times this year.

Yeah, I feel that standing charges should be a political issue, not just in California, because they're regressive and don't encourage people to save energy. If they were to bundle it into the per-unit cost, that would be better for low-income users and provide more of an incentive for high-consumption users to economize (or do their own generation to offset).

In my country there is no standing charge, everything is within the price you pay per kWh. If you usage is 0 kWh, your bill is €0. However only about half of what we pay goes towards electricity, the rest is for transmission and infrastructure costs and taxes.

I have solar that covers all my usage, and net metering, but I still need to ~€30 per month to cover the cost of storing it and taking it back from the grid. I'd be paying around €120 if I didn't have solar.

rich household won't go off-grid. They will stay on grid, their solar supplies power to the grid, EVs supply power at peak prices, replacing peaker plants.

Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day: https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo...

I don't think we'll get there anywhere soon. We're close to being able to go off grid to our current standards of living.

Add in 2 EV's per household and you won't be able to do it all year round without grid connections.

No, he's got a point, I'm pretty much there, but for a bit of storage and an inverter upgrade it would be a done deal but for now the grid is still cheaper for storage.

> 2 EV's per household

The only way that's physically possible is if these EV's are electric scooters.

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