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Comment by rswail | Hacker News Reader

I think this is something that may happen in the next decade.

The interesting impact will be on the grid itself. Why connect to the grid if you are self-sufficient?

Then the grid starts to degrade due to lack of maintenance, and the people that can't afford local storage become dependent essentially on a government maintained service.

Or should we be planning localized storage and grids at the same time, so we get the benefits of both scale and resiliency and redundancy.

People will be parking a mobile 100kWh battery at their house every night. We need integrated V2G and grid upgrades to make the most of this opportunity.

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> Then the grid starts to degrade due to lack of maintenance, and the people that can't afford local storage become dependent essentially on a government maintained service.

Many services that we use in our daily lives are government maintained services, so electricity is no different than water, sewage, internet, roads, railroads, post, emergency services, public education, public health systems, trash and recycling services, parks and recreational spaces, disaster relief and response, and others.

We should absolutely ensure these services continue to be funded and maintained, because they're often not profitable to deliver. Especially to the sprawling population of the United States. That’s exactly why government support exists and should exist: to guarantee access to essential services that markets alone won’t reliably or equitably provide.

I do not think this will happen. Getting most households to be self-sufficient is probably not as cost effective as centralized grid. One there's the economy of scale. Second, any peaks and troughs will generally be balanced out between households and the overall buffer (aka reserve) needed could be lower.

If local storage becomes cheaper than the grid but some people can’t afford it (why, capital costs?) then the government would be better off addressing those capital costs directly.

However, you need to consider industrial and commercial use as well as domestic. Can you power a smelter using local solar?

Probably? https://reneweconomy.com.au/solar-battery-deal-for-giant-sme...

I'm fully off grid today with no issues, even had power company remove power poles. I do heat with wood however. AC in the summer is no issue since that is when I get the most sun anyways.

Imagining you combining these by burning the power poles..

> Why connect to the grid if you are self-sufficient?

I grew up in Australia used to a grid averaging perhaps an hour’s downtime in the typical year. But now I live in India, and not only is the power frequently off for hours at a time (it’s a rare week that lacks an hour of downtime, and five or ten hours isn’t uncommon), the quality of the power is also far lower, and it damages hardware. It’s normal for AC units to need mildly expensive component replacements every year or two due to electrical damage, even with the obligatory voltage regulator in place, whereas in Australia I think most people never need to professionally service their AC until it completely packs up after maybe 15 years. If you’re going to want a decent-sized inverter and batteries anyway to get reliable power, then so long as you can get enough solar panellage, getting those solar panels and more batteries and going off-grid becomes mighty attractive—I suspect a payoff period of under a decade, even with comparatively cheap grid power, partly on the strength of electronics living longer.

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Somewhere along the way, it actually becomes mandatory to be connected to such services. In Australia I lived in a rural town of under 100 people, and I asked if I could disconnect from the town water supply, and was told no. So that was some sum of mandatory daily connection fee for something that I would have preferred to unsubscribe from. (Town water was only hooked up to some outdoor taps, and the toilet; the supply had only become treated/potable five years prior, so every house was still hooked up to their rainwater tanks. In fact, the guy I bought the place from said that twenty years earlier you didn’t use the town water on your garden because it would kill the plants.)

> Why connect to the grid if you are self-sufficient?

I think that starts to bleed into the "pre paid meter" vs contract argument.

but practically the difference between total self sufficiency and 90% is willingness to fork out cash.

I currently have a 13kwhr battery, which covers my domestic power needs for 75% of the year. (we'll start to draw on the grid in the next few weeks.) but in the dead of winter it'll only cover 20-50% of my daily need (excluding the car)

but for car power, thats a different beast. Even though I don't commute by car, with the charging at home, I now use around the same amount of power as the uk average house. (even with solar and storage. pre electic car era. )

There's a certain type of person who fantasizes about being off-grid, but the few that actually live it know the hassle and generally want to get back on if feasible.

Battery costs might go down, but the space they take up on your property costs money as well, which only gets more expensive the more urban you are.

The island of Eigg has a micro-grid. Not individual houses, a micro-grid.

The UK is going to be a wind power island not a solar power island, and definitely not an individual solar power island.

This doom-loop is often repeated, but reality is far more complicated.

Very few people go fully off-grid, reality is people don't want that. Cost/benefit just isn't there unless you live off in the woods.

So instead, market structures react when penetration % becomes non-neglible. First you start seeing things like fixed-fees (minimum prices to maintain a grid connection, or "first x kWh are included"). And then you start seeing like what's in California with NEM3: the grid-export prices drop to "we don't want your excess solar" so people are incentivized to buy batteries. But because batteries make a system more complicated and expensive, people buy smaller systems overall.

So the "too much solar creates a disconnection spiral and the system falls apart" thing is a bit of fear-mongering. The system adapts, the changes in pricing create different cost/benefit ratios, and if nothing else, new AI datacenters will gobble up any power that doesn't need to flow to neighborhoods.

It's not the way that it was originally meant, but this is another interpretation of the phrase "energy too cheap to meter".

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