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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about this (more [1]) and I do believe smaller grids will be the future for many reasons. I guess this is another reason. But the transition from large grids to small grids has no obvious, easy path because a large grid without total market saturation falls apart as maintenance is averaged over fewer and fewer users.

One side benefit though is that it would stop utilities being able to push data center costs onto consumers, something that regulators and governments thus far seem completely unwilling to do.

Oh and distributed infrastructure and leadership (the so-called "mosaic defense") is (yet) another reason why the Iran war was always unwinnable from the start.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49902903

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Indeed. The future is off-grid and community level mini/micro grids.

There is no need to build/maintain transmission network.

Legacy grid is production in far away places, miles and miles of transmission, then a distribution network. The distribution network built for homes is sufficient for homes to participate in grid for redundancy. All buildings can produce energy. Rooftop is proven. Next is vertical solar-- which adds ~4 hours of production. EVs become a storage reservoir and supply power back to the grid (V2X). Add some BESS if needed.

Villages in developing countries (half the population in Asia, Africa) can go completely offgrid. Start with plugins, slowly upgrade to bigger panels. No transmission network needed.

A key enabling technology for this is long term thermal storage, which I've been emphasizing here. It is claimed to work on a scale of ~100 kW or higher, storing heat at 600 C with losses less than 1% per month and capex of $0.10 per kWh-th of storage capacity. This is very well suited for isolated microgrids.

Thats terrific! The plug-and-play layer of storage is plug-in batteries (as an extension of plug-in solar: if you can supply power from solar, you can also supply from batteries)

The first layer is storage is EVs, which is inevitable. EVs have humongous batteries.

Next layer, add thermal storage.

The transition is off-grid.

The technology and the means are there - whats required is the willingness to adopt to the self-powered lifestyle.

Many, many folks have done this - stepped off the grid and live on self-harvested local energy sources - however, the grid is powerful.

It is difficult for entire cities to do away with it so rapidly .. at least until PV harvesting gets a significant order or two cheaper and more efficient…

I think it’s pretty obvious that electric transportation needs to fully adopt integrated energy harvesting. This seems to be an obvious legislative low-hanging fruit.

Individual self sufficiency is a bad solution. It's hard to scale to the point everyone can afford it, and it means risks like your inverter breaking down turn catastrophic so you need to invest in extra backups. You lose a lot of efficiency and flexibility.

I think it's way better to make a community grid. That means your home might only have solar without a storage system because there's a shared battery down the road, using cheaper but more dangerous chemistry you don't want in your home. You pay a small share of maintenance costs and pay off investments you helped decide because it's a co-op. And if that's not enough you can exchange with another neighborhood.

Basically I'm saying power should work like the internet. Independent systems that don't need to be self sufficient, but they're still resistant to failure because there is no centralized control.

> I think it's way better to make a community grid.

Indeed, like Internet, autonomous networks with connections.

US subdivisions can be a micro grid, a few hundred homes.

There are a lot of condo communities, the common elements (roof, etc) are the HOA responsibility. These can do community solar and grid.

In the metros of third world countries, there is a huge growth of gated communities with high rises. These can be net zero with their own production and grid.

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