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Comment by Eleutheria | Hacker News Reader

Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the individual.

Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors, etc.

Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and installing it at home.

Individual energy independence, even if it will never be possible, that's where our dreams should be.

Then water, then food. That's disruption at seismic level. Post-scarcity world.

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Decentralization solves a lot of other problems as well - it's less vulnerable to accidental or intentional failure, it requires much less skill and expense to implement and operate, etc.

Solar has the advantage that it cannot be weaponized even in nonsense theory, greatly relaxing export regulation. This makes it a viable solution for developing countries and remote areas, not just the handful of nations with the wealth and sophistication to manage a reactor.

> Decentralization [...] requires much less skill and expense to implement and operate, etc.

This isn't true because decentralization is easier, it's true because technologies which this isn't true of (require large capital expenditures or high degrees of expertise) can't be given to everyone and their mother.

By saying we're doing decentralized X we're moving the problem of requisite operating skill to the designers who must make their systems simple enough for laypeople. Likewise factories and engineers must find economies of scale in production of units which are distinct from the efficiencies we currently realize building relative few, much larger generators.

In short, while decentralization solves some of these problems, it also presupposes the solution of others. It may be a worthy goal, but there are challenges to get there.

I believe the most important unobserved benefit from decentralized solutions is the wave of innovation it would spark.

Private moneys would compete for a slice of the pie bringing to market millions of ideas putting the pedal of progress to the metal.

Solar may have been weaponized as early as 214 BCE.

Photovoltaics can't really be weaponized, and we can't stop bad actors from getting access to large mirrors.

PVs can't be weaponized because they suck as an energy source compared to burning fuels. Any power source with enough energy density to be interesting is a weapon, just like any engine with enough power to give you reasonable interplanetary travel times is a weapon of mass destruction.

Humanity needs to find a way to deal with high-energy technology if we're to move forward as a species.

You bring solar weaponry into a modern military battle and see how that works out for you.

True energy independence goes both ways, which very few people are willing to accept.

People will install solar panels and enjoy not writing a check to the utility every month. But if their home battery breaks during a heat wave, they're not going to sit in an un-air-conditioned house and and think, "well at least I'm independent." No, they're going to expect the grid to send them power when they need it.

So while independent generation is a good idea, it's not likely to result in infrastructure savings. In fact the kind of smart grid that would be needed to deal with such widely varying local loads would almost certainly be more expensive than just maintaining what we've got.

It's worth remembering that electric generation started out as a very local and independent thing. Central generation won because it was cheaper and more reliable--despite the seemingly obvious losses and expenses of such a huge network.

They'll go to Walmart to buy a replacement the same day just like they would replace any home appliance.

By that time, I bet batteries would sell for less than a thousand, much less.

So true. That's exactly why this is so exciting. With a UPower generator, small communities or neighborhoods could have always on, emission free power for a decade.

and then, as you indicated, with enough clean power, individuals can create desalinated water or even extract water from air. They could cleanly power greenhouses even in the arctic. We could remove carbon from the air.

They could power all of those things on different planets.

>Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors.

The decentralization of production usually leads to a greater cost per unit due to economies of scale. This may not be true for solar, but it certainly is for nuclear, hydro, geothermal and probably wind. There are regions in our planet that don't get many hours of sunlight, how should they produce energy there?

No it is also a problem for solar. A distributed grid is non-trivial to build.

Unless you live in Spain, where solar energy generation by individuals is taxed in a way that it is a lot cheaper to just buy energy from the grid. Investment in solar energy generation in Spain is one order of magnitude smaller than 10 years ago.

Your post-scarcity world will surely not include Spain.

Decentralization to the community level is almost as good and works for people who live in apartments and such. Both ycombinator projects would qualify; Helion's reactor would be 50MW and fit in a shipping container, and produce very little neutron radiation.

This is close to happening. http://www.rmi.org/electricity_grid_defection

Use TCP/IP to coordinate consumption and production, and your storage needs go down considerably.

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