Balcony solar panels can save 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill and, with vertical surface area in cities larger than roof space, the appeal is clear
Microgeneration makes way more sense to me. If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should. The unfortunate piece is we have to many landlords who’s interest are too divorced from their tenets to put up more microgeneration
If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should.
Generators take space, require maintenance, and have a certain optimal capacity that isn’t necessarily hit on a given roof.
For wind energy in particular, the bigger the turbine, the more yield per $ spent. If you go out to Corpus Christi you’ll see these enormous turbines - $10M to $50M / ea - that generate on the order of $24 to $75 per MWh, or $.024-.075/kWh. Home wind/solar don’t get anywhere close to that.
Prime placement of units, distribution across a wide area, and a degree of storage capacity means you’re going to get better and more consistent yield.
But people will always be interested in generating their own, just like we don’t use communal bath houses, or community heating, or unfortunately mass transit. Yes, group services can be a lot more efficient and more reliable but they’re also out of your control and become an ongoing cost
Who is we? Lots of places do communal bath houses. Japan has an entire industry around it. Mass transit is also highly prevalent.
Yes there will always be some level of individual desire to do things or need in some cases but communal projects are useful and common I don’t get the dismissal of that for energy creation something we long ago figured out was better to be done at scale and distributed after.
This is neoliberalism and treating it like it’s the only way to exist. It’s a failure of consideration or imagination. Either way your take is not right for that.
Yes there were and still are too many scammers. Sometimes I think that’s held the industry back even more than the price. If we had any consumer protections, it would blow up the installer industry.
a mix of both is good, there’s arguments for doing local co-generation. Where you essentially turn a community into it’s own power plant, and when you’re talking about things like micro inverters, the cost doesnt really change.
Is it more efficient to do it at a utility grid scale? Yes, does that make it overall better? Not really, you still have to deal with grid inefficiencies, and maintenance, and well, you still have to deal with installations, so the cost isn’t that significant at the end of the day.
Solar is one of very few renewable energy sources that you can actually locally build and maintain on a small scale, no sense in removing that utility from it, that’s part of the reason it’s so popular.
Even if you have perfect eutopic solar communities you would still have to build and maintain the grid for the times when it’s cold and cloudy/snowy/rainy for a week straight to import from somewhere with different weather. It’s completely unreasonable to build that much battery capacity into every town, as nice as it would be.
ok so, even if we assume that you NEED to do this, which is an errant assumption on the basis of “you can just not have that problem through over provisioning” you could use that extra generated power for other things, selling to industry, energy storage, a community center whatever, there are literally endless things you could do with free power, most often you just dump it into heating since it’s cheap, and storing it is fairly trivial in something like water.
At worst possible case scenario, your required grid imports are still going to be less than they currently are, which means less external grid maintenance, and less strain.
Granted it’s not going to be used year round, unless of course, you over provision production and consume in the winter, and produce in the summer, where now you’re getting effectively double the usage, if not more. You probably won’t reach peak micro grid infrastructure, but the flexibility providing by something like solar is worth the consideration. A really good example of this is actually the texas power grid, although that is a pretty large power grid, i never said you should island micro generation, just that it’s likely going to be beneficial.
You’re spending too much time in theoryland. How do you over-provision for 10 feet of snow in a week of 0f/-10c? It’s not a hypothetical. Moving energy across long distances is absolutely critical to carbon-free energy.
Transformers, power lines, roads, trucks, and maintenance teams to move from large scale plants to houses also doesn’t grow on trees, but if maintenance in remote places doesn’t happen it can burn a lot of them.
Sometimes large scale plants make sense, but as the back up too microgeneration where the costs of infrastructure to move from unpopulated to populus areas make sense.
I am also a fan of less inverted power in microgeneration though. More and more of power usage is DC anyways. The need to convert to AC as much IMHO, but that is my far more radical take
microgeneration purely in DC only really makes sense in stuff like campers and RV’s where you’re going to be using primarily nearby, low power consumption devices.
AC is still better, plus modern switching technology while still fairly expensive, is considerably more efficient now. If you’re doing AC you also get a number of other benefits, notably, literally every existing appliance and device uses and works with AC voltages, the entire standard around electricity and home wiring is based on AC mains, all of the accessible hardware is also produced for AC mains, not that you can’t use it for something else, it’s just not intended for that.
Certain appliances will use induction motors, and similar other tech (clocks for example, often use the frequency of the power grid to keep time) based directly on the AC sinewave. You could still run them on DC, it’s just significantly sillier. Plus transmission efficiency is a BIG loss in DC (even now with modern solid state switching components, it’s still just, not ideal), granted thats less of a problem on a micro grid scale, it’s still a concern and potential restriction, nothing beats the simplicity and reliability of a simple wire wound iron core transformer. There are a handful of other technical benefits, and drawbacks as well, but fairly minor.
Having a dedicated DC supply side might be nice for a home environment, but the question is what do you standardize on? DC/DC voltage conversion is fairly efficient as it is already. Converting from AC/DC is incredibly easy and not particularly inefficient at lower power consumption, it’s more of a problem with higher draw devices. But you can easily get around that by using a higher voltage to convert down from.
Agreed. I maybe a radical DC home evangelist but yeah AC has its place still and it being THE standard for home appliances is a good example of the powers of scale.
So far for my home usage I’m standardizing on 48vdc because that is the last multiple of 12 before you go above OSHAs low voltage regs.
From there I really want to standardize further on the power delivery spec, because I just love the idea of smart grid for my home. I can then have dispered batteries in my home for either the primary benefits of that device is portable but doesn’t always need to be (laptop, power tool batteries, little robot thing, car, etc) or as a way to reduce some crazy limited time power draw (like servers starting up, oven running for an hour a day, etc).
From there maybe just Microadapter for a few standard circuits so the outlets work the same.
yeah, i’m definitely not as aggressive on that, but then again i also dont really like having a lot things on my network, or connected to my grid, so i suppose i just sort of optimize that problem out. Plus like i said, convenience, running 120v and 240v is going to be significantly more beneficial for me since i primarily use high wattage draw devices that would benefit from more efficient transmission and conversion (servers and any high power switching power supply basically) i’ve thought about doing a low voltage network, but that really only seems like it’s going to be a bigger mess, for no real significant gain, i have to have central DC conversion and regulation now? I’m just not sure it’s worth it, unless i’m pulling it straight from a dedicated battery bank or something, but that doesn’t really make any sense to me. I might end up using lower voltage LED products for a lot of lighting, but i think i would rather have a handful of high quality high efficiency power supplies, rather than a global one and some weird ass 48v system where i need to convert from AC natively, unless i’m doing some really weird shit, and then down/up convert to any device as needed. It seems like a bit much for removing the AC conversion part of the problem, but that’s just me i guess.
One of the nice things about 120/240 is that our grid is sort of designed for it, so there are some clever ways you can go about utilizing it appropriately. Certain plug specs use both hot/live legs, and neutral (plus ground) so you can technically pull 120/240 voltage out of a single plug, which is quite the trick. You could also fairly easily wire up both of these in more standardized outlet receptacles as well. (although i dunno what the electric code looks like for this one)
My ultimate goal would be doing a decentralized off grid production/storage solution, so high efficiency on higher draws is going to be really important, as well as the ability to standardize on a widely accepted voltage standard. The only real advantage i can think of to using DC grid, is that it would be safer, but like, that’s a solved problem so idk.
personally im not huge on smart grid stuff, though i like the idea of smart grid management, being able to do “useful” things with excess generated power, or pull from storage banks at will given a certain rule set defined under a smart home system is way too convenient to ignore.
Personally, a remnant of that. Being able to use standard lead acid batteries is a perk, but primarily I find that that voltage range of < 20-50>vdc in terms of equipment is in those 12v increments too. With the powedelivery (PD) extended power range (epr) going up to 48v right now, and the fixed voltages in that spec being multiples of 12 again matching the industry it is now.
With adjustable voltage supplies (AVS) it might matter less (because it can increment in 100mv instead of a couple fixed voltages) but I haven’t messed with that yet myself
The PC industry has been trying to get rid of those 3.3V and 5V rails for over a decade now, trying to get everyone on board with 12V only. The only hold-out in a modern PC should be SATA, at 5V, the mainboard already doesn’t care and GPUs definitely don’t. Also no -12V any more. Any year now, not that SATA will die that quickly but the mainboard knows how many SATA connectors it has and can provide sufficient 5V to power your disks.
PD’s default comms voltage is 5v at the moment too.
I’m for moving up the default voltage, but that is naive take for me. It just sounds right I have no idea the actual pros and cons on that low of level if that messes with components and what insulations to expect etc
The reduction of infrastructure and leveraging existing buildings without reducing their existing utility vs converting a new space to be a dedicated power plant plus the infrastructure to move power from less populus (normal case because the cost of populus land is high due to demand) to more populus space.
I also idealogically support it because it makes more controllable by people and less controlled by an outside entity (a corporation/state).
Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That’s why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.
Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.
Electricity isn’t like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is “better” is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not “net zero”, disconnected) then it’s not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it’s actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.
Now this would all be a “you” problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is “dumb”. It’s either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.
What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don’t have the necessary infrastructure to “dump” that extra solar somewhere else.
The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It’s more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).
I am sorry, but your ideas about how these things work are ignoring a lot of issues.
First of all you have significant losses in the distribution grid. This is minimized the higher your voltage is, which is why longer range grids run on 110 kV and more. Then you have an intermediate level, typically 20 kV. Finally you get your local distribution with 220/230V. Also “current flowing the other way” does not exist in AC, because the “direction” changes 50x per second.
Then you only have a limited transportation capacity, so moving a lot of electricity from a central plant of course costs a lot of investment and maintenance. The idea that “Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free” is completely out of touch with the reality of the electrical grid.
But it gets worse. The more producers and consumers you have, the more you will need to balance fluctuations in production and consumption. This is why traditional grids were built around having a high baseload, with incentivizing high demand industries to connect, stabilizing demand. For renewables this is completely different, because renewabls will fluctuate. So the more energy you run through the centralized grid, the more short and medium term storages you will need to provide and the more investment and running costs you will have.
You mention this with there being too much production on the local grid and then in another place also needing to react to this. This is not a problem exclusive to local grids. It is a problem for any level of the grid with integrating renewables. Note how the article also mentions the limit of 800W without requiring a permit.
Finally in the long term we need to make the demand more flexible to production. So if the sun shines and the wind blows, household appliances should run, the fridge should cool a bit stronger, and the water heater heats up for the evening shower… Having a responsive demand with millions of agents can easily lead to overshooting, so that the demand spikes up far beyond supply, because every consumer reacts at the same time and it doesn’t temper out.
This problem is much smaller, if every household can directly see their own production and consumption and already limit how much excess goes into, or is demanded.
So microgeneration is part of the solution and not a problem like you make it out to be.
I am a big grid fan too. The hope that HVDC ca,n mean longer time with solar on the grid, and more averaged wind power.
Smarter grid ties is definitely something that I would like to see as well, including battery usage.
The infrastructurea though isn’t just a potential reduction in wattage needed to be supported in the last mile, but not needing infrastructure at all dedicated to a power plant. Again pro renewables, solar, wind, hydro. Wind and hydro benefit from scale quite a bit, and I don’t think roof top solar alone will cover industrial power usage, so I expect we will have some grid scale plants, but in addition to microgeneration.
Microgeneration makes way more sense to me. If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should. The unfortunate piece is we have to many landlords who’s interest are too divorced from their tenets to put up more microgeneration
Generators take space, require maintenance, and have a certain optimal capacity that isn’t necessarily hit on a given roof.
For wind energy in particular, the bigger the turbine, the more yield per $ spent. If you go out to Corpus Christi you’ll see these enormous turbines - $10M to $50M / ea - that generate on the order of $24 to $75 per MWh, or $.024-.075/kWh. Home wind/solar don’t get anywhere close to that.
Prime placement of units, distribution across a wide area, and a degree of storage capacity means you’re going to get better and more consistent yield.
But people will always be interested in generating their own, just like we don’t use communal bath houses, or community heating, or unfortunately mass transit. Yes, group services can be a lot more efficient and more reliable but they’re also out of your control and become an ongoing cost
Who is we? Lots of places do communal bath houses. Japan has an entire industry around it. Mass transit is also highly prevalent.
Yes there will always be some level of individual desire to do things or need in some cases but communal projects are useful and common I don’t get the dismissal of that for energy creation something we long ago figured out was better to be done at scale and distributed after.
This is neoliberalism and treating it like it’s the only way to exist. It’s a failure of consideration or imagination. Either way your take is not right for that.
Spas and apartments and buses/trains do absolutely exist. Only the former is considered “luxury” in the US, though.
Wasn’t Solar City’s whole gambit to effectively buy everyone’s roofs and lease them back for a fraction of their real market value?
I don’t think you escape “Own nothing and be happy” just by throwing up a few hundred watts of solar on an extension cord.
Yes there were and still are too many scammers. Sometimes I think that’s held the industry back even more than the price. If we had any consumer protections, it would blow up the installer industry.
That doesn’t change my point
welcome to the land of windmills
These microinverters aren’t made of fairy dust. Doing this stuff at utility scale uses a lot less nasty minerals and chemicals.
a mix of both is good, there’s arguments for doing local co-generation. Where you essentially turn a community into it’s own power plant, and when you’re talking about things like micro inverters, the cost doesnt really change.
Is it more efficient to do it at a utility grid scale? Yes, does that make it overall better? Not really, you still have to deal with grid inefficiencies, and maintenance, and well, you still have to deal with installations, so the cost isn’t that significant at the end of the day.
Solar is one of very few renewable energy sources that you can actually locally build and maintain on a small scale, no sense in removing that utility from it, that’s part of the reason it’s so popular.
Even if you have perfect eutopic solar communities you would still have to build and maintain the grid for the times when it’s cold and cloudy/snowy/rainy for a week straight to import from somewhere with different weather. It’s completely unreasonable to build that much battery capacity into every town, as nice as it would be.
ok so, even if we assume that you NEED to do this, which is an errant assumption on the basis of “you can just not have that problem through over provisioning” you could use that extra generated power for other things, selling to industry, energy storage, a community center whatever, there are literally endless things you could do with free power, most often you just dump it into heating since it’s cheap, and storing it is fairly trivial in something like water.
At worst possible case scenario, your required grid imports are still going to be less than they currently are, which means less external grid maintenance, and less strain.
Granted it’s not going to be used year round, unless of course, you over provision production and consume in the winter, and produce in the summer, where now you’re getting effectively double the usage, if not more. You probably won’t reach peak micro grid infrastructure, but the flexibility providing by something like solar is worth the consideration. A really good example of this is actually the texas power grid, although that is a pretty large power grid, i never said you should island micro generation, just that it’s likely going to be beneficial.
You’re spending too much time in theoryland. How do you over-provision for 10 feet of snow in a week of 0f/-10c? It’s not a hypothetical. Moving energy across long distances is absolutely critical to carbon-free energy.
Transformers, power lines, roads, trucks, and maintenance teams to move from large scale plants to houses also doesn’t grow on trees, but if maintenance in remote places doesn’t happen it can burn a lot of them.
Sometimes large scale plants make sense, but as the back up too microgeneration where the costs of infrastructure to move from unpopulated to populus areas make sense.
I am also a fan of less inverted power in microgeneration though. More and more of power usage is DC anyways. The need to convert to AC as much IMHO, but that is my far more radical take
microgeneration purely in DC only really makes sense in stuff like campers and RV’s where you’re going to be using primarily nearby, low power consumption devices.
AC is still better, plus modern switching technology while still fairly expensive, is considerably more efficient now. If you’re doing AC you also get a number of other benefits, notably, literally every existing appliance and device uses and works with AC voltages, the entire standard around electricity and home wiring is based on AC mains, all of the accessible hardware is also produced for AC mains, not that you can’t use it for something else, it’s just not intended for that.
Certain appliances will use induction motors, and similar other tech (clocks for example, often use the frequency of the power grid to keep time) based directly on the AC sinewave. You could still run them on DC, it’s just significantly sillier. Plus transmission efficiency is a BIG loss in DC (even now with modern solid state switching components, it’s still just, not ideal), granted thats less of a problem on a micro grid scale, it’s still a concern and potential restriction, nothing beats the simplicity and reliability of a simple wire wound iron core transformer. There are a handful of other technical benefits, and drawbacks as well, but fairly minor.
Having a dedicated DC supply side might be nice for a home environment, but the question is what do you standardize on? DC/DC voltage conversion is fairly efficient as it is already. Converting from AC/DC is incredibly easy and not particularly inefficient at lower power consumption, it’s more of a problem with higher draw devices. But you can easily get around that by using a higher voltage to convert down from.
Agreed. I maybe a radical DC home evangelist but yeah AC has its place still and it being THE standard for home appliances is a good example of the powers of scale.
So far for my home usage I’m standardizing on 48vdc because that is the last multiple of 12 before you go above OSHAs low voltage regs.
From there I really want to standardize further on the power delivery spec, because I just love the idea of smart grid for my home. I can then have dispered batteries in my home for either the primary benefits of that device is portable but doesn’t always need to be (laptop, power tool batteries, little robot thing, car, etc) or as a way to reduce some crazy limited time power draw (like servers starting up, oven running for an hour a day, etc).
From there maybe just Microadapter for a few standard circuits so the outlets work the same.
yeah, i’m definitely not as aggressive on that, but then again i also dont really like having a lot things on my network, or connected to my grid, so i suppose i just sort of optimize that problem out. Plus like i said, convenience, running 120v and 240v is going to be significantly more beneficial for me since i primarily use high wattage draw devices that would benefit from more efficient transmission and conversion (servers and any high power switching power supply basically) i’ve thought about doing a low voltage network, but that really only seems like it’s going to be a bigger mess, for no real significant gain, i have to have central DC conversion and regulation now? I’m just not sure it’s worth it, unless i’m pulling it straight from a dedicated battery bank or something, but that doesn’t really make any sense to me. I might end up using lower voltage LED products for a lot of lighting, but i think i would rather have a handful of high quality high efficiency power supplies, rather than a global one and some weird ass 48v system where i need to convert from AC natively, unless i’m doing some really weird shit, and then down/up convert to any device as needed. It seems like a bit much for removing the AC conversion part of the problem, but that’s just me i guess.
One of the nice things about 120/240 is that our grid is sort of designed for it, so there are some clever ways you can go about utilizing it appropriately. Certain plug specs use both hot/live legs, and neutral (plus ground) so you can technically pull 120/240 voltage out of a single plug, which is quite the trick. You could also fairly easily wire up both of these in more standardized outlet receptacles as well. (although i dunno what the electric code looks like for this one)
My ultimate goal would be doing a decentralized off grid production/storage solution, so high efficiency on higher draws is going to be really important, as well as the ability to standardize on a widely accepted voltage standard. The only real advantage i can think of to using DC grid, is that it would be safer, but like, that’s a solved problem so idk.
personally im not huge on smart grid stuff, though i like the idea of smart grid management, being able to do “useful” things with excess generated power, or pull from storage banks at will given a certain rule set defined under a smart home system is way too convenient to ignore.
Is the multiple of 12 thing just for ease of lead-acid storage?
Personally, a remnant of that. Being able to use standard lead acid batteries is a perk, but primarily I find that that voltage range of < 20-50>vdc in terms of equipment is in those 12v increments too. With the powedelivery (PD) extended power range (epr) going up to 48v right now, and the fixed voltages in that spec being multiples of 12 again matching the industry it is now.
With adjustable voltage supplies (AVS) it might matter less (because it can increment in 100mv instead of a couple fixed voltages) but I haven’t messed with that yet myself
The PC industry has been trying to get rid of those 3.3V and 5V rails for over a decade now, trying to get everyone on board with 12V only. The only hold-out in a modern PC should be SATA, at 5V, the mainboard already doesn’t care and GPUs definitely don’t. Also no -12V any more. Any year now, not that SATA will die that quickly but the mainboard knows how many SATA connectors it has and can provide sufficient 5V to power your disks.
PD’s default comms voltage is 5v at the moment too.
I’m for moving up the default voltage, but that is naive take for me. It just sounds right I have no idea the actual pros and cons on that low of level if that messes with components and what insulations to expect etc
Makes sense mathematically or you think makes sense?
Both.
The reduction of infrastructure and leveraging existing buildings without reducing their existing utility vs converting a new space to be a dedicated power plant plus the infrastructure to move power from less populus (normal case because the cost of populus land is high due to demand) to more populus space.
I also idealogically support it because it makes more controllable by people and less controlled by an outside entity (a corporation/state).
Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That’s why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.
Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.
Electricity isn’t like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is “better” is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not “net zero”, disconnected) then it’s not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it’s actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.
Now this would all be a “you” problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is “dumb”. It’s either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.
What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don’t have the necessary infrastructure to “dump” that extra solar somewhere else.
The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It’s more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).
I am sorry, but your ideas about how these things work are ignoring a lot of issues.
First of all you have significant losses in the distribution grid. This is minimized the higher your voltage is, which is why longer range grids run on 110 kV and more. Then you have an intermediate level, typically 20 kV. Finally you get your local distribution with 220/230V. Also “current flowing the other way” does not exist in AC, because the “direction” changes 50x per second.
Then you only have a limited transportation capacity, so moving a lot of electricity from a central plant of course costs a lot of investment and maintenance. The idea that “Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free” is completely out of touch with the reality of the electrical grid.
But it gets worse. The more producers and consumers you have, the more you will need to balance fluctuations in production and consumption. This is why traditional grids were built around having a high baseload, with incentivizing high demand industries to connect, stabilizing demand. For renewables this is completely different, because renewabls will fluctuate. So the more energy you run through the centralized grid, the more short and medium term storages you will need to provide and the more investment and running costs you will have.
You mention this with there being too much production on the local grid and then in another place also needing to react to this. This is not a problem exclusive to local grids. It is a problem for any level of the grid with integrating renewables. Note how the article also mentions the limit of 800W without requiring a permit.
Finally in the long term we need to make the demand more flexible to production. So if the sun shines and the wind blows, household appliances should run, the fridge should cool a bit stronger, and the water heater heats up for the evening shower… Having a responsive demand with millions of agents can easily lead to overshooting, so that the demand spikes up far beyond supply, because every consumer reacts at the same time and it doesn’t temper out.
This problem is much smaller, if every household can directly see their own production and consumption and already limit how much excess goes into, or is demanded.
So microgeneration is part of the solution and not a problem like you make it out to be.
I am a big grid fan too. The hope that HVDC ca,n mean longer time with solar on the grid, and more averaged wind power.
Smarter grid ties is definitely something that I would like to see as well, including battery usage. The infrastructurea though isn’t just a potential reduction in wattage needed to be supported in the last mile, but not needing infrastructure at all dedicated to a power plant. Again pro renewables, solar, wind, hydro. Wind and hydro benefit from scale quite a bit, and I don’t think roof top solar alone will cover industrial power usage, so I expect we will have some grid scale plants, but in addition to microgeneration.