Comment by don_esteban
10 hours ago
You are looking at it from the point of view of 1st world country that has a functioning highly centralized generation and distribution system.
My view is more from the 3rd world country where the generation and distribution is insufficient and unreliable.
To goal is to have local generation closely tied to local production, greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission. Yes, it does not work as well as well functioning global system, but that is not the reality of the 3rd world. And can be achieved much cheaper/simpler than a well-working global system.
Sort of like Africa leapfrogging land lines and going directly to cell phones.
Electric machinary does not have to be crazy expensive. As electric cars do not need to be crazy expensive, that is the market the west is willingly leaving to China/rest of the world. (Just go to China/Asia and see cheap electric cars. For locals, the electric is the cheapest option.)
Re: PV is already sufficiently cheap: For 1st world, and for the current applications. Bringing the battery costs down would enable much wider use of solar.
Last year I have been to remote parts of Indonesia. Almost all local transport was by small boats, with japanese ICE engines. The availability (logistics of getting the fuel to small remote islands) and cost of fuel were quite limiting. If each village/homestead had their PV farm for charging their boats, their life would be transformed.
"greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission" - the need isnt gone. You still need transmission, especially with VRE where you want to distribute generation to capture higher variety of weather.
Getting electricity for some unreliable home usage is one thing and should be pursued if there's no viable alternative, but the moment you want to go the next step, transmission is a must.
I am thinking Africa, not Northern Europe with winter, snow and weeks of overcast.
In tropics/subtropics, even during monsoon season, you have plenty of sunlight, the needs for storage and long distance transmission capacities are much lower than in more solar-hostile environments.
> "greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission" - the need isnt gone.
Yes, that's what the word "alleviate" means: less severe, not gone.