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Comment by voakbasda

2 hours ago

In the US, this will never happen due to NIMBY zoning laws.

Most rural areas have pretty permissive zoning.

But also, other than Texas, I don't hear about a lot of regional over production. There's pretty good interconnection within and between the two major grids.

  • One reason you don't see overproduction is it's hard to get connected to grids. Local self-generation eliminates that roadblock. I think we're going to see increasing energy autarky in rural regions as solar gets cheaper.

    Assuming ultra low cost thermal storage becomes a thing, there's going to be a market for small externally heated engines to recover that heat as power. That (+ batteries) will enable complete off-grid operation with PV at small (maybe 100 kW) commercial scale and larger.