this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Sure, but neither will be fixed with voluntary action. Both will point to the other as a reason to do nothing.
We need legislation and regulation to require energy efficiency and clean energy production. If that means kWh get more expensive, then that is the true price of energy. Cheap, deregulated energy is writing checks our grandchildren will have to cash.
100 sq meters of solar cells per house (with batteries and inverters) should do a lot of good.
How big is your house? My roof is covered where it's practical and efficient to do so and I only have about 10 sq meters.
so like 100 square feet?
Centralization is more efficient and less wasteful.
For energy generation, being close to the point of usage prevents waste from energy transport. For energy storage it's probably more efficient to do this at larger scale, which means centralized systems.
So I think it's more complicated and depends on a lot of factors. Stating "Centralization is more efficient and less wasteful" as a hard fact is misleading at best.
Though the rooftop solar isn't optimal from an efficacy standpoint, it has other selling points. You have residential solar and a battery? Congratulations, you don't have to worry so much about power outages. This is particularly a selling point for rural living, where outages happen more often and last longer.
The abstract "it's greener" is a less potent sales pitch than "your fridge, heating, and a/c can still work even if the grid is gone".
Having centralized solar doesn’t preclude a homeowner from also installing solar, and decentralized green energy has other advantages over centralized green energy.
Where’s the waste? If you collect more than you use, you can store it or send it back to the grid. If this is an efficiency concern (“you’re collecting less energy than the same amount of paneling would”), then it’s not really relevant as by that same logic, not having solar is “more wasteful” than having it.
The waste is if it's truly decentralized then everyone needs to be able to provide enough for their individual peak while a centralized system can be made to handle the highest peak of the day for many households while also providing enough for people whose peak is at different hours.
From a material requirement perspective being able to provide just what we need and not more is the most efficient. Batteries are great, the material required to make them still has a huge environmental impact and isn't unlimited.
If everyone has solar panels on their roof, you can still have the central grid and you can still share power from house-to-house, though.
Generally speaking, decentralized solar refers to a centralized grid that is heavily augmented with decentralized solar, not “truly decentralized” solar.
This isn't a nuclear reactor: one could have a bunch of PVCs on a solar farm or divided by 10 000s of homeowners.
It could just be the same thing. Total houses in community. Apply solar cells to already owned government land or near where the current plant is anyway like most already have been doing. Just scale up and add wind in. Salt batteries all over. Bam.
The beauty of solar is it scales up/down without much fuss whereas you can’t just run a coal fire plant for your home. We can build what makes sense for each community/home.
Sure, but it's more efficient to have the number of panels necessary for the community (neighborhood, city, etc) than having everyone get what they need for their individual peak...
Depending on the housing density, probably but not always. Again, we don’t have to determine this from the beginning. We can adapt the scale and approach to each circumstance. I imagine buy and large having one central array of solar panels feeding several properties/communities makes the most sense. But how many properties (and their average draw) per sq/km or sq/mi very much impacts what that translates into.