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Comment by LUmBULtERA | Hacker News Reader

Unless every home is completely off the grid, you’re going to need to pay for most or the majority of that transmission and distribution anyway. Peak winter and summer I also would imagine many or most residential deployments aren’t going to cover their own need, unless they’re incredibly over built with massive batteries. In any case, I should check out your Christopher Clack reference.

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The modeling is a few years old now, but here's a podcast episode diving into details:

https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-146-why-local-sol...

(And of course, perhaps one modeler can get it wrong. But over here in California where the majority of our sky high electricity cost is from T&D, it definitet feels very true. And last national stats I saw had T&D as higher than generation costs)

You don't need as much grid capacity if houses have their own generation and storage.

The grid still needs to be built for the worst case - houses aren't going to have days of storage for a week of cold weather with dark clouds

Worst case is months. In the depths of winter you need energy captured from the sun during summer. That's a drastic rethinking of the scale of storage.

Absolutely. For the sake of the topic of discussion I was trying to think of Californian conditions but for places like Sweden you'll need completely different solutions (Sweden has been powered 100% on Hydro+Nuclear for decades now so that's one way)

As long as the houses are still connected to the grid you will indeed by paying for distribution costs. But I think that you should expect to see transmission savings since you'll have more of the demand met locally.

Why? If there's any possibility those homes will draw 100% of their power from the grid on any given day, then the cost of infrastructure will be pretty much the same since a grid failure is a disaster.

And there is a 100% chance they will, like my home is today, because 11kW of solar is making about 800W due to cloud cover which has persisted most days of summer.

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