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Comment by eagerpace | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this thought pattern just assumes all electrical generation will be done the same way as always, from a central source. Two big things are already happening to change this paradigm though.

1) Batteries are allowing us to transmit energy asynchronously

2) Distributed generation with solar

“The grid” needs updates for sure, but it doesn’t need 10x capacity increase. That’s just fud.

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What does it mean to "transmit energy asynchronously"?

Transmit the energy when it's cheap, instead of at the moment it's going to be used.

async is a strange choice but perhaps the closest equivalent from a software vernacular. time-shifted energy transmission/generation.

Batteries managed by individual users will never replace big infra. They are simply not resilient enough.

This kind of logic is akin to saying mesh networks are all we need to deliver reliable internet to everyone. No, CTTH, FTTH or satellite is what we need to deliver reliable internet to everyone, and those require big infra.

Furthermore, to a point in the article that folks on Ars are spouting, if everyone is charging during off-peak hours, then those aren't off-peak any more. They're now on-peak hours.

Grids are required to deliver steady reliable power even under peak usage. 10x is likely an underestimation of how much extra capacity we will need if everyone switches to EVs.

Under the current rules, yeah, but the rules and how we think about this need to change too. For example in my state the process for selling energy back to the grid from a residential account is extremely limited and had a capped number of users.

Batteries aren’t resilient enough today but they have grown leaps and bounds over the last few years. New chemistries and ways of controlling them are making all kind of new possibilities.

As much as I don’t like some of the rules in CA the requirement for solar on new builds is brilliant. The hardware has become so cheap and rolling the labor and design into the initial construction means a short pay back period.

Selling energy back isn't as efficient as it sounds. Transmission losses are a major factor for delivering power. In a star topology, any power you generate must go back to a local base station before being delivered to your neighbour, at minimum doubling the transit distance.

So, of course, the next step is (to my point): Let's rely on a mesh network to deliver power locally and directly. Sure, until one of your batteries has an issue or its a rainy day and the batteries are depleted. Suddenly your neighbour needs to source power from somewhere else. That somewhere else could be other neighbours, who are, due to local weather conditions, experiencing the same issues. Okay, let's go back to the grid. Now this weather is affecting multiple locations at the same time, and the grid itself is under-provisioned since it was reliant on these local sources of power. If the grid has sufficient capacity to deal with this failure mode, then it has sufficient capacity to be the regular, default power source.

Power generation and delivery are hard problems that require big thinking. Wishing it were simple (oh just do this!) doesn't make it so.

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