It's really interesting that the push is coming from co-ops. Many people in my town don't seem to understand how important and incredible our local co-op is. They mostly complain about the quality of service (there's more downtime than you would get from a traditional utility, for sure) but don't think about the alternative is a utility that belches coal smoke and outsources customer service to Bangladesh.
We'd most likely be stuck in the '40s, and the world would have about 40-80x as many people living in abject poverty. Co-ops work when everyone involved is a true stakeholder, I am not so much a stakeholder in my bank, nor in Intel, nor ASUS, but I still benefit from my transactions with them.
I do not understand your comment. A coop is simply an employee-owned company (usually with more even distribution of ownership than many nominally employee-owned companies). You do not need to work for a coop to do business with them
No! You raise capital by selling an ownership interest or a portion of your future cash flow. When you’ve done that, it’s no longer employees who own the company and its profits.
Do you think entrepreneurs give up control and ownership of their companies just for fun?
You're still paying capitalists a consideration in exchange for the use of their capital. Whether you want to pay them equity or interest, whether you want to document it as "wages" or "profits minus debt," the same thing is happening under the hood: capitalists, not workers, are reaping part of the rewards, and those rewards come from risk, not labor.
Risk is the bread and butter of the finance industry. And the finance industry plays a significant role in the functioning of the economy. It should be regulated, not criminalized.
> You're still paying capitalists a consideration in exchange for the use of their capital.
That's too reductionist. You could apply that logic to anything that a company pays for. Renting photocopiers? Then the capitalists at Xerox are reaping part of the rewards. It might be true, but it's not very interesting.
My anecdotal experience has been the opposite. Electrical service is on par, but the customer service at xcel far eclipses the coop I'm currently stuck with. Its not even a close comparison in terms of responsiveness, clear communication, and transparency of services and pricing offered. Xcel also heavily invests in alternative energy sources.
Will it be possible with solar and on-site storage to largely roll back rural electrification grid? In California PG&E can't afford[1] to maintain the rural system and it just starts fires constantly.
1: Can't afford it, net of the billion in profits they shovel into their holding company.
We'll need a lot of storage to make local solar as reliable as the grid. We may be headed for an uncanny valley, as solar makes the grid less profitable, yet still necessary.
The utility companies should probably be investing in EV charging (like the ability to buy electricity from a shared charger, and bill it directly to your home account instead of appearing on the charger operator's meter), in order to maintain/increase demand for their product as solar takes it away.
This will be up to the management smarts of grid operators. They'll have to adjust their strategies over the next decade (or two) as large individual coal stations are decommissioned and many smaller solar and wind generators come online whilst consumers also take matters into their own hands.
I think "the grid" has value as a shared-source backup that, personally, I'd rather have than not, but that will come down to how much it ends up costing versus the hassle of the occasional power failure and the costs of buying more storage to cover for them.
Also, the cheaper electricity becomes, the more people will use it, which could put more demand on the grid, or keep demand stable as self-generation increases.
I imagine at a certain point it'd be cheaper for a utility to have truck mounted battery banks that they can drive to affected areas and supply power to, while they repair their broken onsite power generation
A truck stuffed to the gills with batteries would hold maybe 4 MW-hours of energy. You'd need a lot of trucks, except most of the time you wouldn't need any of them and they'd just sit around. Sounds expensive?
It is more expensive, but would it be mor expensive than maintaining a grid for an entire region? The power density is low, but presumably you're not running every electricity using device while you're hooked up to emergency power.
This idea may be worse than just keeping a grid around, but my point was more along the lines that we are not tied to needing a grid itself anymore if we get power generation at every home/business. We still need some sort of backup power system, but it is possible that it takes a different form
My back of the envelope calculations are for a reasonably large house it would cost ~1/4 of the value of the house for the properly sized and set up solar plus storage to go completely off-grid.
That's without any concessions on the demand end, just plug and go. But it seems reasonable if you were sufficiently far off grid. Certainly there are places where it is financially far better, witness some people getting $350k estimates for extremely rural properties to run a power line.
The grid, in some form or another, should end up as a kind of premium 'backup' for when self-generated and self-stored power isn't available for any of the various situations that may occur. Mainly because "it's already there".
If power generation had evolved differently, and started with self-generation and self-storage, then the grid likely wouldn't have existed in the first place, and other contingencies would have been created.
Since "the grid" is there, I don't think it would make sense to roll it back.
The way you describe "it just starts fires constantly" and "can't afford it" sounds like a problem caused by ultra-capitalism / bad business decisions rather than technical limitations.
It's really interesting that the push is coming from co-ops. Many people in my town don't seem to understand how important and incredible our local co-op is. They mostly complain about the quality of service (there's more downtime than you would get from a traditional utility, for sure) but don't think about the alternative is a utility that belches coal smoke and outsources customer service to Bangladesh.