The root problem here is that the market structure for energy should change to adapt to new technologies and new climate realities, but we have a century of regulation, infrastructure, and entrenched incumbents that have a vested interest in preventing the change.
I could believe that we need some form of a grid to smoothe out demand across consumers, and some form of time-based demand pricing. It is probably not the grid that PG&E owns, and it is probably not the rate structure that CPUC approves. Renewables generally have much smaller economies of scale than fossil-fuel based generation - you can craft and install solar panels in much smaller modules than a single power plant that services tens of thousands of homes, and you have much more flexibility where you put them. At the same time it's becoming much riskier and more expensive to run transmission lines through tinder-dry forests and burn down another city every few years.
I think the future is microgrids and municipal grid defection. We'll still have electric grids and electric companies - but they will likely service and be owned by the city-states that they serve. To the extent that we have a rural population, they'll setup their own rooftop & community solar, and back it with generators and iron-air batteries. The grids won't interact much - people in say San Jose are unlikely to want to subsidize the tree-clearing needed to run wires out to say Petrolia.
We also need much more transparent time-of-use pricing, to encourage demand shifting back to daylight hours. You actually don't need huge battery setups: well-built homes with energy-conscious owners draw only a couple hundred watts at night, vs. several kilowatts during the day. You do need a couple things that have passed under the radar screen so far: 1) workplace EV charging, so all your vehicles get charged during the day, and 2) better insulation, so you run your heat pumps during the day. Shift those loads from nighttime to daytime and you'll end up consuming 90% of your energy usage while the sun shines.
I could believe that we need some form of a grid to smoothe out demand across consumers, and some form of time-based demand pricing. It is probably not the grid that PG&E owns, and it is probably not the rate structure that CPUC approves. Renewables generally have much smaller economies of scale than fossil-fuel based generation - you can craft and install solar panels in much smaller modules than a single power plant that services tens of thousands of homes, and you have much more flexibility where you put them. At the same time it's becoming much riskier and more expensive to run transmission lines through tinder-dry forests and burn down another city every few years.
I think the future is microgrids and municipal grid defection. We'll still have electric grids and electric companies - but they will likely service and be owned by the city-states that they serve. To the extent that we have a rural population, they'll setup their own rooftop & community solar, and back it with generators and iron-air batteries. The grids won't interact much - people in say San Jose are unlikely to want to subsidize the tree-clearing needed to run wires out to say Petrolia.
We also need much more transparent time-of-use pricing, to encourage demand shifting back to daylight hours. You actually don't need huge battery setups: well-built homes with energy-conscious owners draw only a couple hundred watts at night, vs. several kilowatts during the day. You do need a couple things that have passed under the radar screen so far: 1) workplace EV charging, so all your vehicles get charged during the day, and 2) better insulation, so you run your heat pumps during the day. Shift those loads from nighttime to daytime and you'll end up consuming 90% of your energy usage while the sun shines.