(1) while it makes sense to me to distribute generation, because there are not really any significant economies of scale other than purchasing power, it doesn't make sense to distribute storage which, IIUC, has huge economies of scale.
(2) being fully off-grid where I live requires homes that can be heated in winter with heat pumps that require less than mid-winter generation levels. That means, in general, much better construction techniques than most current houses have. At our house, we generate 2x of our needs in the non-heating season, and 0.5x of our need in the heating season - covering that demand with a battery would be ridiculous.
I think there are some interesting conversations to be had with regards to your first point.
Our grid infrastructure isn't cheap. We need a huge amount of equipment to do the voltage conversions to make power lines semi-sane. We also need a ton of space, maintenance and equipment to run the wiring, install the transformers, handle substations and distribution, etc...
My suspicion is that if you account for that, local storage is cheaper. But I think we're still finding out where battery tech is going to settle.
I'd be having a very different conversation if we hadn't introduced LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries, and realistically - these have only been on the market ~15 years now, and only really generally available for 5 or 6 years.
These are already pretty incredible batteries. A bank them the size of a washing machine will power most residential homes for days, cost under 10K, and be very safe. Prismatic LFP cells run ~$100/kwh (not theoretically, right now: https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/eve-mb31-grade-a-...)
If we see a similar upgrade with Sodium (and it's looking more and more real, multiple commercial products have hit the market last year) - then I think a decade from now we'll really start to wonder why we're wasting so much land and spending so much on grid equipment if you can just install a small bank of batteries for a couple thousand dollars and call it done.
Will you still have economies of scale with storage? Probably. Will those outweigh costs to transmit that to where it needs to go? My hunch is no.
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On a darker note - individual generation and storage is WAY more robust to military disruption. No central location to bomb to knock out power for a whole city.
I don't think there's any particular economy of scale to renewables beyond amortising installation costs.
This is a really big component in most western countries, so big installations are always going to be more cost effective, but there's nothing special about storage vs solar or anything else.
I suppose storage is smaller, so you don't have to pay for much land like you would solar (and where homeowners are basically utilising an underused resource so they have a cost advantage in that respect)
(1) while it makes sense to me to distribute generation, because there are not really any significant economies of scale other than purchasing power, it doesn't make sense to distribute storage which, IIUC, has huge economies of scale.
(2) being fully off-grid where I live requires homes that can be heated in winter with heat pumps that require less than mid-winter generation levels. That means, in general, much better construction techniques than most current houses have. At our house, we generate 2x of our needs in the non-heating season, and 0.5x of our need in the heating season - covering that demand with a battery would be ridiculous.