Its an interesting proposition, although I'm not sure that you can really make that leap with just solar, wind, and batteries. There is a lot of base load to make up for.
I could see however individual houses become independent of the grid. And that will have tremendous benefits when things like storms hit, no longer knocking out power to residents, simply factories and office buildings and street lights. Presumably with a more simplified infrastructure that could be protected and repaired more easily.
[side note the unexpurgated page had 150+ tracking tools attempt to load according to ghostery! That is a record for me so far.]
We are in desperate, desperate need of more decentralization in our core infrastructures, to the point that this libertarian could see his way clear to agreeing not to grouse about subsidies for technology that's already cost-effective if it will accomplish more decentralization. As nifty as the "big solar plants" are in some ways, installing 10,000 acres of solar in the middle of the desert isn't really "decentralization".
(I was much grumpier about subsidizing things that couldn't stand on their own economically as there's a lot more economic waste and false investments that occur, but if solar can already stand on its own two feet and the we collectively tip some money into the kitty to get it out there faster the waste is far less, and the societal benefit far greater.)
It's just about do-able, people have done studies on total de-carbonisation that would involve shifting all cars to electric or bio-based fuels for example, not just the electricity generation side of things. The big hold up is finding political will to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and let the new tech compete on a free market basis (not the free- but lets pretend externalities don't exist market), but the ball has started rolling now so things should be interesting over the next decade as public opinion and lobbyist dollars find themselves shifting more to one side.
Hmm, while your statement is technically correct it is also ignoring all of the hype around Tesla's "whole house battery" technology which is, as part of its positioning in the market, turning grid tied installations into more stand alone installations. And yes, it is "thousands of dollars" cheaper to do a grid tie system, and yet the regulatory changes are making it harder on home solar systems to recover costs (mostly because it shifts peak load costs toward the utility and away from the individual rate payer, the utilities are trying to avoid that).
And the article is discussing a "future" world where almost all individual houses are not grid tied, rather they are perhaps grid backed up, in the event that there isn't enough solar or wind to keep their house batteries up.
So in that world, where folks are converting their "old" grid tied system to the "new" grid independent systems, it is going to change other parts of the community that break when external events disrupt the grid. That will mean that communities will be less impacted by the "grid" getting knocked off line by a hurricane because their normal mode will be to not be on that grid. And that has some positive implications for community planners.
I could see however individual houses become independent of the grid. And that will have tremendous benefits when things like storms hit, no longer knocking out power to residents, simply factories and office buildings and street lights. Presumably with a more simplified infrastructure that could be protected and repaired more easily.
[side note the unexpurgated page had 150+ tracking tools attempt to load according to ghostery! That is a record for me so far.]