Is the Road to Green Energy a Driveway or a Highway?

What is the best model for power generation- a supergrid highway power distribution with few sources or a billion sources with no grid? Solar power is our largest source of green energy, but how do we make it work 24/7?

The biggest draw back to solar power is that we only get energy when the sun shines. We can develop storage systems or create an international smart grid. It’s daytime somewhere. The areas of the earth that have daylight could provide electricity to the areas in the dark. We would need to work together and become mutually trusting of other people to make it happen. That could take a while- like a few generations, and a trillion dollars, but it’s possible. The large corporations would make a lot of money moving energy around on this super-highway grid. It’s not a very satisfying approach though, and we’d still be dependent on large energy corporations.

The other end of the spectrum in power generation is having everybody be local and independent of everyone else. This makes more sense, because we wouldn’t need the trillion dollar grid to implement it. We need to invent better energy storage systems, but they would be smaller in scale, and if we could redirect the grid money into local generation and storage it would be more efficient and kinder to the environment as well.

How do we convince the nation to develop a gridless energy system and keep your power in your driveway? It could start on a small scale and grow from experience. Start with a community, then expand to a town, then a county, then a region. Over time we could wean ourselves off of the grid and eliminate the need for it entirely. We need to work together to make this happen too. That could take a while- like a few generations, and a trillion dollars, but it’s worth the thought. I like this approach the best.