[thelastgallon]

Completely agree with you, Govts sacred duty is to protect the super rich and utilities are the biggest monopolized cash cows (Eg: Warren Buffet). However,if people work with their local governments and change the building code to allow plug-in solar and plug-in batteries, that will continuously upgrade every home to become more and more energy independent and with the explosion of products, eventually be grid free. The biggest costs are labor, permits and delays; if its just products that people can plug and play, the adoption will be faster than just rooftop solar (or rooftop + batteries).

Also, most utilities have tiered rates (higher utilization at higher rates), if you can have plug in systems that can bring the total kwh down, it immediately lowers the peak rate.

The only bottleneck is making products that are safe to plug in, and this will happen as building code creates a standard to plug-in.

[alwa]

So… @lazide replied with a hahaha. It got flagged to death, understandably.

If it were anybody but @lazide I’d have flagged it too, but… I can’t help but grimace and nod.

To hazard a loosely-informed guess at their subtext… and politely ignoring your opening salvo of calorie-free populism… I’m not speaking from a place of certainty, but my impression is that there seem to be elements of “not even wrong” here. Some contra- lines of argument:

* code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;

* individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;

* the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;

* the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?

* the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;

* one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;

* Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;

* building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…

I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!

I love your sense of empowerment; I’d encourage you to bring it to bear at a scale where it matters— much bigger than a home, much smaller than a whole polity… I think there are benefits to decentralization and to independence but I don’t think those are the benefits you’re emphasizing here.

[thelastgallon]

> * code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;

UL 3700 exists. Local efforts are underway to let anyone use plug-in sola without contractors, permits, utility approval: https://pluginsolarusa.com/

> individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;

The grid connects millions of individual homes. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here?

> the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;

Plug-in solar or batteries do not feed in to the grid. They are for consumption within the home.

> the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?

There is no work involved other than just plugging it in. There is no volunteer home owners labor. Even if there is, it is their own home. When you turn the lights on, do you add that to your spreadsheet of volunteer home owners labor? Or do you consider plugging a cable into an outlet a big task that should require contractors, project managers, managers, directors, forecasts, estimates, daily standups? If thats your view, thats understandable, most enterprises work that way.

> the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;

plug-in battery uses existing built environment. Thats the whole point.

> one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;

I don't know what you are trying to say here. It sounds like corporate speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QmAbQMukB4

> Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;

Rate tiers are a politically convenient way to hide cost-recovery problems, cross-subsidize favored groups, and extract revenue while pretending the underlying cost structure of the grid is volume-driven when large parts of it are not. California homeowners are buying record numbers of home batteries to pair with solar panels. If the rates are entirely unreasonable, homeowners will go offgrid. California homeowners are smart enough to figure out how to freeze property taxes close to zero, I'm sure they will figure out the right laws when electricity rates become unreasonable.

> building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…

Yeah, just leave it to the utilities and regulators, they have nothing but consumers best interest at heart.

> I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!

plug-in batteries are impossible and require home owners volunteer labor, but fusion, it can manifest from thin air!