Indeed. The future is off-grid and community level mini/micro grids.

There is no need to build/maintain transmission network.

Legacy grid is production in far away places, miles and miles of transmission, then a distribution network. The distribution network built for homes is sufficient for homes to participate in grid for redundancy. All buildings can produce energy. Rooftop is proven. Next is vertical solar-- which adds ~4 hours of production. EVs become a storage reservoir and supply power back to the grid (V2X). Add some BESS if needed.

Villages in developing countries (half the population in Asia, Africa) can go completely offgrid. Start with plugins, slowly upgrade to bigger panels. No transmission network needed.

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pfdietz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

A key enabling technology for this is long term thermal storage, which I've been emphasizing here. It is claimed to work on a scale of ~100 kW or higher, storing heat at 600 C with losses less than 1% per month and capex of $0.10 per kWh-th of storage capacity. This is very well suited for isolated microgrids.

	▲	thelastgallon 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thats terrific! The plug-and-play layer of storage is plug-in batteries (as an extension of plug-in solar: if you can supply power from solar, you can also supply from batteries) The first layer is storage is EVs, which is inevitable. EVs have humongous batteries. Next layer, add thermal storage.