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Originally Posted by conradpdx
No I realize this, so lets say only a third of the residential properties are capable of producing just enough power to cover their own power needs. Then perhaps a third that could produce excess power. Right there we've gotten to 22% of the electricity in the nation on renewables. That's not including the power produced by the aprox. 11% that produce more power than they need. If they even produced enough excess to cover half of the remaining 1/3 that has problems producing their own power we are now pushing 27% of the nations power coming from home owners.
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Which is fine, and would be a good thing. If you read studies by power systems engineers, you find that the grid can run with roughly 10% (as it is) to 30% (with relatively cheap upgrades) of intermittent generation. (I'm just going from memory here: read the articles yourself for better figures.) But remember what I said about the problem not scaling linearly? The greater the fraction of intermittent generation, the more difficult/expensive the problem becomes.
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Screw the investors/owners of the old power plants.
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Screw them 'til you need to run the old plants for backup power, 'cause you got a couple of weeks of unusually cloudy weather :-)
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Honestly, I think this system would work very well.
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I prefer to go by the opinions of power system engineers :-)
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And I never claimed it to be a cure all, just something easy to make a big dent, or a just good place to start.
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Maybe YOU didn't, but a lot of people are. That's the real problem: they see that a small percentage (about 1%, IIRC) of renewables can just go on the grid, so they think everything could be made renewable just by building more PV panels & wind turbines. They prefer wishful thinking to engineering :-)