I would like to see a more in depth treatment than what I've seen (or what I've thought about).

Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.

In terms of the wires in urban centers, I don't have a good sense. I can see where you might be right but at the same time, that infrastructure is already there and there are efficiencies to be gained by not transporting electricity over many miles of copper.

I also agree that the social aspect but there's a large pressure to find solutions because energy costs are going to be dropping by an order of magnitude or more.

> Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.

Your going to need very long electric lines, to send clean energy from places where its sunny to places where it cloudy, or from places where its windy, to places where its currently calm.

Sorry, I'm not quite sure I understand your point.

There are places that have so much cloud cover year round that it makes solar adoption there effectively impossible? The frequency of these places is such that their energy needs requires the infrastructure remain in place?

Or less. People are using solar to go off the grid.

This is something that I think has basically flown under the radar of mainstream understanding: you can now live "off the grid" and have many of the perks that used to be the domain of grid-connected living.

Not all of them... but "off grid" no longer means living like Ted Kaczynski. The popular understanding has yet to catch up.

You can have artificial lighting all night long (thanks to LEDs and batteries), computers (ideally you want to avoid the DC -> AC -> DC conversion), Internet access (although most satellite systems aren't really optimized for low power yet), running water (solar-powered pumps, cheap large-capacity plastic storage totes), etc.

The items that are still hard to get, because of their inherently energy-intensive nature, are hot water out of the tap on demand, and interior climate control (space heating especially). You need a pretty big solar array and battery system to run even a fairly efficient (AC or heat pump) climate control system. Lots of people get around this by siting their off-grid cabins in places that don't require AC, and making the interior volume small enough to heat with a small biofuel furnace (like a modern, efficient wood stove) that can burn locally-obtained fuel.

Decentralization has never worked in the history of mankind. I don't know why people continue to get hyped up about decentralization topics.

The internet?

It was created as a decentralized network, but is it now? It may be in some technical sense, but for all practical purposes, it's collectively centralized.

One interesting documentary on this topic is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Every Loving Grace.