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The Myth of Going Off the Power Grid
Lasrick writes: Dawn Stover uses Elon Musk's announcement that Tesla will soon be unveiling plans for a battery that could power your home as a starting point to explore the idea that "going off the grid" is going to solve climate change. "The kind of in-house energy storage he is proposing could help make renewables a bigger part of the global supply. But headlines announcing that a Tesla battery 'could take your home off the grid' spread misconceptions about what it takes to be self-sufficient — and stop global warming." Stover worries that shifting responsibility for solutions to climate change from governments to individuals creates an 'every-man-for-himself' culture that actually works against energy solutions and does little to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, "smart grid" technology would be much more efficient: "With a smarter grid, excess electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines could be distributed to a network of on-the-grid home and car batteries. Some utilities have also experimented with using home water heaters as an economical substitute for batteries."
Vastly more efficient than battery, I'll grant, but let's try to stay accurate.
Modern Li-ion batteries have a round-trip efficiency of about 85%. Grid transmission has losses of about 7% from the power station to you, but will likely be higher if it is peer-to-peer. They are actually in the same ballpark.
But TFA is just stupid. The tiny handful of first-world survivalist kooks trying to go off the grid are not what is causing global warming. The massive expansion of coal burning in India is a somewhat bigger problem, by many orders of magnitude. Maybe we should focus on that instead. Solar-to-battery would be a good solution to many Indian and African villages that are not on the grid at all.