Anyway, my friend asks the insurance assessor how often he has a power failure at his house "Oh, only a couple of times a year" says the man.
In 10 years living off grid, my friends have never had a single outage.
Not only is local, sustainable low cost energy production getting cheaper and easier but the post-industrial household energy use is going down.
We've replaced CRTs and incandescents. Our new buildings have better weather proofing and even our kitchen appliances have dramatically improved.
Even in places like Los Angeles, the public have been clamoring for and enthusiastically voting to gasp tax themselves to build mass transit systems. The average vehicle fuel economy has been going up consistently for years. This trend towards lower cost, more efficient things is one consumers have been wildly supportive of and will continue.
The future of low energy at low cost is the stated reason that companies like PG&E are moving away from nuclear based primarily on financial forecasts.
People can have their own wells, or collect and store rainwater, but most don't if utility water is available.
Every home in any remotely civilized area is already wired for utility power. Utility scale renewable energy, if that can be done cost-effectively, probably makes the most sense for the most people.
Otherwise you have an expensive purchase and installation of solar panels, a transfer switch if you keep utility power connected as a backup, battery installation so you have electricity at night, etc.
It's just more complexity and expense than most people want to deal with, compared to paying a hundred dollars or so a month to the utility.
By this time, the cost threshold of things in the class of solar is perhaps a few hundred dollar fixed cost for your needs. Just like you don't need to be an energy-saving enthusiast to get a non-crt computer screen today, low-cost commodity energy generation hardware will dominate the marketplace and essentially be the only consumer-facing option.
If you are an "I don't care" consumer like most are, the cheapest and best business model would be to have either someone come by and put the thing in or to franchise it out like 7/11 so every neighborhood gets their own low-cost plant.
Either way, large power-generation infrastructure projects are likely to give way to an even larger consumer-facing power-generator infrastructure.
In the shorter term someone somewhere (maybe reading these words right now) will come along and make a version of solar or solar-equivalent tech a sexy luxury toy for wealthy people to show everyone how rich they are. It will get hyped-to-hell-and-back. Big players will slap their head and say "oh darn that was obvious" and quickly move in to snatch the market and there will be a wild ride for all the VC groups involved. It'll mint a few 22-year old billionaires from either MIT or Harvard who will be paraded as visionary geniuses for our time. So lovely.
Don't know when, don't know where, but it's coming. (ok, my real guess is geopolitics will destabilize oil prices and create a climate for adoption within the next 3 years - the cost metrics have just started working out in the past 12 months)
The thing is, a water collection system requires constant upkeep. A solar power system requires some maintenance once in several years (like your roof). Even if they want to stay connected on the grid (batteries still require maintenance), they'll probably want some solar power.
Unfortunately, he pays something like $1900/month, because he is distant from the nearest fire station, and again, city-based insurance companies see that as a big problem.
The house is in the Yukon, far out there.
This post of mine has a photo of their "cabin" that is just down the road from their house. http://theroadchoseme.com/chillin-yukon-style
I just went through my photos, I don't actually have one of their house online anywhere.
I took these on a walk from their house: http://theroadchoseme.com/northern-lights-1
Also, "off-grid house in the Yukon" is extremely common :)
He has replaced the entire battery bank once, and now has more panels that track the sun.
Although I'm a big fan of distributed solar, I don't think it's by any means so clear it'll become dominant. Utility scale solar is half the cost on a leveled basis. Given existing institutions, market structure, and the very non trivial problems involved in a P2P grid I think a federated model is much more likely, with some very localized distributed stuff in the mix.
YUP
any concept of 'sustainability' that ignores politics and human complexity is silly
And industrial energy consumers may need hundreds of megawatts for each plant. metal smelters, cement factories, ammonia synthesis, desalination, hydrogen production, transportation, ...
There are lots of non-electricity energy consumers that we want to transition off fossil fuels too.
And if we want to actively put CO2 back into the ground we might need even larger amounts of energy.
So fusion may still have a place to supply these base loads, especially in northern latitudes.
Fortunately, they seem to be growing in both efficiency and capacity/cost in a superpolynomial fashion. But they are still expensive, short-lived and require maintenance.
The whole point is to make it not a commodity you have to constantly buy and transport, but something everyone at all levels of infrastructure could make themselves locally.
There's a Moore's law of solar called Swanson's law which is on track for what in today's terms we'd effectively call "free energy" sometime in the nest few decades.
Another big idea is that these don't require any manual capturing, transport, and feeding of fuel. You install them, make sure they are clean and essentially that's it. Nothing more to mine or constantly load into the machine.
A robust, fault tolerant, dynamic system of community and family power is the actual future and only dramatically decentralized things like that will ultimately be politically viable and sustainable.
They will more likely survive wars and infrastructure collapse; something that a model reliant on a few multibillion dollar plants will never be able to do.
Sustainability is not only about ecology but also about decomodifying energy and not having to be constantly reliant on some large group of people maintaining an infrastructure to keep the lights on.