Off grid solar+storage is great when you and everyone around you is using very little electricity. It lets you go from "nothing" to "lightbulb at night" very cheaply, which is a huge improvement.
Once you're using tons of electricity, list a 1st world home does (refrigeration/ac/microwaves/electric ovens/electric stoves/washing machines/vehicles/...), storage would have to be absurdly cheap for it to not be worthwhile to start hooking homes together to load balance and reduce (not eliminate) the need for storage. And then the same logic applies to hooking up cities/towns/villages. And in the end it almost certainly turns out that by the time you're a huge consumer of electricity like the 1st world you have a grid.
A different path, but the same end result.
However to suggest that once they can afford luxuries that are most cheaply acquired by going beyond a single-household electricity setup that they won't continue to do without them over some attachment to not having a grid, that claim seems almost certainly completely incorrect.
It also needs to be said that electricity isn't just used for "wasteful things", it's used for making things more efficient, so that people can do more. The article talks about this in the context of lighting, but it's no less true in the context of washing machines, and dishwashers, and microwaves, and air-conditioning [1], and mechanized transportation (electric bikes/cars/...), and ...
[1] http://corporatemechanical.com/how-air-conditioning-impacts-...
Heating and cooling (and the computers that manage the batteries, which draw about 200W, including internet!) is hard to timeshift, but everything else is easy to move to sunny days.
Anyway, on those sunny days, electricity is literally free. I wish I could just dump it into a magic box that pulled charcoal out of the atmosphere.
The lightbulb moment was realizing that of I did manage to pull a ton (or 15) of carbon out of the air by whatever method, I would then have to move that carbon... Somewhere. I had been looking especially at algae bio reactors, which leave you with a particularly soupy waste situation. :)
One can shift them by at least few hours using theorem-insulated water tank. It costs money but likely will be cheaper (and safer) than Lithium batteries.
Yes island interconnects seem reasonably unlikely. Similarly Hawaii has no interconnects between the main islands [0] despite being a first world locale. A different geography leading to a different grid structure the mainland US isn't "leapfrogging", it's just a different geography leading to a different grid structure.
The US is abandoning the grid in Puerto Rico and California (though the politicians won’t admit it, and the pork is still flowing).
If solar and batteries continue to get cheaper, the cost of the grid hookup will eventually stop making economic sense for new construction.
The vast majority of Western energy is wasted, rejected as waste heat. Solar electrification skips over a wasteful thermodynamic conversion of heat to electricity. Even the rare case where fossil fuels seem at first glance as efficient, such as for heating water and homes, it turns out that 99% efficiency of conversion of fossil fuel energy to heat still requires 3-4x as much energy as a heat pump to get the same result. And don't get me started on how incredibly wimpy and inefficient ICE cars are.... unreliable bad machines.
And the only, literally the only time I have seen somebody come up with napkin math to say that solar would be hard to install in sufficient quantity to meet existing lifestyles in countries with normal insolation, it has been using total energy, rather than the actual useful amount of energy.
Solar and storage are gigantic technological marvels compared to the tech that delivered energy to us in the 20th century. Unless one's earning are tied directly to spreading FUD about these new technologies, it makes no sense not to acknowledge both the amazing tech curve of the past decades, and to speculate won the wonderful places that solar and storage in future will take us.
As I said in another comment, once people can afford a better lifestyle, they aren't remotely likely to choose to keep living the worse one.
On the other hand, I too am a fan of solar and electricity. I completely buy the solar + storage + grid is sufficient for a western lifestyle. I'm not arguing against solar, I'm arguing against lack of grid, that connecting houses, towns, and cities together can save more money on storage than it costs to run the wires. You want to plan for very-close-to-worst generation + storage >= very-close-to-worst-case load over all time frames, and grids smooth over variations in both generation and load, which makes the worst cases go way down, which means that that equation requires a lot less storage (not none, but less).
Incidentally I also think that "solar + wind + storage + grid" is an even better combination... and that wind power only works with a grid (because the scaling rules around them mean you want giant wind turbines that put out enough power for many houses)... but even with only solar grids just make too much sense.
Your position is reasonable, though I think that we will find that a lot of places that don't have grids will be just fine without them in the future. For those of us that have already invested heavily in them in the last century, we will probably continue to use them, but in many cases they will greatly raise the cost of energy as we rely on them rather than cheaper alternatives. Though we do see some "non-wires alternatives" already in the US, which are places where storage is beating out building more grid, the incentive model for most utilities will favor them building unnecessary and expensive grid infrastructure instead of the best option for ratepayers. It's going to take very vigilant advocacy groups to force regulators to hold utilities to make better decisions.
But I think that storage is not the bottleneck here, there's a wide array of cheap options coming online. And even at today's prices it's quite possible to get $100-$150/kWh LFP that plugs right into the inverter.
Car engines, on the other hand,...
I don't think you get to the same end result. When production is in the same location as consumption, the interconnects can be way less expensive and in a disaster the grid has more redundancy. Plus it bootstraps way better, locally people get access to the initial benefits before the entire grid has been planned out.
And as others suggest, those interconnects might go mostly unused, storage and generation is pretty impressive nowadays.
But even besides the timing advantages, you just end up in a situation where the power grid is closer to the internet in architecture where sources and consumers of electricity are all over. We have the technology to handle that.
IMHO it would be useful to have grid technology that could work as a web of low voltage/low current connections. Something that could be installed without needing lots of expertise and be intrinsically safe. Maybe even in the same package as water pipes.
Low voltage = high current = less inefficient, less dangerous. High voltage = low current = more efficient, more dangerous. There's good reasons why overhead power lines are very high voltage.
To get reliable and cheap power, people have to invest in their own generation. That's still expensive but increasingly more feasible and critical for especially small businesses. If you run e.g. a small shop and you have perishable goods in a fridge in a tropical country and the power goes out, you basically have a lot of melted / rotten goods after a few hours. Not great. If that happens a lot, your business dies. In the same way, having the AC on or off in a hot country can mean the difference between having your place full of customers or not. It's not optional. If grid power is only available a few hours a day, your business is at risk unless you fix a more reliable supply. Many grids in e.g. Africa are very unreliable and don't have enough capacity.
In many countries people are still relying on generators for this but increasingly solar and batteries are becoming a viable alternative. The upfront cost of this is a big obstacle for many smaller businesses. As is the availability of components. But generators and fuel are also not free. And they break down and need maintenance too. And the exhaust fumes cause health issues.
However, solutions in this space actually have a value and return on investment. So, providing lines of credit for this is actually something that is potentially a profitable business and not just charity. Plenty of entrepreneurs in Africa, the Middle East, parts of Asia, etc. that could use that to bootstrap their businesses and would be able to pay back loans with interest.
I'd say micro grids will be a reality long before, if ever, people figure out cheap, reliable grid power in many of these places.
Another example of this sort of dynamic are skipping credit cards for app based payments. Or not having much of a postal service because email.
In all these cases I think its more of a shortcut than truly leapfrogging. Not as good in terms of redundancy (good for reliability) and interoperability.
The grid is very valuable, but it's also very expensive, and as storage and solar get really cheap, while grid costs stay stagnant, we may arrive at a future for which decentralized, disconnected microgrids are the cheapest energy solution for large chunks of the world.