Re: Do you have solar panels?
That we have a grid in the first place is fundamentally a consequence of the means of generating the power that goes into it, and that is in turn a consequence of the available resources and technology.
The technology we had a century ago was steam and hydro. To use hydro, you necessarily have to build the power station where the resource is, you can't bring the resource to some other location. With steam, you can move the fuel (coal, gas, oil, uranium) but in the case of coal that's costly, and in the other cases even though the fuel can be moved, it's still far more practical and economical to use them at a few very large power stations rather than everyone having their own small power station at home.
Electricity in the 20th Century was thus naturally a very centralised industry. Generate the power at few large power stations, then distribute it to homes and industry.
The same applies to wind. Whilst there's some wind just about everywhere, relatively few locations have enough wind on a consistent basis to generate a decent supply of power. And those places are, since they are so windy, not where most people would want to live.
What's different with solar is that the primary resource, that is sunlight, occurs naturally where the electricity is required. There's no need to move either the resource or the power, since it's already in the right location. Solar is also practical on a small scale. You can have a few solar panels on the roof far more easily than you could have your own steam turbines and coal-fired boiler at home. Put those two attributes together and, if we're going to use solar as the primary resource, then you don't actually need a grid to distribute the power in most situations. It's already distributed at the time it's produced.
The problems with solar are that (1) it's intermittent meaning that storage is required and (2) is low density. It works to power a home but there's nowhere near enough sun falling on the roof of a smelter to power the activity in the sheds under that roof.
I see a future where we still have centralised generation and we still have a grid, but the smaller loads take care of themselves. The grid will supply factories, CBD offices, trains, electric car charging stations and so on but a home in the suburbs it won't be needed in most parts of Australia.
As one scenario, you live in a typical suburban house, you have solar and are off-grid (because the grid was turned off in your street a few years earlier). You have an all-electric car and another plug-in hybrid car. Where the interface occurs is via the vehicles. Surplus power at home? No problem, you charge the car with it. Running low on power at home? No problem, you dump some energy out of the car's battery into your house battery. Need to buy some power? No problem, that's what your local "service station" is for - you drive there, charge the car with power from the grid and either use that power to run the car or, if necessary, dump some into your home system.
Under that scenario, there's still a grid and you can still access it but not directly. Service stations won't be routinely busy in Summer but they'll be busy places when there's a few days of cloud.
Another point is about diversity. Go back 50 years and it was all very simple. Most electricity came from the locally available resource - in Australia that's coal for most places, hydro in Tas. Then we used a bit of other fuel, mostly oil, as a "top up" to meet the peaks or when problems occurred with the main means of generation. Cars ran on petrol, of which there were only two grades. Industry used coal or oil. That was pretty much all there was to know about energy in Australia.
Then we started using a lot more oil for power generation in WA and SA since it had become cheaper than coal.
Then gas came along in Vic and SA, soon followed by WA, with SA coming to rely heavily on it for power and the other states using it back then primarily for homes and industry.
Then the environmental movement emerged. A war erupted over a planned oil and gas-fired power station in Vic and another war sprang up over hydro development in Tas. That power station in Vic was only ever half built, and the Franklin River is still flowing free today and probably always will.
Then along came broader concerns about pollution. CBD area coal-fired power stations closed, we started taking the lead out of petrol and we started to worry about CO2. Around the same time health and safety became a similar concern with asbestos bringing about the early demise of quite a few power stations.
Now we've added landfill gas, wind and solar. Cars no longer need just Super or Standard, there's now 7 different fuels available at some service stations. And so on.
The big trend there is diversity. It is no longer a given that a house in Sydney has off-peak hot water ultimately heated by black coal. It is no longer a given that dinner is cooked in Hobart on an electric stove powered by hydro. There's far more diversity at both ends of the line, production and use, than was once the case.
Going forward, there's no inherent need for any new technology to completely replace what already exists. There's no reason why we can't have cars available in either diesel or electric depending on what suits the buyer. There's no reason why we can't have off-grid homes and on-grid CBD's and factories. Etc.