3 ms·

I imagine at a certain point it'd be cheaper for a utility to have truck mounted battery banks that they can drive to affected areas and supply power to, while

• ebikelaw 8y ago
  A truck stuffed to the gills with batteries would hold maybe 4 MW-hours of energy. You'd need a lot of trucks, except most of the time you wouldn't need any of them and they'd just sit around. Sounds expensive?
  • lovich 8y ago
    It is more expensive, but would it be mor expensive than maintaining a grid for an entire region? The power density is low, but presumably you're not running every electricity using device while you're hooked up to emergency power. This idea may be worse than just keeping a grid around, but my point was more along the lines that we are not tied to needing a grid itself anymore if we get power generation at every home/business. We still need some sort of backup power system, but it is possible that it takes a different form
• p1mrx 8y ago
  In general, solar doesn't stop working because it needs repair; it stops because it's cloudy for longer than expected.