As others have already pointed out, the article contains a lot of handwaving arguments and seemingly inaccurate claims. So, for anyone interested in a more tho

As others have already pointed out, the article contains a lot of handwaving arguments and seemingly inaccurate claims. So, for anyone interested in a more thorough and quantitative discussion of the problem I highly recommend David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air", which is available for free online: http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ It contains detailed discussions of many of the problems that we would face when shifting our energy production to renewable sources and decentralizing it, and he provides a lot of data and calculations to give you a feeling of how to overcome them.