alt Hacker NewsAnd the area you own is theoretical proportionate to your avaibale money.
So yes, rich people can obviously have more of it all, like with everything else that money can buy. But is this really a point worth going in deeper here?
I see the point as in "solar power plus battery is good", creates resillence, please more of it.
Unfair distribution of wealth is a different problem.
And here concreteley the article lacks for me details, what exactly the work on the grid means, if it is really about fossils vs solar, but microgrids that can connect to each other sounds like a pragmatic solution to me.
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It's not just redistribution, land is an already heavily overcommitted resource on Earth. China, for example, holds basically same amount of land as US, for its 4x population, and they house the people in things like dozens per each clusters of 50-story condominiums.
In places like that - that but not necessarily specifically China or Asia, local proprietors would head to forested mountains unfit for residences, and actively desertify it to put on PVs to collect incentives, if incentivized. The cost is externalized and paid collectively in such forms as raised atmospheric CO2 levels and micro disasters like mountain landslides.
Resilient solar-battery off/micro-grid is great if you live "by yourself" in relative sense and doing so would allow removal of electrical transmission lines with own costs and externalities, but it's far from panacea, if not opposite - it's a specific and somewhat radical solution to specific problems.
Now, as to whether such dystopian Bladerunner cities on Earth that has to rely on fission/fusion should exist in real life, it's probably deeply wrong that they do. But we're not cutting down Earth's population by 90% to fix that, and wealth redistribution is a minor part of the reason it would be wrong.
Microgrids at that size are the most expensive way to get resilience. If they're pragmatic for many people then something has failed and we should work to fix it.
Bigger ones have a better tradeoffs, so I'm not so harsh on towns having their own grids. Still unsure whether it's a good use of funds.
> Unfair distribution of wealth is a different problem
Unfortunately, all problems are eventually going to come down to this. Or many problems are, if not "all"
We can't fix a lot of the problems facing our society and our planet with "only wealthy can afford this" solutions