> Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage
I don't think that moving the generation around is really an "instead", because the problem at hand is that distribution is expensive and someone has to pay for it if you want a grid. And most of that cost is the local stuff.
So how do you get everyone connected that wants to be, without it costing them a ton of money? You might have to make the grid cost into a mandatory tax.
Whether the electric company is private or state-owned is mostly a separate issue.
I don't think there is a viable answer to that. The thing is a lot of what we pay for with the grid is reliability. Until rates are set up in a fashion to properly express that we will have problems.
Wind and solar reduce fuel use, but they make for very little reduction in required infrastructure. Thus the value to the utility company is approximately the value of the fuel that's offset minus the costs of handling the situation.
Combine these and you see that the true value of wind and solar is pretty low other than from an environmental standpoint of reducing carbon emissions. (Now, if you have a use case of something that's power intensive but can freely be turned on and off then there could be some appreciable value.)
It’s not 100% “instead”, but equally it’s not 0%. A grid with more distributed generation (and storage and load flexibility) can be smaller and cheaper.
This is almost what is happening. Rate payers are paying less and less in order to compensate for production cost, and increasingly more in order to be connected to the grid and that the grid is stable. For the moment that cost is mostly attached to how much energy is consumed as a matter of billing, but that can change.
I don't think that moving the generation around is really an "instead", because the problem at hand is that distribution is expensive and someone has to pay for it if you want a grid. And most of that cost is the local stuff.
So how do you get everyone connected that wants to be, without it costing them a ton of money? You might have to make the grid cost into a mandatory tax.
Whether the electric company is private or state-owned is mostly a separate issue.