I remember driving across the desert in Texas two years ago, right in the middle of the oil fields with the huge lumbering pumps moving up and down everywhere. Some of the oil wells gas off natural gas, and they haven't come up with a good way to contain and use it on site so they're required to just burn it off as it comes out of the well because the CO2 isn't as bad a greenhouse gas as methane. This got me thinking about how stupid and wasteful our society is right now. This was deemed the solution to free fuel just falling into their laps. Burn it. Don't use it for anything, just open burn it into the atmosphere. These are the kinds of wasteful legacy systems we're dealing with. This got me thinking about how centralized our grid power is, and that it was designed and built by the same kind of people around the same time as the oil infrastructure originally was. That single point of failure all but guarantees that it will fail catastrophically at some point. Kind of ironic that a couple years later that very place was ground zero for one of the worst grid failures in the history of the US. It's not all that hard to generate electricity, but it is very hard to build a large and complex system that services hundreds of millions of people that runs 24/7, 365 days a year, and never fails. When it does fail, especially during a time of harsh weather, it can bring society to its knees until it's back online. I also didn't realize just how centralized our oil infrastructure was until the pipeline hack, but it makes sense in hindsight. Long story short, I agree that we as a society definitely need to transition away from dependency on these mammoth centralized systems, and I think we can even get away with it being just as cost effective. If the amount of money for poured into decentralized power that gets poured into the grid, the economics would almost certainly work out.