Great piece, Matt. Love the idea of a decentralized grid and decentralized methods of power generation to redistribute excess power efficiently. Haven’t heard this discussed much, but it sounds like a great solution to one thing that’s always bothered me about the topic of green energy; the hypocrisy of us being a country that prides itself on labor and human rights standards, while wanting to aggressively expand technologies whose supply chains at current global scale rely on forced labor, child labor, and environmental devastation.
The thought of creating mass infrastructure to bank excess power concerns me because it sounds like that would require a lot of extra battery production, but decentralized production and distribution sounds fascinating. Would be cool to build a system with nuclear power for our main generation and work on building decentralized ethical renewables over time with the goal of phasing out as much non renewable production as possible, but that’s just my two cents as someone who isn’t super knowledgeable on the subject.
Thank you. Yes i love the decentralized idea. Nuclear is not talked about enough and feared for decades old reasons. I mean those reasons are very important and should be taken seriously. But at this point the tech has vastly improved from gen 1 Russian reactors
This framing of activists attacking the symptoms instead of the disease is sharp. You're dead right that blaming data centers and EVs for grid strain is backwards when we're still running on infrastructure from decades ago that bleeds 5% just moving electricity around. The decentralized grid idea you laid out actually makes a ton of sense, especially for Ohio where you could have farmers selling wind power directly to local industrial parks instead of routing everything through ancient transmission lines. If environmentalists really cared about carbon footprint, they'd be obsessed with that one-third waste number you mentioned instead of trying to shut down the things using power.
Great piece, Matt. Love the idea of a decentralized grid and decentralized methods of power generation to redistribute excess power efficiently. Haven’t heard this discussed much, but it sounds like a great solution to one thing that’s always bothered me about the topic of green energy; the hypocrisy of us being a country that prides itself on labor and human rights standards, while wanting to aggressively expand technologies whose supply chains at current global scale rely on forced labor, child labor, and environmental devastation.
The thought of creating mass infrastructure to bank excess power concerns me because it sounds like that would require a lot of extra battery production, but decentralized production and distribution sounds fascinating. Would be cool to build a system with nuclear power for our main generation and work on building decentralized ethical renewables over time with the goal of phasing out as much non renewable production as possible, but that’s just my two cents as someone who isn’t super knowledgeable on the subject.
Thank you. Yes i love the decentralized idea. Nuclear is not talked about enough and feared for decades old reasons. I mean those reasons are very important and should be taken seriously. But at this point the tech has vastly improved from gen 1 Russian reactors
This framing of activists attacking the symptoms instead of the disease is sharp. You're dead right that blaming data centers and EVs for grid strain is backwards when we're still running on infrastructure from decades ago that bleeds 5% just moving electricity around. The decentralized grid idea you laid out actually makes a ton of sense, especially for Ohio where you could have farmers selling wind power directly to local industrial parks instead of routing everything through ancient transmission lines. If environmentalists really cared about carbon footprint, they'd be obsessed with that one-third waste number you mentioned instead of trying to shut down the things using power.
Thank you. Yes i love the decentralized idea. Not only would it be efficient but also vastly improve grid security