The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change
This article doesn't mention some serious problems that affect power grids reliant on renewable energies:<p>1 - The grids becomes vulnerable to the weather. There's no solar energy at night and it's greatly reduced in cloudy days. Wind power is unpredictable and closely matches the output of hydraulic power, so that the two sources can't complement each other. You can check Brazil in recent history to check the effects of droughts in the power grid.
In the end there is a need of conventional power plants always ready to backup the grid when the renewable energy is not available.<p>2 - The majority of losses of the power distribution network are on the last mile, when the voltage is lower and the current is higher. If every house and electric car become consumers and providers to the grid, most power movements occur in the low voltage networks. There's also the issue of batteries storing energy for later consumption. Lithium batteries have a 80%-90% efficiency storing energy.<p>3 - Since we are talking of the environment, rare earth metals have a very pollutant and energy intensive extraction process which in most cases is not accounted in the environmental cost of solar panels.<p>Replacing the majority of energy production by renewable energies will result in an net efficiency loss. I would rather support a balanced production with nuclear (fusion?) power plants providing the fixed needs of the grid and renewable energies making up the rest.