That sort of lifestyle is really feasible on solar. Rooftops alone are likely enough, or at worst some bit of agrovoltaics.
The vast majority of Western energy is wasted, rejected as waste heat. Solar electrification skips over a wasteful thermodynamic conversion of heat to electricity. Even the rare case where fossil fuels seem at first glance as efficient, such as for heating water and homes, it turns out that 99% efficiency of conversion of fossil fuel energy to heat still requires 3-4x as much energy as a heat pump to get the same result. And don't get me started on how incredibly wimpy and inefficient ICE cars are.... unreliable bad machines.
And the only, literally the only time I have seen somebody come up with napkin math to say that solar would be hard to install in sufficient quantity to meet existing lifestyles in countries with normal insolation, it has been using total energy, rather than the actual useful amount of energy.
Solar and storage are gigantic technological marvels compared to the tech that delivered energy to us in the 20th century. Unless one's earning are tied directly to spreading FUD about these new technologies, it makes no sense not to acknowledge both the amazing tech curve of the past decades, and to speculate won the wonderful places that solar and storage in future will take us.
As I said in another comment, once people can afford a better lifestyle, they aren't remotely likely to choose to keep living the worse one.
On the other hand, I too am a fan of solar and electricity. I completely buy the solar + storage + grid is sufficient for a western lifestyle. I'm not arguing against solar, I'm arguing against lack of grid, that connecting houses, towns, and cities together can save more money on storage than it costs to run the wires. You want to plan for very-close-to-worst generation + storage >= very-close-to-worst-case load over all time frames, and grids smooth over variations in both generation and load, which makes the worst cases go way down, which means that that equation requires a lot less storage (not none, but less).
Incidentally I also think that "solar + wind + storage + grid" is an even better combination... and that wind power only works with a grid (because the scaling rules around them mean you want giant wind turbines that put out enough power for many houses)... but even with only solar grids just make too much sense.
My home in the wet tropics is solar powered. A small array of eight 325w panels supports 3 people, a regular AC refrigerator, electric kettle, electric hotplate, washer/dryer, and continuously running ceilings fans for moisture. In periods of cloud cover we still generate some power, we just switch to propane cooking and being frugal with our power budget. Solar is a no brainer in the tropics.
I think misinterpretted your comment, as well as make a serious error when I said "vast majority" rather than "vast chunk" of energy is wasted.
Your position is reasonable, though I think that we will find that a lot of places that don't have grids will be just fine without them in the future. For those of us that have already invested heavily in them in the last century, we will probably continue to use them, but in many cases they will greatly raise the cost of energy as we rely on them rather than cheaper alternatives. Though we do see some "non-wires alternatives" already in the US, which are places where storage is beating out building more grid, the incentive model for most utilities will favor them building unnecessary and expensive grid infrastructure instead of the best option for ratepayers. It's going to take very vigilant advocacy groups to force regulators to hold utilities to make better decisions.
You kind of completely skipped your fellow commenter's point, which was not about production method, but about the benefits of a grid when you have important storage needs.
Yes, I misunderstood, which his other comment really drove home.
But I think that storage is not the bottleneck here, there's a wide array of cheap options coming online. And even at today's prices it's quite possible to get $100-$150/kWh LFP that plugs right into the inverter.
The vast majority of Western energy is wasted, rejected as waste heat. Solar electrification skips over a wasteful thermodynamic conversion of heat to electricity. Even the rare case where fossil fuels seem at first glance as efficient, such as for heating water and homes, it turns out that 99% efficiency of conversion of fossil fuel energy to heat still requires 3-4x as much energy as a heat pump to get the same result. And don't get me started on how incredibly wimpy and inefficient ICE cars are.... unreliable bad machines.
And the only, literally the only time I have seen somebody come up with napkin math to say that solar would be hard to install in sufficient quantity to meet existing lifestyles in countries with normal insolation, it has been using total energy, rather than the actual useful amount of energy.
Solar and storage are gigantic technological marvels compared to the tech that delivered energy to us in the 20th century. Unless one's earning are tied directly to spreading FUD about these new technologies, it makes no sense not to acknowledge both the amazing tech curve of the past decades, and to speculate won the wonderful places that solar and storage in future will take us.