Small generation at the residential level

A power wall is a great compliment to a set of solar panels. A power wall without them is just the worlds most expensive UPS.

every year dozens of people die from carbon monoxide poisoning due to improperly vented generators used as backup power when the grid goes out, as it frequently does in bad weather. Having a battery backup instead would prevent this loss of life.

Depending upon how much stuff one plans on powering, these walls won't last long. You'll be on a generator fairly soon. But if one combines it with something like solar cells (or wind or something) then you can keep a usable group of appliances going.

I could go from spring through fall without it.

...unplugged/disconnected from the grid and generate your own power via your own solar panels or wind mill.

is more likely to be drawn at night, when renewable power generation on the grid is likely the lowest.

Not much of a point, IMO. To me, sounds like a weak argument in attempt to influence people away from them.

I agree with your point, it's another cheap retort similar to home PV costs all rate payers when in fact PV reduces the load of a utility during peak periods which actually reduces costs.

If you are talking about a coal fired power plant, the warm up period is so long they are kept spinning with a light load at night, but the boilers are burning coal just the same. Recharging off peak means you could reduce your use during peak hours.

But as others have said, if I had Power Wall or similar it would be part of a system that included PV and/or wind. IF you didn't have PV/wind to charge the battery you would have to have a big differential in peak/off peak rates to justify the battery.

With regards to a battery being less than 100% efficient, I would think that if combined with PV or wind, it would be part of a system that is more efficient that any type of centralized power plant and transmission line system.

The two go hand-in-hand virtually every time they're discussed.

Both generate intractable electronic waste in order to obscure reality and dump responsibility for cleaning that crap up on future generations.

Both rely on a poor understanding of energy in particular, and physics in general.

And both represent an affectation that is barely disguised denial.

Both exhibit low energy to mass density, and both distribute toxicological nightmares widely in order to allow people who don't know what they're doing impress their fellow bourgeois friends and neighbors with how much they "care."

They don't care, but there's no point in addressing people's comfortable lies and illusions in the age of "tweets" taking precedence over thought.

We're over 408 ppm today, and we're not coming back.

geoengineering strategy. Without that I don't see how the human race survives.

Is the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which in my view is only feasible by using seawater as an extraction tool.

Success is improbable, but it is the only feasible approach. It would involve enormous amounts of energy -which must be carbon free (unless the carbon involved came from air or water) and the vast commitment of the best minds in engineering, but it is remotely feasible.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency to blabber on and on about solar cells, wind turbines and batteries, and the related fantasies about electric cars, which haven't worked, aren't working and won't work.

I am hopeful that some type of technique will develop before it is too late. But I realize that it quite possibly already is.

...explored at considerable depth. I hope to write here in the future on just one example, if I find the time, cerium oxide based carbon dioxide splitting, and make an estimate of the material requirements to split just one billion tons per year, about 3% of what we actually dump each year.

This is all wonderful, except no serious effort is being made to develop these technologies. The impetus for so doing this is only possible if we include the external costs of dangerous fossil fuels in their price at the point of use, for example include a carbon tax without limiting the cost to this singular external cost.

In my opinion there is not one political leader on the face of this planet with the guts to do this.