Lurk, Hang in there, I enjoy your posts. If I ever get to the complete system of renewable energy, renewable food production , transportation and home heating I would welcome a critical analysis of my efforts.
I have focused on food first as I believe it is of critical import and largely neglected. Anyone attempting renewables to power their food production requirements will quickly realize they need to change their expectations . We are so dependent upon the food transportation network and enormous numbers of food miles currently built into our diets. Bananas, citrus, tropical fruit on menus thousands of miles separate from their points of production. Even greens and salads available in the Northern parts of the US where we recently saw -35 F. Renewable and local will require a change in these expectations. Diets should be built around local availability IMO but you don't need to worry about this problem if you don't actually try producing your own renewable energy.
Renewables are also locally constrained and some currently occupied regions may in fact not support any renewables options that can maintain anything similar to current lifestyle expectations or population densities. Wind works in some areas, solar or hydro in others. Wood as a heat source is in reality not an option in many areas lest we cut down every tree and bush in a vain attempt to heat our ( overly large )homes.
Transportation seems to be everyone primary interest because it is critical to maintaining the infrastructure that obviates my first two points. I may be contrary but I believe local should be our primary consideration because any honest assessment of the renewable energy required to maintain the transportation infrastructure will not work in decadal timeframes . Yes very rich societies that have fossil fuel resources to build out electric trucking and large personal EV vehicles ( Teslas ) may seem at first sustainable but those options will fail as the fossil fuels to create them begin to fail. Self supporting renewable infrastructure requires serious efforts at walking back our expectations of luxury and anyone who try's to put a total support structure together will quickly realize this point. We need to figure out how to live on less energy inputs rather than create an imitation of how we currently live. Yes electric vehicles are part of a renewable future but those vehicles will be small, light and not expected to travel very far.
Home heating / cooling is also feasible as we move forward but local resources should drive local architecture .
Lastly we need to figure out how to sink some of the excess carbon we have already emitted which leads me back to food and farming. Farming with renewables and locally sourced energy and biomass needs seems to be a full circle solution but also a very labor intensive one. It requires major changes in current lifestyle expectations. It also can be adapted to further steps down the energy escalator we have become conditioned to expect, the elevators will not always go up. If or when solar, wind, and batteries go through their replacement cycles farming can still go on even if that means we transition back to beasts of burden.
If we put all of our efforts at high expectation transportation networks and fail to maintain our food and farming past/ future the bottleneck will narrow.