At any rate, it doesn’t matter if it’s solar, wind, coal or toothbrush activated, one large plant will always be more efficient than many small plants. For the same reason that a plant making ten million cookies a shift can make them cheaper than grandma.
Installing and maintaining hundreds of thousands of tiny home plants has to be a nightmare.
I worked at a Combined Heat and Power Station(CHiPS) for a goodly number of years and that managed to reach efficiency figures of around 68%.
That is extremely good, very few stations can get within a good country mile of that.
The reason was that the station is part of a hospital, heat is produced for the buildings, air-con, chilled water for the scanners etc (you use absorption chillers which use heat to chill water) and the electricity is treated as a useful by-product.
This method of runniong the station meant that there was usually more demand for heat than electricity byproduct sothis was exported and sold to the grid, thus providing useful cash, in fact it was very profitable indeed as our highest heat demand coincided with the highest prices paid on the hourly rate during the day.
Although the station is very small in terms of grid capacity, 15MW IIRC, its a useful amount to have available to the grid company as it’s a useful as an infill capacity, it is more economic to pay higher electricity pool prices to run a small unit than to run a 100MW unit yourself just to get the relativley small amount of power required.
The coal fired stations around my locale all typically run at less than 33% efficiency as there is nowhere to use the heat after it has been through the turbines, in fact it’s costly to get rid of it.
Possible optics can be used for computers and communication but:
1 The light has to be created somewhere
2 the light itself is an electromagnetic wave
3 Hi Opal
In NYC stream is pipes from steam (most likely co-gen now) plants to buildings. As stated above you can se high pressure water even compressed air. there is some talk about using microwaves to transmit power (like the space based solar satalite - collect the sun’s rays where there is no clouds then beam it down to a receiving plant).