I feel like I'm hogging the slow pitches here ... somebody else want to take it?

There were plent of ships built after Titanic.

General electrification and having a grid is far from a faild paradigm. It will probably become even more important as fossil fuels get expensive, it is so far the most efficient way to coordinate the use of manny different power sources for manny different needs.

If you can figure out a better way of building a grid and electricity distribution you can in a resource strapped future "mine" and recycle copper and aluminium from old inefficient circuits to build the new higher efficiency ones. Perhaps it will be 2 kV DC to your doorstep instead of 110 V AC? I dont know.

The local grid where I live would live for some 40 years or so with minimal maintainance but the maintainance isent minimal, its being upgraded on several levels.

Well, seeing as how the Swedes have literally had centuries of practice surviving in what could be called rigorous climatic conditions, somehow I doubt they are likely to share your framework that we are all doomed anyways.

And someone talking about electrical systems in place for what in some cases has to be several generations isn't talking about some 'failed paradigm' - they are just talking practical electrical engineering, a subject which just happens to predate the automobile, and a skill humanity is unlikely to give up at this point. Most of us find the paradigm of light at night pretty comforting, especially those people living in a place with a few hours sunlight per day in the winter.

The Swedes don't have a failed paradigm - they have an industrial society which realistically approaches problems with the sort of hard headed pragmatism you would expect from people who have never had much margin for error. But as the Germans say, the Swedes 'cook with water too' - that is, they are still facing a number of problems, and they do not have magical solutions. They could very well be living in condition familiar to their 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, etc. century ancestors.

The Swedes simply don't have the decadent luxury of talking about failed paradigms at their keyboards connected to a planetary data network, since they are making concrete plans to continue to maintain a level of civilization even as other peoples' paradigms fail around them. (I do think the suburban U.S. 'buy a SUV to commute 2 hours a day to pay the mortgage' paradigm is about to hit a brick wall, though.) And who knows - it just might work in Sweden, since they will actually being doing the hard work of trying to live in the world surrounding them, and not worrying about whether their paradigm might fail. The winter is just a touch too cold to allow a true back to nature movement, after all - they are likely to stick to a paradigm involving insulation, I'll wager. I'll even wager that the Swedes know how to build fairly warm housing to survive in, without any need of fossil fuel at all - after all, they did for centuries. German Fachwerkhäuser, ca. 15th century, are surprising well insulated (they beat a concrete house from 1950 hands down), and fairly easy to maintain over centuries using nothing but local materials and skilled human labor - or is housing also a failed paradigm?

Peak oil is neither the alpha nor the omega - it is just change. Messy, perhaps catastrophic change for some, but less so for those able to see the future clearly and meet it. And yes, the paradigm involving cheap oil is about to die - this is not exactly unknown to large number of people living in places like Sweden or Germany - but speaking broadly, those people are REALLY worried about climate change, not whether the price of gas is 3 euros a liter. The Greens in Germany wanted to make it 2.50 euro a liter in the late 1990s, by the way (though tricky to compare, call it 10 dollars a gallon)- obviously, their paradigm of expensive gas leading to conservation and alternatives was just another example of failure, since peak oil is coming. As if the German Greens hadn't heard that, sometime around their college days.

I think the Swedes also had a clue about this peak oil thing, sometime in the 1970s.

Calm down, the "decades" seemed to refer to hybrid/EV battery standardization. Fortunately, vehicles can be built without such standardization - Toyota's been building them for some time. After all, the user accessories are most in need of standards, and user accessories don't, and need not, run at the same voltage as the motor. So you can have 12V for the radio, your notebook computer, and so on, regardless of the battery and other system voltages. The rest is merely a matter of convenience for the manufacturer, who has already taken care of it.

Increasing oil prices will drive hybrid and electric vehicles in any scenario except for Mad Max doom, so one might as well get over that. People will not go back to stoop labor, walking, and peasant existence - if that's the issue - without a major, violent, revolutionary fight. And in any case there are too many people for that to work any more. And let's face it, many if not most - even, these days, in the less developed countries - are in no physical condition to live in some previous century. So if Mad Max ever comes, all bets are off and these discussions simply will not matter...

See this is why I'm glad I let you guys go first.  Very substantive comments.  I would have gone with the shallower observation that the opening declaration was not very strong, falling back from "decades" to "infinity" in two lines:

We don't have decades.

Even if we did, we don't have infinity.

LOL, we don't have infinity, what will we do?

Second, I think decades are the correct timescale for energy transitions.  Projects take decades to come on-line, and reserves take decades to run their course.

I'm not a cornucopian though, we should be listening to what those projects are doing so that we can start any decade-long transitions we need to make.  You know, as stated in the Hersch report.

The insulation of 12v systems is more than enough for 42v use. 42v is viewed as a logical voltage because that's the voltage of electric hi-los. The battery, controller, and motor production lines already exist and can be duplicated without big engineering costs.