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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the rich-energy-mogul dept.

Open Source.com has raised an interesting issue.

With household and municipal scale electricity generation becoming commonplace, it appears that the energy market is about to experience a major technological disruption. Of course, with disruption comes opportunity, and there's already some clear contenders in the field, from Tesla with their cars and batteries, Suntech with their solar panels, to Vestas with their huge turbines.

There's a big caveat with all of this large-scale investment though, and that's contending with the existing centralized power grids and the utilities that manage them. Open source models are a good fit for this new paradigm, with collaboration replacing monopolies and open systems displacing proprietary vendor controls. High quality open source software tools exist already, including the well-supported PowerMatcher suite, but how will this collection of solutions wrest control of the key "last mile" hardware from the hostile and entrenched utilities?

Any suggestions from the SoyLentil team? If we get it right, all of us could become unfeasibly wealthy...

 
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:23PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:23PM (#176838)

    How about a foot of snow followed by a rain storm? Happened where I live, collapsed quite a couple house roofs. I was outside with my roof rake clearing the snow off in the rain, quite annoying although collapsing the house would have been more annoying. I would imagine it would take a lot less to snap a panel.

    How a roof rake in general works around panels is unclear to me. Need to do it in this climate or you'll get ice dams. I suppose I could just panel the unheated garage.

    What I'd really like as a product is something like a pagoda for my back yard holding endless rows of 45 degree angle panels as a shaded roof in the summer. I have enough carpentry skill to get far enough to really F that up. I wonder what kind of brick the planning commission and permit offices would shit were I to actually try to implement this as a "patio shade, also holding solar panels" or some kind of BS like that. I've been wanting to build something like that for many years for my patio, maybe in my infinite spare time I could enlarge the patio and cover it.... cover it with solar panels.

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  • (Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:25PM

    by TrumpetPower! (590) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:25PM (#176867) Homepage

    I can't comment on building codes for places that get accumulations of snow, save to note that that's a truly ancient engineering problem that has very little to do with solar panels.

    My panels are installed according to local codes that required that they be attached to the roof trusses. Nothing short of a tornado is going to get them off the roof, and anything that would puncture them would embed itself in the foundation's concrete slab if it hit a part of the roof not covered by panels.

    I would hope that installations done in different locations similarly take local hazards into account -- earthquakes in California, snow in New England, and so on. I just know that my panels are up to code and a definite improvement to the safety of my home over not having panels...not that the improvements are to any dangers I'm likely to face, but still....

    b&

    b&

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