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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...
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday April 29 2015, @10:14PM
Your load sharing idea is most likely outcome. Probably not even bother with storage or reselling. Too many watts, don't use them. Its just getting too dang cheap.
Well, Night happens.
So, I think local-ish storage is key for community solar. If small household battery plants are economic use them. If subdivision size storage is economic, build it that way.
My point is selling back to the grid is probably not worth the cost and the regulation headaches. The technology for doing so house by house seems premature anyway.
Also, it might be time to think of some service that gets large-ish storage battery installations out of Joe Sixpack's hands. Too many chances for "Hold my beer, and watch this" events.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.