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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 Gravis on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:49PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:49PM (#176875)

    The overhead of building and maintaining a grid makes having a grid for a few folks or for occasional unfavorable conditions way, _way_ _WAY_ too expensive.

    you have made the mistake of assuming i meant the entire grid would remain intact as it is today. strip out all neighborhoods and bury the cables and suddenly you have a limited region that has a highly reliable grid.

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