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 sigma on Thursday April 30 2015, @01:00AM
What I don't understand is the distributed nature and why is no one building vast solar plants on former dairy farms or whatever?
Some are, though as it turns out, it's more efficient to float them on reservoirs instead. You get better cooling of the panels for greater efficiency, less evaporation from the reservoir and a few other benefits besides.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-29/solar-power-plant-at-jamestown-wastewater-site/6431872 [abc.net.au]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @03:37AM
California Wants To Make It Easier To Cover Old Mines With Renewable Energy [thinkprogress.org]
With all the activity underground, all that above-ground area has just been idle.
There are still lots of ways to be discovered to turn "waste" and "idle" stuff into deliverables.
-- gewg_