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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 fritsd on Thursday April 30 2015, @11:01AM
The problem of renewable energy sources is that they are transient and intermittent. So, there is room in a modern electricity grid for a new kind of actor: the "I have a big battery and will smooth out the peaks" utility.
There are various ideas, and you'll have to find someone more knowledgeable to explore their current status, but here are two:
- Sodium-Sulfur battery [wikipedia.org]: unfortunately, the company that tried to get this idea off the ground was TEPCO, which had a rather unfortunate accident a few years ago.
- There was an experiment in Europe to modify frozen meat storage warehouses, so that they would freeze to a colder temperature than necessary (this has no negative effect on the meat) during times of excess electricity production, and then they would be allowed to warm back up to -25°C during times of the day that electricity was expensive. This is a win-win for both the meat warehouse (profiting from fluctuations in electricity price) and for the grid (smoothing out peak demand such as the 3 GW Eastenders tea-kettle break [geek.com]).
I think I read about it on The Oil Drum [theoildrum.com], I know the website is defunct but maybe you can still find useful tips in its old articles, many of which were brilliant to read.