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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 jmoschner on Thursday April 30 2015, @06:09PM

    by jmoschner (3296) on Thursday April 30 2015, @06:09PM (#177191)

    What I see happening is the building of "neighborhood grids" where you have local power generation, storage, and distribution. Think every home in a subdivision with solar and maybe a windmill or other renewable source or two in the section. All connected to a central power storage device. You bypass the need for utilities if you don't let them in to begin with. I see this kind of thing starting with new suburban development and expanding to new industrial areas before slowly supplanting utilities in already existing areas.

    Screw this sell back the electricity to the utilities nonsense. Use that extra juice to power things that make money for you and your neighborhood. Excess energy can be stored or used for novel community projects, such as local data centers with computing rented out to various companies and/or local cloud storage. Power a cell tower and make deals with the provider for cheaper/free internet for the community in exchange for using the tower and getting power for it. Maybe the excess power is used to provide free car charging stations or to power snow removal equipment.

    The key is to Avoid the outside electrical grid as much as possible. Try not to put or pull power from the grid and instead keep the juice local.

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