Parallel energy production – solar panels are not rocket science

I started playing with solar energy, see a simple overview of the energy production and storage system in this video I made:

So far, I thought that solar energy was demanding – it needed specialized experts to install it and make it work, complicated technologies that I don’t understand, drilling into walls and so on. But you can start small – and just connect two cables.

If your livelihood depends on your laptop and smartphone functioning, it is a good idea to have a replacement for your power supply if the official distribution network accidentally fails.

More recently I was surprised at how brutally regulated the production and distribution of electricity is (at least in most European countries). Parallel electricity production and storage systems and networks are not so easily doable – in terms of red tape, it’s not difficult to do.

If you have a solar panel and excess energy (for example, stored in a battery), you cannot sell it to your neighbor. I think “microgrids” are the future – in the village, but also in cities, where every house can have a solar panel on the roof. When someone needs to start a power grinder, they can use the surplus from their neighbors, then return it back from their own panel or buy it for money (crypto, or pay-as-you-go micropayments over the lightning network…).

Energy grid as a surveillance system

Electric grid is a surveillance system as well, especially with introduction of smart meters. It is fairly easy to find out when you are at home and what your patterns are. Weed growers and miners found out the hard way. Tax evaders will probably find out too.

What kind of tax evaders? If you pretend you are not physically present somewhere, but you consume energy as a living person. Of course you could always say you are just renting, but then there's income tax from rental.

By analyzing aggregate data of your power consumption, it's sort of the same problem as spectral analysis in chemistry. It's a hard problem, but with similar algorithm, you could find out over time what kind of devices a person uses.

You can become an energy capitalist (and signal that you are an environmentalist too!) and own your production capacity by moving to solar. It's not the cheapest way in most parts of the world, but it is private and you pay the price of energy upfront, fixing future price.

Also, it is a form of option. So in case there are power outages or price spikes in energy production, you earn the upside of that option if you want and charge other peoples' devices.

Conclusion

I think the future of energy is in such microgrids (ideally from renewable sources). Fortunately, I’m not alone who thinks so. If you want to play with it, you can start now.