if you have an existing grid connection and intend to have a good sized solar array, it just makes sense to grid tie and sell solar during the day when electricity is more expensive (you can elect for variable rates with PG&E) and leech grid energy at night when it's cheaper, rather than storing it chemically at a loss.  you can get solar panels under $1/watt if you look around but storage and grid tie inverters are what will wind up costing you unless you can just suck it up on a DC bus when it's available.  i don't have any viable suggestions on how to overturn the whole financial/energy system nor would i research one as an individual, but distributing/democratizing generation and reducing those transmission losses (2/3 of electrical energy produced!!!) is a step in the right direction that we can take independently as individuals while cumulatively reducing the power of PG&E et al.  there is of course intrinsic security value in storing onsite - one way to go about it is to consider all the ways you use energy and see if you can convert it immediately into that format for use later, like making ice during the day to use as coolant at night if you run solar, or vice versa if you run off the grid and want cheaper electricity rates.  personally i have a few old car batteries that i try to keep topped off, with a switchboard to dish out power to 2 cigarette lighter type plugs for experiments.  would like to get the wifi router (~30% of my bill) hooked up but don't have enough storage to keep it running overnight at the moment.  if anyone wants to work on a smart controller for adding solar to the home electrical budget sometime next month, let's set up a time and draft the specs.

the claim that centralized power production is obsolete ignores the existence of factories as we know them.  geothermal, solarthermal, gas turbine, nuclear, hydroelectric, none of these will be reasonably installed in homes.  true, even manufacturing is becoming more decentralized and i intend to help push it along that path, but you really need a certain economy of scale to melt a bucket of metal, control its chemical composition, and form it into long uniform extrusions, etc.  i don't see that need ever completely disappearing.  seems like gas turbines are pretty good for on demand topping off the grid, and new solar thermal cycles can produce at night, so we can really get away from some of the nastier feedstocks but there will always be a role for a grid.  what happens when you top off your batteries completely?  you can suck water out of the air, crack it into hydrogen and oxygen, liquefy it for use as rocket fuel.  you can have earthmoving equipment standing by to sieve rocks for concrete aggregate out of the topsoil.  you can overclock computers for distributed computation projects like SETI@home, or pump water uphill, any number of schemes if you have the need for whatever endproduct.  i have looked into a few of these, in particular condensing atmospheric water with excess solar power, but it also makes sense to just sell your surplus onto a grid until you think of a more pressing need onsite.  it becomes a question of how mature is our energy conversion technology and how close we want to live and work to eachother, or how close we want our electrical loads and generators together

Mar 26, 2013 03:41:49 PM, di.franco@aya.yale.edu wrote:
Production of alternative energy can be and for most reasons probably should be much less centralized, equivalently, smaller-scale, than production of energy mostly is now. (Off-grid, as you mention, but very literally.)

Large-scale up front + large, complex distribution networks is revealed as an obsolete architecture; large scale distribution networks become relatively less important, so even if the answer to your question is no, which it probably isn't given crowdfunding and other disintermediated finance gaining momentum, it's moot, or at least of much less relative importance.

Put another way, when the most important goal is maximum efficiency rather than maximum centralization, large upfront capital investment + large, complex distribution network is stupid; proper accounting of all costs and benefits in a global rather than piecewise local sense reveals this now for agriculture, manufacturing, energy, ...

Even now, buffering between supply and demand is a constraint on grid architecture leading to great economic demand within the current paradigm for distributed storage / production of energy according to someone who came through sudo room whose name escapes me.

This loosely-drafted email brought to you by the slogan, "localize production, virtualize everything else" and the acronym STEMI compression.


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>On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Romy Ilano romy@snowyla.com> wrote:
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Is it possible to create alternative energy distribution networks (biofuels/solar/ wind etc) that replace mainstream petrol and natural gas based energy without a large financial sector? 
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the vc system that funds these alternative energy start-ups piggy backs off the investment banks, etc. and big private equity and institutional investment funds. vcs are like a fly on the @ss of a financial hippo.



>I haven't heard people discuss off-grid that much in the tech talks I've been to( which are excellent). Is there a conversation here that would show how off grid is a viable alternative, even if it's not a big money solution?
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>On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 1:56 PM,  hol@gaskill.com> wrote:
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>this talk about imports and exports always reminds me of energy flow
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compare 2011
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https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2012/Oct/images/25306_LLNLUSEnergy2011650.jpg
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with 2002
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http://www.hubbertpeak.com/us/images/us_energyflow2002.jpg
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fascinating
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