Overview

The idea, which first occured to me in 2002, was filed in a provisional patent by Piperpat patent attorneys in August of 2006. This business method is now public, with solarNetwork.net being one of hopefully many implementations. What's exciting right now is that rapid advancements in solar and battery technology are being made. Additionally, private and public capital markets have responded enthusiastically to the potential that these new technologies have exposed. But until some political will is shown by goverments on a larger scale (yawn...), it is probably once again up to individuals to make a move. Could a group of "amateurs" assemble a modern alternative energy company? Luckily, now all the tools are at our disposal, and the first phase is just a matter of building.

Development Schedule: Phases

I see the project happening in 4 phases:

solarNode and solarServer baseline development

1*

There is still a great amount of development and testing to be done to get one solarNode operational, and talking to the central solarServer. While the hardware and software spec is still under development, it has to be flexible enough to include a number of charge controllers in the near future. None of the software is that hard to do, but open source makes sense for the idea, make the project inclusive, and reduces any barriers that might arise going forward.

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SolarNode membership and charge controller and battery monitor driver development

2

Having a working setup of power generation and usage, along with the data collection for one solarNode is fine but nothing's going to happen until more people are involved. That means that various pieces of hardware need to be included in the specification. These are what I'm currently calling drivers - the logical interface between the charge controller and the computer. While panels, batteries, switches, wiring, and inverters differ in their technical details, their function within the system is fairly generic. The key pieces of hardware that needs to be catered to, I believe, is the charge controller and battery monitor, of which there are many brands, with many different data interfaces. Some people would say, why don't you get one working and just use that one, but the reality is that the system must be inclusive in order to have many participants. The logical layer that abstracts the data interfaces of many brands and models of charge controller will be a slight technical challenge, but one perfectly suited to an open source community. And I do believe it's mostly a matter of handling serial/usb port calls in different sequences. I mean look: it's just not that hard. And while more "drivers" are being completed, existing drivers will continue be a source of data. Now, hmm, does anyone know anything about, uh....Modbus?

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Data Collection and Analysis

3

Having many members now submitting their solar data, from either small nodes or very large nodes, we will have a database of electricity generation data that will be fit for extrapolation and analysis. I think some basic reports would be good to generate, but mostly the data to start will be coming from rather small solarNodes (small number of panels, small battery capacity) where the grid-bill offset isn't even detectable. But it's the accurate extrapolation of this data that will be interesting - if you did expand that panel array with next year's technology, how would it have fared? What if you not only included PV array-based solarNodes but small micro-turbine windpower generators? What about including small scale micro-hydro? What model of cost sharing is both equitable, market driven and encouraging of cooperative interdependence? There are lots of scenarios to run through, but the undeniable fact will be - unless it simply doesn't work - a lot of kilowatt hours were generated, and more importantly, a lot of services were consumed, while CO2 emmissions were reduced.

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Corporation/Foundation founding and financing

4

Now we may never get to this stage, to be honest. The results of our experiment up to this point may tell us that solar technology is improving far too slowly to make this viable. Global warming may indeed turn out to be a big hoax by scientists simply motivated by funding dollars, and perpetuated by a left-wing media elite. Coal becomes the new "chic" energy source, and the results from carbon sequestration will be so profoundly successful, the whole problem becomes "buried". Say nanotechologists abandon their research, and the prices of oil and natural gas plummet with the discovery of colossally huge new fields in "friendly" locations globally, leaving solar equipment prices higher and drier and more irrelevant than ever.

Personally, I think these scenarios are unlikely to unfold in the years ahead, but whether or not they do, the possibility for many things to go awry is there. That is, it's just an experiment. But, I think it's a fun one at that - so let's stipulate for a second: that it works. Here's the scenario: We've built out the basic software, got it work with several if not dozens of charge controllers, some even with the manufacturers' blessing. Lots of solarNodes are submitting data by the minute, and other solarNetwork.net members are slicing and dicing that data. Meanwhile, falling PV panel and battery prices mean that a solarNode is are getting cheaper and more powerful by the month. Citizens around the world, without prompting from anyone, are building their own solarNodes, and taking responsibility for 1-40% of their electricity consumption, right from their own rooftops. Important to note here: there would be no replacement of the existing "grid", just some displacement of part of your grid usage.

With energy efficient devices becoming increasingly common, it's also turning out that you don't actually need ALL that power that you once thought you did. The once teeny but increasing numerator (solar generation) is looking a lot better when compared with the now much smaller (efficient and monitored consumption) denominator. And with owning rather than renting energy becoming a trend, viral marketing encouraging people to join, the data-streams increase geometrically. We extrapolate the data using the prices of the hottest new equipment coming out next year and it seems like there's a small but niche market of dependable customers who would actually PAY for this green, independent, internet-enabled electricity service. Enter: the legal entity. How does a company negotiate with an open-source community? Well, it has been done, but let's not count our penguins just yet. In short, the idea that a company could sell sustainably created electricity and service customers worldwide should interest investors (clearly some of this idea is already being done) - but we're an infinite number of IFs away even from that discussion.

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* STATUS: Currently the project is in Phase 1