Business Model

Like the old "Online vs. Bricks and Mortar" decision, another false dichotomy that people seem to get stuck on is that you either have to be "off-grid" or "on-grid". If you are on-grid, then any excess energy you produce with solar or wind should be sent back into the grid for other people to use, right? OK. But if solar technology is so expensive, then how and why is anyone actually producing an excess? Who's buying that excess, and at what fair price? These aren't your standard coal-fired Kilowatt-Hours, you know: these would be clean, green, low-carbon-footprint, locally-made, handcrafted Kilowatt-Hours.

OK, now what if someone paid up-front for and supported a solar installation on your house, and you just received an electricity bill for those clean, green, Kilowatt-Hours. Wouldn't the payments to the solar-based company eventually be at least somewhat offset by the savings from your grid-based company bill? You might now have 2 bills, but depending on the size of the solarNode, the total amount spent on electricity would hopefully be close to what you already paid out each month.

The difference is that now, a larger percent of the power you consume is generated from sustainable energy - that's certainly an improvement. Plus, if it rained one day, you'd still have your dependable grid power. And if there were a blackout of any kind, well you might even have some electricity for a few hours from the solar system: that's also an improvement in reliability. Nobody can quantify exactly how much money power outages cost the business community, but let's just say: A LOT*. Companies come and put satelite dishes on your house, and then send you a bill for network services rendered - why not some solar panels?

* Current estimates for the costs of business interruption are a slightly less quantitative cost of a blackout, but a study conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2005 estimated that the annual cost of brownouts and blackouts is $80B USD in the United States alone (source)