Distributed but Cooperative

Now imagine that you had 2 houses with this solarNode setup: one in San Diego, and one in Sydney, and you kept track of the energy collected, using a very-low-power computer, and a charge controller. It might be a sunny day in SD, and an overcast day in Sydney, so that only one house (the SD house) would report full batteries to power that San Diego desklamp that evening. However, if there were a cooperative agreement between the two houses, that 12 cents of savings from solar electricity generated in San Diego could conceivably be shared between the two houses.

That's right: 6 cents each. And maybe the next day, Sydney was beautifully sunny, and San Diego was grey. Or maybe, they both had sunny days - it's just weather and we can't control it. But, we're pretty sure that it will follow the model of a Markov Chain, according with the predictable seasonal variances (i.e. Summer: hot, direct sunlight, Winter: colder, indirect sunlight) based on the hemisphere of the earth you live on. That helps a little.

Gathering the data streams from these small-sized generators is an interesting project, and crucial to the rollout of the software and network. But a few desklamps aren't going make a difference to the power consumption and energy policy of a significant number of people, let alone the planet's population. However, because we can extrapolate from this data set fairly well, we should have a very powerful bunch of "What-If" scenarios to run.