Hear me out. On Reddit, the #solarpunk channel is decidedly anti-blockchain. To me, this is totally surprising and against the actual ethos of Solarpunk - to integrate technology for a bright, clean future.
Granted, blockchains don’t have much reputation in alternative circles. And for a good reason. A lot is just linked to scams, get-rich-quick dudes, and speculation, apart from energy consumption arguments.
But blockchain at its core is just a distributed database. One that has no central authority, can not be tampered with, cannot be altered, nor taken down if parametrized accordingly.
This allows - as a potential - to democratize access and value creation. Renewable energy is also fundamentally decentralized. Everyone can participate!
Now, with the costs of renewable energy creation (notably solar) shrunk significantly, and the demand for energy consumption rising heavily, if we only think about the booming electric vehicles alone -
What if people could earn money by generating solar energy and selling directly to vehicles, instead of the grid? I believe this could actually boost renewable energy generation over the roof.
Generators would be rewarded with a blockchain token for the energy generated, while consumers would pay for the energy in those tokens. Therefore speculation would be curbed as the tokens are for a real thing, energy, which on top is a stable unit - kWh.
Of course there are a lot of hurdles here - mostly institutional. Usually, energy is controlled by local authorities. They don’t want to allow anyone access to this market.
Then there is the distribution issue. Energy must be transported to the points of consumption, the charging stations. But due to the decentralized nature, this could actually result surprisingly cheap, as instead of transporting large distances, more charging stations in neighborhoods could reduce those distances. But still, this would require upfront charging stations and distribution investments.
I am an engineer. A dreamer. More often than not, as many many others, the realities of markets and economies clash with such ideals, thrashing generally good ideas.
But I wonder if such a scheme could made be possible. Anyone having some good suggestions? I mean mainly from the economics side. How to design the scheme, how to make it so that it is interesting to everyone? There are already several solar energy blockchains, but they kinda failed to get traction.
For the more radicals - I also dream of a money-less Solarpunk future, but to date, it seems further away than ever, looking at the right wing surge everywhere. Maybe we can build bridges at least from the technological side. Thank you if you got so far. Happy to respond to critique and questions.
money-less Solarpunk future
Don’t read that channel, but it sounds like another unworkable socialist utopia.
As for the title, current crypto miners love running their operations near hydro power plants - not because ecology, but because economics of such power plants make it really cheap.
Whole thing is a complex matter - there’s really nice coverage by Sabine Hossenfelder
Thaaank you for a different view on things, finally. To be honest, I am myself also a bit a critic of bitcoin - most of the bitcoin green talk is green-wash, after all…However, the thing is that blockchains and cryptocurrencies are still relatively recent science.
And the ONE single thing which moved me to write this post and share my idea, even if it was shattered (I don’t mind if it just not good enough), was one of the phrases in that video: “…SPEED UP THE TRANSITION TO RENEWABLE ENERGY, BECAUSE ENERGY IS MONEY”. That is exactly my thesis, and my whole thinking (now several years!) revolves around how to make it actually real. If renewable energy was literally money, then there would be no inflation, things should work much more stable, because you can’t print energy out of thin air!
So first of all thank you, and if you have more resources around how renewable energy is money, but especially, how to make it literally money (less so about bitcoin though), I’d immensely appreciate!
Renewables are an invisible revolution that everyone seems to be ignoring. I don’t know why, but if you look at the numbers, solar alone grows at staggering rate of ~20-25% EACH YEAR. This is a massive, exponential growth that won’t slow down until some limiting factor kicks in (either resource availability or price of electricity falls down)
Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
This is GLOBAL. This has nothing to do with ecology, I’ve run some rough estimations few years ago - solar is CHEAPER than fossil even in temperate climate. Similar story with the wind power - well managed renewable power plants print money, it’s a good business.
That said, this is about electricity production, fossil fuels are still unmached for transportation and this isn’t going to change any time soon
Successful in accomplishing what?
Precisely my thought. I’ve yet to see an application of block chain that hasn’t already been solved by some other technology.
I can turn this around. I have yet to see some of the characteristics of blockchains being solved by some other technology. You may say it’s irrelevant because they are useless, and I am not going to argue against that. But it’s a technology and as such has potential. Maybe not today, maybe never. It’s like Solarpunk. We don’t know if it will ever be real.
Sure, if blockchain was created first then it would be novel instead of novelty.
So you think cryptos “solve” the same problem as paper money? A distributed open network is just the same as some rich bros printing paper?
Sometime the point is not to solve a new problem but to improve a fundamentally broken “solution”.
So you think cryptos “solve” the same problem as paper money? A distributed open network is just the same as some rich bros printing paper?
No and yes.
Money was created to improve upon the barter system by adding a standard unit of value. Paying salaries no longer needed stores of salarium, the state just prints money to pay for services and taxes it back to prevent the currency from inflating.
The problem that crypto solves is that rich bros don’t like the state monopoly on the creation of money. It’s not an actual problem, they just want a legal means of committing fraud.
Sometime the point is not to solve a new problem but to improve a fundamentally broken “solution”.
How is it an improvement?
Rich bros print the crypto currency with no accountability.
Governments print real money.
FTFY
I am not talking cryptocurrency but blockchains. And governments don’t print real money, they just print money you think is real, because they force you to. And there are crypto currencies which are not printed by rich bros. However, the same way as community currencies like LETS or mutual credit, they have just limited impact. I just say this because the all-round attack “it’s all garbage” simply is not true.
There’s application in responding to requests for information quickly, in a mesh network, perhaps in presence of malactors. For example the medical records of injured US soldiers are stored in and delivered using a block chain solution.
There’s application in a hypothetical currency free from the corruption of governance. For example, an orange President couldn’t print gobs of money during a pandemic, devaluing your currency, then hand that money to corporations.
There’s application in responding to requests for information quickly, in a mesh network, perhaps in presence of malactors.
Online databases already exist and have been handling requests for information quickly for longer than there has been an internet, and always in the presence of bad actors. What problem is there, specifically, that the blockchain would solve?
For example the medical records of injured US soldiers are stored in and delivered using a block chain solution.
No they arent, the DoD did a study that said it might be useful for that purpose if they can solve the challenges with scaling, interoperability, and integration with legacy services.
There’s application in a hypothetical currency free from the corruption of governance. For example, an orange President couldn’t print gobs of money during a pandemic, devaluing your currency, then hand that money to corporations.
No there isn’t. Unregulated currencies are still subject to corrupt governance, the only difference being that the governance isn’t nominally accountable to the electorate. Literally nothing has stopped Elon from printing scam tokens for his pump and dump schemes and keeping the extracted value for himself.
This is what happens to IT professionals when the centralization of textbook design is no longer appropriate the situations. All they’ve got is a hammer. So, everything’s a nail, even if it means lying.
Bitcoin is the only inflation resistant currency I know of.
It’s not a very useful currency if deflation is making people hoard it…
The current situation, where those closest to the issueing party of new currency reap the biggest reward, also sounds not very usefull. Therefore I do applaud alternatives, be they not perfect.
What do you mean, “alternatives”? This sounds like a distinction without a difference.
A little inflation is a good thing. The deflationary cycle is awful.
In allowing people generating solar energy to be fairly rewarded. Schemes today are at the mercy of the utility companies. Basically, to incentivize people to generate more solar energy than is already happening. Think of roofs.
I realize this is only meaningful if for some (I guess economic) reason they get more through that than through selling to the grid.
The blockchain solves one problem: trust. Do we really have that problem in normal energy markets?
People who buy and sell energy would need to trust each other and the middle man in between them. If they have trust issues, using a blockchain could make sense. As far as I can tell, the current system doesn’t suffer from a lack of trust, so what would the blockchain do in this case?
I actually have to disagree with the notion that blockchain (meaning distributed public ledger blockchain for these purposes) solves the trust problem. I’ve yet to see an example where this is actually true.
What public ledger blockchains do is move trust to somewhere off-chain. Consider a common example that’s used by advocates; tracking a banana from source to sale. The blockchain is supposed to create a completely untamperable record that proves the banana in your hands was ethically sourced. But in order for that to actually work, there has to be some way to prove that the banana in your hands corresponds to the record on the chain. And that proof can only come from human verification at each step of the process. So the trust is still there, it’s just in the humans verifying the accuracy of the records rather than in the records themselves. Which is basically how the current system works.
And you’ll find this same problem with basically any and every application of public ledger blockchains as a solution to problems of trust. In the vast majority of cases, sooner or later these trustless, decentralized systems will ultimately defer to trust in a central authority. How do you know your Bored Ape NFT is the real one, and not a copy minted by someone else on the same chain against the same image? You check it with BAYC through OpenSea or whatever platform they’re using. Ethereum has been forked multiple times. How do we know the current “Ethereum” is the true and real version of the ledger? Because the Ethereum Foundation says so.
These systems only solve trust in the same way that sweeping all your trash under the rug “solves” cleaning your apartment.
How would this generated electricity be transferred to the purchaser? So I generate 1 kW of power and get one of these tokens. I put that token up for purchase. Somebody buys that token entitling them to 1 kW. Now how does that 1 kW go from me to them? If the answer is the power company, now you need to rope them into this scheme and I’m not seeing any reason at all why they would do that.
So we should waste perfeclty good electricity to mine some blackchain … for what reward? Some meme currency?
There’s no mining. Only a few blockchains require mining today. The energy generation IS the mining. Every kwh which has been generated would just issue a token. Sorry if that sounds mumbo jumbo, but these are actually blockchain technology characteristics.
I’m failing to understand what problem the blockchain would solve that isn’t already solved more efficiently by a regular database…
Not all blockchains work via mining
This sounds like a solution looking for a problem. We know how to build green infrastructure. Many countries have done it. China has shown how it’s done, many other countries have done a lot too, albeit using Chinese inputs.
Also if your solution does not allow for debt, it will be unnecessarily slow in the rate of growth. Building green infrastructure is a great example for positive use of debt.
Because 99% of the time, the simplest solution is the best one, and the simplest solution never involves blockchain in any capacity. In this case, the simplest solution involves money. Currency exists for a reason, whether you like it or not.
Also, for real-world use, not being able to alter information in the system is a bug, not a feature, because it prevents the correction of mistakes. And there will always be mistakes, because humans.
Here’s an idea. How about instead of paying money to buy a token that you then buy electricity with you just… Buy electricity. You can have a distrubuted system without the silly tokens that’s how stuff like torrents work. Or better idea go through some sort of central (maybe government!!) agency which has enough power to enforce people are fairly paid for the power they sell to what I’m going to call “the grid”.
Anyway fun fact my Grandpa, almost 2 decades ago plonked some solar panels on his barn and was able to sell the extra power to their utility provider. They lived so far out into the boonies that their neighbors literally kept and sold cows for a living so I’d like to assume pretty much anybody can do the same.
Generators would be rewarded with a blockchain token for the energy generated, while consumers would pay for the energy in those tokens.
Any electricity market should take into account that production and consumption should be balanced at all times.
If I produce today, but there’s not enough consumption of electricity, should I be rewarded with a token?
If I want to consume tonight, spend the token I bought, but there’s not enough production, what’s the token for?
In other words: such a token assumes infinite storage of electricity, a kWh today is the same as a kWh tonight. This doesn’t reflect reality.
I believe utilities have to pay for excess solar power your panels generate.
So this whole thing is kind of already done with dollars as the token.
Consumer level maybe, depends on the contract between you and your utility provider. Wholesale it’s a different price every quarter hour (at least here in EU), with most power traded as future contracts (so the generating parties know in advance how much to produce).
I assumed OP was taking about the consumer level.
In either case, it seems like blockchain would be an extra layer of complication on something that already exists with no real benefit.
Yes but you are at the mercy of utility companies, who are often very restrictive. You don’t get as much as you would get on the market, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to resell.
What market? I don’t have any way of letting my next door neighbor use the power I generate and not letting my neighbor across the street use it so there still needs to be some sort of middleman/distributor.
Without the utility how would I connect to a grid to sell to others? Who would pay for that and manage it?
I mean they can be priced differently based on time, just like real world electricity prices.
Then I buy the tokens when they’re cheap, hold on to them, and spend them later when they’re expensive?
This sounds like money, except harder. And every time there is a transaction, it takes place on an infrastructure that isn’t free, so there is a necessary cost involved. It seems like this would make it require more effort, have more (breakable) moving parts, and be less efficient than just using money.
In any case you’ll end up with a futures market for energy trading, to coordinate the balance between production and consumption.
I just highlighted the problem of 1kWh = 1 “super duper solar coin”.
But yes, that market can be denominated in whatever way you want. Traditional currency is the status quo.
Blockchain currencies have been part of the status quo for almost 15 years now…
11 years ago the biggest bitcoin exchange in the world was a Magic: The Gathering web forum. This was just before said forum shut down and lost ~850,000 Bitcoins.
I mean the amount of token you get can depend on the current electricity supply.
How does the production side work? I’ve produced monday through saturday, and want to consume on sunday. Do I gain tokens, monday through friday, proportional to the expected production on sunday?
I honestly have no idea. I didn’t think of this. Just was replying to your original criticism with a possible fix.
You should put more thought into this, because without a proof method that relies directly on the amount of power produced then you’re just hoping that people aren’t minting tokens for free.
Good points. I thought to yes, reward every kwh generated. I am not sure how the not-enough-consumption is a severe issue. Is it one at all (given the amounts people would be able to generate in the first place), can it be stored, in batteries or even own vehicles…
The not-enough-production is different, every used token would be destroyed, hence there can’t be more tokens than production. I think…
It’s a big problem, it drives up grid frequency, then starts to destroy devices, start fires, … In current markets, the price of electricity even goes negative at certain times (so you get paid to consume).
It can be stored only in small amounts. The total world amount of batteries can supply germany’s consumption for about one day.
hence there can’t be more tokens than production. I think…
For example: I produced monday through saturday and have X coins. I want to consume on sunday, but there are no producers.
But blockchain at its core is just a distributed database. One that has no central authority, can not be tampered with, cannot be altered, nor taken down if parametrized accordingly.<<
I want you to think about the fact that there is no central authority. That means if it is attacked, nobody can lock it down and rebuff the attack. You’re talking about running a piece of infrastructure using a distributed database. It’s one thing to allow people who have been vetted (so no, not everyone) to feed energy from an renewable source into the grid. It’s completely different to run the entire infrastructure off this idea.
You’d have to build a second grid for the purposes of what amounts to a solar bank coop. Because there’s no way the government would let you hook up to theirs free and clear.
What you’re talking about would need to be regulated. It would need to be beholden to a centralized agency or government entity (local or federal). It would need some form of monetary compensation which means it’s going to be taxed in some way etc.
That’s why you can’t just hook up a connection to the grid and build a solar panel. That’s why you have to have a pre-existing paid connection to the grid. To protect the infrastructure you’re connecting to.
To do otherwise would provide a vector for attack to the existing power grid and the government already has enough problems with that.
Of course solarpunk is anti-blockchain. The unnecessary and wasteful energy use is the antithesis of everything that solarpunk is. Blockchain is very much a cyberpunk technology.
You too are conflating blockchains with cryptocurrencies using proof-of-work. This is simply not what blockchains are.
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You are massively glossing over the energy cost of running any block chain in comparison to traditional database solutions, driving the majority of ASICs to be warehoused in locations with hyper subsidized coal power. The block chain is a solution with awful externalities in search of a problem that’s mostly solved.
Modern blockchains like Ethereum don’t use ASICs and don’t consume any more energy than a normal database would. They use proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work.
Traditional database solutions often don’t consume less, because they are centralized and need to account for all the load. Hence they are fat, difficult to maintain and scale, need backup, and run in energy sucking datacenters where you don’t have control.
Not even speaking of the data. Subject to hacking, manipulation, gated control, data loss, and a myriad of other problems.
Granted, MOST “problems” being thrown blockchains at are non-issues and just a hype hammer looking for nails, but there are genuine use cases where blockchains DOES solve important issues.
I’m sorry but this is absolute nonsense.
A reasonable energy cost for a single transaction on a modern database is about 0.1J. Even factoring in redudancy and backups, if we’re incredibly generous to your argument and multiply that cost by ten, that puts us at 1J. In fact, I’ll be ludicrously generous, I’ll multiply by 100, so 10J per transaction. That’s an absolutely insane cost, but we’ll imagine that we’re doing this as inefficiently as it is humanly possible to do.
The cost per transaction of Bitcoin sits at around 1,000,000,000J per transaction. Yes, 1 billion joules per transaction. To claim that these are comparable energy costs is like me claiming to be as rich as Elon Musk. Even looking at something like Ethereum, you’re still at about 1,000 joules per transaction. Stacked up against our hilariously overestimated energy costs for our traditional database, you’re still 100 times over.
(Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x)
Also, you can’t just blindly ascribe the energy cost of “everything else in the same datacentre” to a standard database driven solution and act as if that’s a reasonable comparison. That would be like me adding the total energy cost of every single building where a validator node for your blockchain is running, even if it’s just someone’s laptop sitting in the corner of a forty story office.
Look, I came into this thread to seriously engage your question, but I cannot let an obvious falsehood like this slide by unchallenged. It is such a gross distortion of the truth that I’m actually struggling to decide if you really believe this, or if you’re straight up trolling.
The obvious falsehood is dismissing each blockchain by using bitcoin as a reference. I am NOT talking about bitcoin-style Proof-Of-Work transactions whatsoever. Also, the article you mention is from 2020, where Ethereum was also running Proof-Of-Work, like bitcoin. It doesn’t anymore. I don’t dispute that bitcoin uses incomparable amounts of energy. If you can’t see what I am talking about then thanks for engaging but let’s not converse any longer.
I addressed all of this in this other reply: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/15924074
Basically, handwaving at “Ethereum is proof of stake now” just isn’t good enough. The difference in scale of power consumption between public ledger blockchains and traditional databases are so vast that even the most optimistic models for reducing their inefficiencies still only get you to “pretty bad” at best.
Your answer isn’t good enough either. Aren’t you forgetting application servers, web servers, load balancers, Cloudflare, firewalls and all that stuff which allow a database to just use 0.1J? Because if we are talking VISA and banking scale of transactions that’s what it takes.
Besides, it’s just missing the point. Traditional databases are good and best at what they do - address traditional problems. Blockchains address different problems, so comparing them for completely different use cases won’t work. You can compare MySQL vs Oracle vs PostgreSQL that way.
Your answer isn’t good enough either. Aren’t you forgetting application servers, web servers, load balancers, Cloudflare, firewalls and all that stuff which allow a database to just use 0.1J? Because if we are talking VISA and banking scale of transactions that’s what it takes.
I’m not “forgetting” those things, because they’re simply not relevant to what’s being discussed. A web server doesn’t “allow” a traditional database to use any more or less power. A web server is a web server. A firewall is a firewall. They’re not in any meaningful way connected to the transaction layer that we’re discussing. Blockchain validator nodes also sit behind firewalls, if the people running them know what they’re doing.
Besides, it’s just missing the point. Traditional databases are good and best at what they do - address traditional problems. Blockchains address different problems, so comparing them for completely different use cases won’t work. You can compare MySQL vs Oracle vs PostgreSQL that way.
Again, this is just a handwave.
If your argument is “Public ledger blockchains can be just as efficient as traditional databases”, which is the argument you previously presented, you need to actually demonstrate that.
If your argument is “It doesn’t matter if public ledger blockchains are less efficient, that inefficiency is worth it for the unique benefits they provide” then, first off, why did you make the other argument originally, and second, what have you done to actually show that only a public ledger blockchain can solve the problem you’re describing?
If your argument is “Public ledger blockchains can be just as efficient as traditional databases”
That was never my argument. If you read carefully, there were other arguments I made in context. I just wanted to put it into perspective. Everything uses energy, and comparing things in tech is often very complex because it depends on a zillion factors.
In a blockchain, to make a transaction you need the node and that’s it. In traditional client server model, a database on its own rarely does the job, especially if you talk transactions and banking. Hence why web servers and all the other layers very well account and are relevant to store a transaction, otherwise it just doesn’t happen. I know because I have done this for a living.
what have you done to actually show that only a public ledger blockchain can solve the problem you’re describing?
What have you done to show it does not? You are only arguing about energy. To date I have yet to see an application where I can send money in sub-seconds to a person in Venezuela which has trouble accessing international markets and censorship by the government. Or creating a tamper-proof land registry which can’t be altered by the government or a rich guy in some developing country. Or a database which can’t be censored, or shut down by a government or some powerful dude. An application which allowed anyone to create money (even if it’s too often misused). Mind you, I am not saying blockchain is good for everything nor that it is the best thing ever invented nor that it does not have problems. Any tech does.
I am sure you will find ways to argue against this, because when someone’s mind is made up there’s little space, but I am not here to convince you, I just stand my ground and make my case. Have a nice evening.
I love when anti-crypto ideologues talk about bitcoin like it’s the only option. It’s 2024. Maybe if you didn’t spend the past 15 years mindlessly hating, you might understand there are better options now.
From your own outdated article:
the energy consumption of PoS blockchains is several orders of magnitude lower than that of PoW. It is primarily for this reason that the community of the cryptocurrency with the currently second-highest market capitalization, Ethereum,
is trying to switchswitched from PoW to PoS. Other cryptocurrencies, such as EOS, Tezos, and TRON – all of which feature in the Top 20 cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization – are already successfully using PoS.The most rosily optimistic estimates of proof of stake’s reduction in Ethereum’s energy costs (that I’ve seen) put it at a 2000x reduction. That means that in theory, if all of those gains were realised, and if we start with the numbers I previously cited, Ethereum might hit the same energy cost per transaction as a pretty inefficient traditional database setup.
Except that transaction rates are fixed in public ledger distributed blockchain systems (because every validator node has to have time to clock in with their results), so as the network scales up the cost per transaction also scales up. I’m actually doing Ethereum a favour by using old numbers there, because it’s final cost per transaction prior to the proof of stake switch was certainly much higher than it was at the time of that snapshot.
Traditional databases scale in a way where the economy of scale works for you rather than against you. The bigger you get, the lower your cost per transaction even as your total costs increase. Blockchains anti-scale; the cost per transaction goes up as the network gets bigger.
They still use far less, bitcoin manages like 10 transactions per second and consumes a staggering amount of power. A normal database running on something using a few watts could handle 10 database updates per second.
Yeah bitcoin is obviously not going to look well there. However, that’s taking one example and apply to everything, which is inaccurate. Like taking a massive Hummer and take its consumption for every (gas) car in existence.
The blockchain I am talking about wouldn’t have such power consumption because it doesn’t use mining. I have made allusions of how that works in other comments.
If you aren’t using a proof-of-work blockchain algorithm then why not just use a regular database instead?
Because the point is to have an open network.
If openness is your concern, then distributed ledgers have already been a thing for decades.
The questions are: What problem are you trying to solve with the blockchain and why wouldn’t a non-blockchain distributed database or a regular database with appropriate access controls be a better solution?
A “database with appropriate access control” is a completely different use case, not appropriate at all for communal and open, transparent use. You need to have admins, you probably need some management organization altogether, admins can change stuff and it’s difficult to prove they didn’t, and a lot more issues.
However, "What problem are you trying to solve with the blockchain " is the fundamental question which needs to have an answer. I (and others) gave a lot of answers spread over all replies. At the core: no authority in control, complete transparency, unchangeable, decentralized (just like a renewable energy grid should be), everyone can participate.
A good idea does not need to convince, so if these arguments don’t answer the question, either it needs better explaining or it is not that good.
You very much gloss over the whole “distribution” part. That is one of the main three segments of an electric grid (generation, transmission, distribution). Practical Engineering has some great content about how the grid works and addresses some of the problems renewables face in certain aspects iirc. I recommend giving it a watch or at least a background listen. His first video that is a good place to start, and the “which power plant does my electricity come from” with the lake analogy is also a good intro.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTZM4MrZKfW-ftqKGSbO-DwDiOGqNmq53
Having a DER system is great and all because the transmission system doesn’t have to be as highly loaded (thus increasing the total load a system can withstand), but you still need to be pretty connected for something like this to work - and like others have pointed out, that’s going to mean building a parallel grid (which the energy regulators won’t like if you get too big) or hooking into the existing grid (which probably already has DER management baked into the system if you contact your local power company).
The grid works because it’s big. That’s a feature, not a bug. And because we have AC not DC on the wire, any energized and connected generator has to be in dead lockstep with the grid frequency or else your hardware is going to become a load, make expensive noises, emit magic smoke, or some combination thereof.
One major edge case you have is night charging of EVs. Let’s say I’m a 9-5 office worker with a standard parking lot at my workplace. I’m just a keyboard monkey doing whatever, so I’m not a decision maker as to what goes in the parking lot infrastructure wise, so I’m at the mercy of whatever Facilities is doing, and gods know what that is. But I have a nice brand new EV, and I want to charge it. When I drive home after DST ends, it’s dark outside. There’s no solar to charge my car. Some renewables (like wind and hydro) work at night, but solar doesn’t. I’d need to charge an auxillary power storage system during the day, and then transfer that to my EV battery at night. That’s more complexity.
Power storage of any kind of generation is a huge issue with many different solutions, and not all of them are batteries. And nothing is a perfect system, so there’s energy losses whenever we convert from type A to type B of whatever.
Or… I could just hook my EV up to the grid where the cost of my bill per kilowatt hour includes systems and people to manage keeping the system on voltage and on frequency, 24/7/365.25.
Any power produced during that day for a solar system that doesn’t get immediately used needs to be stored (because it HAS to get put somewhere or you literally break the grid or waste it). That energy storage - along with the voltage converters - is going to take up extra cubic footage in your system that won’t be small, and requires regular monitoring and maintenance to stay online. The system you’re proposing is going to create many fragments of the grid in the form of these pop up neighborhood charging stations entirely dependent on what resources are available in less than a mile radius.
Even if you assume that you don’t have to frequency synchronize with the main grid and you’re fully isolated, you run into another big problem: local generation isn’t always perfect. Solar especially is very susceptible to the giant orb in the sky being around, so your local energy storage needs to account for being able to hold enough power for a certain percentage above your worst case cloudy day while maintaining the necessary output to sustain the local EVs depending on it. If you get a 2- or 3- day storm, I hope you have enough energy storage to have low daytime charge rates for 4- to 5- days. In the playlist, there’s also a video talking about using hydroelectric generators in reverse to store energy as physical potential energy in a reservoir as one example of how a grid might store excess energy.
This is one thing the major grids are quite literally engineered and regulated to accomplish: because they are in fact so large, they can just import energy via the market system from somewhere with better weather or is slightly off-peak demand. And when one type of energy becomes less viable for a given weather condition (like solar on a cloudy day) they have a diversified generation portfolio of other sources: renewables like wind and hydro, nuclear energy for big orders, and even grid-scale energy storage system such as flywheels (fast stabilization), pumped water storage, and even giant batteries, and if all those fail, well yes we do still have dinosaurs to burn. (The world’s not perfect yet and we should by all means go for progress, but it will be a long road). And all these sources are already working together to keep the grids on voltage and on frequency, and have physical and managerial infrastructure to keep everything connected and synchronized such that supply and demand are balanced.
My fundamental hope was that with this idea solar energy generation would be boosted by some order of magnitude, and that people and communities would own the infrastructure and not be dependent on any government agency. Solarpunks say a lot that Solarpunk is about communities and people, and for such a vision, I thought that independence (self-reliance?) is a major requirement. However, after reading a lot of very thoughtful responses, like yours, I already came to the conclusion that it won’t work in the way I explained. But I wanted to honor the time you took to respond. I know very well how the electrical grid works, as my primary education was electrical draftsman, so I understand all your points and I agree - although for some of them, there can be solutions - that’s what engineering is about. But as there are fundamental flaws in this design, there’s no point in delving deeper. Thanks!
Currency, the term you are looking for is currency.
The way you exchange value for goods and services without needlessly attaching an energy wasting puzzel game to it is to not do it!
Just have physical or digital currency in USD or some other real world currency that doesn’t require a blockchain and doesn’t have its amount artificially capped by processing power. It’s a dumb idea made by con men to take money from people.
I agree as long as you talk bitcoin. But blockchains are NOT just cryptocurrencies, and not all currencies work as you describe like bitcoin.
BTW, when we have digital USD, say goodbye to your financial freedom. The government can (and will) tax you whenever they want whatever they want for the reasons they want (we need to save the economy, we need to bail out banks, etc.). They can even shut you down completely by closing access to your accounts. Because they will only allow the use of the digital dollar, because they will have full control. A totalitarian regime’s dream.
Lmao yeah sure, conpared to now, where the government sets taxes and you pay it already? That doesn’t sound much different tbh
You can evade taxe today. And the government does not have direct access to your bank account right now. It will with a digital USD, and because everything will have to run through their digital USD, everything is tracked, and you can’t evade anything. Give it a thought, there is a huge difference.
But…they can already do all of that? And nothing is stopping you from having a secret offshore account in a foreign currency, instead of cryptocoins.
No they cannot. You still have cash today, which also allows for anonymous transactions and which you can stash away. If today they’d try grabbing your money from your account, you could just move it away. That wouldn’t be possible anymore without approval, count on that. A digital USD is totally not the same, they’d probably just ban cash. It will be all nightmares becoming real. Not saying here crypto currencies are a panacea and the solution, just warning of the woes of a digital USD.
Besides the fact that you’re using Blockchain to mean Crypto Currency, this is unrealistic and counterproductive in a number of ways.
What if people could earn money by generating solar energy and selling directly to vehicles, instead of the grid?
How? How do you get your rooftop power to a buyer across town, or the other side of the country? Corporations or municipalities still control the grid
Then there is the distribution issue. Energy must be transported to the points of consumption, the charging stations. But due to the decentralized nature, this could actually result surprisingly cheap, as instead of transporting large distances, more charging stations in neighborhoods could reduce those distances. But still, this would require upfront charging stations and distribution investments.
You caught it yourself. Are you proposing an alternative grid? Good luck with that. Putting a charging station on your own property and renting that out via crypto? That’s a massive waste of space, since you’ll now need an additional parking spot for every home
Generators would be rewarded with a blockchain token for the energy generated, while consumers would pay for the energy in those tokens. Therefore speculation would be curbed as the tokens are for a real thing, energy, which on top is a stable unit - kWh.
How do you get tokens, if you consume more than you produce? You buy them with money. So saying it curbs speculation rings hollow. Besides, who rewards these tokens? Contrary to Bitcoin etc. you need physical hardware to confirm the proper amount of energy was transferred, and hardware can be tampered with.
What we need are communal, shared infrastructure and an end to growth. Not more electric cars, and certainly not more individualistic, crypto-capitalist tech fetishism. I don’t mean this as an affront to you, but this whole suggestion runs contrary to all that Solarpunk is about
So the primary reason I wrote this post was not to talk about something I am convinced of as a solution, but exactly for people to drill holes and fire everything they have at it. If I don’t have the answers, it would not work in real life. So first of all tI am grateful to everyone who is chiming in.
There is a fundamental aversion in Solarpunk circles towards blockchains. I don’t want to change that, nor argue against that. The crypto space has earned this aversion all by themselves. There is obvious abuse and misallocation through these concepts.
I am an engineer. I have fought all my life to get a balance between my affinity to tech and the harm we are doing to the planet. But - we can’t just all get back to be farmers, can we? I love Solarpunk because it inspires to get to that balance, where we don’t need all to go back to bare basics, but use technology for a harmonious life with our host planet.
Technology is a big word. Can we demonize technology in general? Is the Internet bad? Are EVs bad? Are solar panels bad (think of what it takes to create them!). I am sure that is not an issue here, or so I hope.
Blockchains. Again, blockchains are just data structures. Fundamentally, numbers linked to other numbers. Yes, they require energy, but so does the entire Internet. You wouldn’t blame the Internet as a whole just because it’s used for capitalist maximalization, much more than blockchains are being used for that? Should we stop using it because big corps make most of their money nowadays through the Internet?
Blockchains are also just tools. Yes, most stuff is anti-thetic to Solarpunk. Notwithstanding, I (and many others) believe it has potential to bring about some change. They are fundamentally a more democratic tool because they lower the barrier to entry. Everyone can participate, and nobody can take that away from you. We can argue about democracy too, as democracy per se is a very abstract concept as well, and there are no absolutes nor silver bullets. Every community of any scale has to work it out for themselves, but it’s blatantly obvious that what we call today Democracy is a farce.
Associating crypto-technology to “crypto-capitalist tech fetishism” exclusively, however, is, excuse my counter-pun here, which I also present without personal affront, not understanding the technology as such. There are donating platforms built with crypto. There are also dedicated crypto-leftist groups, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptoleftists/ or their discord channel. There are bioregional and regenerative finance projects who channel resources to people doing great (solarpunk) stuff on the ground. There are a lot of many more great ideas based on crypto. A lot of them fail to get attraction, a lot fail altogether as a project, a lot are too idealistic, a lot just fall under the radar, and a lot are useless. A lot could be done without blockchains, or not at all.
I was not trying to convince anyone that this solar crypto stuff IS Solarpunk, I only tried to get feedback to the question if it is a feasible project with some beneficial properties, these being for example to communally govern resources, and providing income to people (what if shanty-towns would have their solar roofs. A game changer for them) while further boosting solar energy generation. Frankly after reading some replies it doesn’t look like. I don’t mind if people say it is or not Solarpunk, or all the other (always welcomed) dismissing and rejecting critique. The aim was to try to identify if there is merit in even trying. And it looks there isn’t, purely based on practical and economical criteria, like some you did point out in your reply.
“Communal, shared infrastructure” is an abstract concept as well. There is a tension rarely talked about, and it is if this means we need to go back living in small village-like communities only. It often sounds like that. Is that really the end game? I am not sure. In that case yes, blockchains and a whole lot of other stuff are superfluous. However, I assume most people writing here live in cities, with a romanticized ideal of what it means to live in small close-knit communities, because they never actually had the chance to do that. I have. And I have lived in cities. The population share living in cities is constantly growing. Most city people want to continue living in cities. So what we do? Can “Communal, shared infrastructure without growth” as a concept be applied to all scales? Maybe it can, and blockchains could be a powerful tool to mediate the transition to that, due to their unique characteristics of accountability, transparency and decentralization.
Or maybe not. That’s totally fine.
Here’s the basic problem with this solution as far as I can see: assuming we’re talking about a distributed public ledger blockchain, you haven’t described how the chain is secured.
The existence of systems like “proof of work” and “proof of stake” is based on the need to have some sort of proving mechanism for validator nodes. You have to solve the sibyl problem, or else someone can just run 10,000 copies of the validator software on one computer, submit enough votes for a false record that it overwhelms any competing votes, and thus create their own version of the chain - now authorized as the definitive and true version - where they get free energy for life because they’re so staggeringly wealthy in your new currency.
Distributed public ledgers only work if you insert a real world cost to validation. Basically, something of value must be committed or destroyed in order to authorize a validator node. Otherwise you have to authorize the nodes yourself, and now you’ve just reinserted a central authority.
So what is destroyed or committed to secure your chain? Assuming proof of work, it would be hardware and energy. People would be burning power solving increasingly complex and entirely meaningless math problems in order to be allowed to act as a validator. So now we run into the problem of incentive; why would they do this? In basically every public ledger blockchain that exists, the answer is that they get paid. Newly created tokens are given out to validators as a reward for their work. And, inherently, those tokens must be worth more than the cost of doing that garbage work in order for validators to actually benefit in any way. Without that, the incentives don’t work, and the validator nodes all shut down, destroying your blockchain.
This is why speculation and rampant deflation are inherent to cryptocurrencies; because in order for the validator system to not be overwhelmed by a single bad actor buying a tonne of computer hardware, the complexity of the validation (hence, the cost of the work in spent energy) must scale with the amount of hardware in the network, and that means that the cost of being a validator scales with the amount of hardware in the network. So as your network grows, the value of the token grows, or else the network dies.
But you’ve decided that people will also be rewarded with a token for the actual physical act of generating solar power and feeding it to the grid. And they’ll pay for power with those tokens. So your system is unbalanced. You pay people to generate power with newly created tokens, and then destroy those tokens when they’re spent to buy power. But you, presumably, also pay people to run validator nodes (because how else is your network secured?) using newly generated tokens, so you’re giving out more tokens than the actual amount of generated power in the system. That means you have too many tokens chasing a limited supply of goods.
So now you either have to allow people to overbid for power, creating rampant runaway inflation, or you have to keep the cost per kwh fixed, and create a situation where people go to get power but there’s none in the system, because you’ve got floating, “empty” tokens that don’t actually reflect a unit of power generated. And since you’re paying for power going into the system with these tokens, either way you’re destroying their perceived value and that means you’ve destroyed any incentive to sell power to your network in the first place. They’ll just sell to the grid instead.
And moving to Proof of Stake or Proof of Storage or any other proving mechanism doesn’t solve this problem, because ultimately they all rely on the validator committing something of value. If they don’t, it’s by definition no longer a proving mechanism, because the cost of sibyl attack becomes zero (or close enough to zero as to be meaningless). And if every validator must offer something of value, they must get something of value. Which means you have to generate tokens and give them out to the validators, and you have to ensure that those tokens have a real-world worth that is commensurate to the value that the validators commit.
Yep, real blockchain know-how here. I answered to this partly here I think (if I am linking correctly) https://slrpnk.net/post/17009217/13027204. The real issue there is how would anyone be prevented to register a new private key as a validator. Hard-wiring that into the hardware creates new problems. So I guess this is the argument where it all could fall apart, just technically. Thanks.
So, if I understand your pitch correctly (and, let’s be clear, this is information that needed to be presented right off the bat if you actually wanted to communicate this idea effectively), you’re envisaging a model where you sell some kind of hardware, presumably a complete solar panel kit of some sort, which then acts as a uniquely authorized validator node on your network, while also accounting for each unit of power pushed by that panel. As validator nodes, each panel contains a full copy of the database, and acts to verify new transactions, ensuring the integrity and security of your blockchain.
I’ll allow, for the sake of your argument, that your keys and code are sufficiently secure that you’ve accounted for basically any possible hacking risk. We don’t need to get into that argument. While in practice perfect security is impossible, for now we’ll say that your hypothetical security is “good enough.”
Right off the bat, we run into the following challenge:
- If the device is an all in one, including the panel, your idea is dead from the start, because your target audience wants to install their own panels and then share their excess power, effectively banking it for later. You’re not going to convince them to use this bespoke solution just to take advantage of your charging network concept. Your plan cannot rely on you beating out every other solar panel manufacturer in the world; that is lunacy.
- If the device is distinct from the power source, like some kind of box that you interconnect between the power source and your grid, there’s basically no technical soution I can conceive of that would prevent someone from plugging it into their state / national grid and converting off-peak electricity into solar credits that they then bank for on peak hours.
Its remotely possible that the economics of the whole thing makes the latter option unappealing, but if so, I can’t see it. At best you’ve basically removed the incentive to use solar that the scheme is supposed to offer.
Another technical issue with this approach is that you want these devices to be usable wherever the sun shines, but in order for them to be able to each act as a validator node they have to each contain a full copy of the database, and that means having at least a decent internet connection if this system is ever supposed to scale. That isn’t going to work out at the cabin.
But even supposing those problems are solvable, and supposing that you can solve the problem of how the power gets from the panel to the charging stations without going through the local power company, we’re left with this question: Why blockchain?
You say that you want this to be distributed, public, not under the control of any one entity, but your keys would have to be authorized by a central authority. You would have to be the only producer of these devices to ensure that some unscrupulous individual doesn’t build a box that runs a hundred validators at once, exposing you to sibyl attacks again. You would also have the ability to revoke any key at any time. There would be nothing truly decentralized about this system.
Yeah this is the best critique in all the answers. I was aware of most of these issues, and I hoped that by sharing the idea, ways to improve it and make it viable would emerge. I was thinking that the same way solar energy can be metered and sold today (after all, you can’t lie about having generated energy you haven’t, can you?), the infrastructure issues could be addressed (being the meter the actual node, and possibly as some kind of light node, which wouldn’t have to store the whole chain). The most important goal however was to boost decentralized solar energy generation, and make it profitable to individuals and self-organizing communities, instead of relying on our slow, gating institutions. Think of shanty-towns in the tropics which could suddenly be contributing to a cleaner world while also resulting to be better off (some credit scheme or something would be required for their investment costs, of course). If this idea doesn’t reach those goals, it’s useless.
I still believe blockchains have potential but this is maybe not the best use case. Thanks!
You have to solve the sibyl problem, or else someone can just run 10,000 copies of the validator software on one computer,
That’s solved on Ethereum by requiring you to stake tokens that cost money. You would need an enormous amount of money to afford to spin up 10000 validators.
submit enough votes for a false record that it overwhelms any competing votes
I’m afraid you’re not very familiar with how Ethereum works. 10,000 validators isn’t anywhere near enough to disrupt the system, all you would do is burn your stake and lose all that money if you tried that.
Even if you acquired enough stake to prevent finality - 2/3 of the total stake would be required, costing tens of billions of dollars and taking years to work your way through the entry queue - all you’d do then is cause a huge annoyance to everyone on the system while your tens of billions rapidly burned down to below the threshold and finality resumed again. You wouldn’t be able to insert “fake” transactions.
People have been working on blockchain technology for a long time, these sorts of basic attacks have long ago been accounted for.
Do you also burst into astrophysics conferences and tell people that the sun is a burning ball of gas?
Please read what I wrote again, very carefully, and ask yourself “Am I actually contributing anything new to this person’s understanding of the topic?” Because everything you’re throwing out here is basically baby’s first blockchain, and none of it comes even remotely close to addressing my actual argument, which seems to have been a few steps beyond your grasp of the subject.
Perhaps I’m too tired to understand your meaning here (it’s late), but blockchain isn’t crypto currency. It’s a distributed ledger, and was around long before crypto. It’s not completely immutable either as the hard fork of Ethereum proved.
Blockchain could be used to record energy transactions, but the question is why would you want to? What benefit does it add?
Btw homeowners in parts of Australia are already receiving credits for the excess solar power they generate. There’s no need to manufacture a new system to enable that functionality.
Once again, I’m tired. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood your reasoning.
It’s not an open market though. It’s gated and you are at the mercy of the local authorities, which often are very restrictive and difficult. It’s not even possible everywhere. Plus, you don’t get paid the market price, as they naturally want to maintain their monopoly and want to scoop.the profit of reselling.
While all the maintenance costs are still up to you.
It’s not an open market though. It’s gated and you are at the mercy of the local authorities, which often are very restrictive and difficult.
Utility services are natural monopolies.
Are you proposing that people build a totally independent electrical grid that somehow isn’t regulated by local authorities?
Communal, local infrastructure. Not a grid spanning vast areas, although it could. Look, this might totally not be the way to do it, but essentially to achieve independence we need to break up those monopolies. Otherwise we will always be enslaved to the powers that I thought we wanted to replace. Energy and food independence as well as communal land management I think are fundamental requirements for that - whatever the means, I subscribe. Otherwise I don’t see how a Solarpunk future can be even envisioned.
Blockchains (if used correctly) are good at breaking up such monopolies. But it’s just tech. People need to want and do it. So whatever people say :)
Communal, local infrastructure. Not a grid spanning vast areas, although it could.
Then why does it need a global management system? If it’s all local, why not use a local database and save the expense of distributing it?
Look, this might totally not be the way to do it, but essentially to achieve independence we need to break up those monopolies.
Independence from what?
If you’re talking about independence from having to share electricity services with other people then you can just go off the grid, no blockchain necessary.
If you’re talking about independence from utility providers then you’ve crafted a tautology, as the only way to achieve independence is to be independent.
If you’re talking about independence from for-profit grid service utilities, then making every home an independent participant in the real-time electricity market will only compound the problem.
Otherwise we will always be enslaved to the powers that I thought we wanted to replace.
Those powers would still exist. Replacing the utility-scale grid operators with a local electric homeowners’ association doesn’t solve the problem, it just moves it closer to home. You still have to deal with the cost of building and maintaining the grid, as well as constant negotiation with all providers and consumers to ensure that the grid will remain stable.
Energy and food independence as well as communal land management I think are fundamental requirements for that - whatever the means, I subscribe.
Adding blockchain makes those goals more complicated to achieve for no benefit.
If you want energy and food independence, you can just do that.
Blockchains (if used correctly) are good at breaking up such monopolies. But it’s just tech. People need to want and do it. So whatever people say :)
False. Blockchains, as a feature of Capitalism, create monopolies. If they broke them up, then the tech bros would have already replaced the banking system with them. What actually happened is that the existing banking system started using crypto too, so now most blockchain-based value is held by an extremely small number of obscenely wealthy folks.
That’s incorrect. Blockchains are not a feature of capitalism. Cryptocurrencies (mostly) are. The only reason why they haven’t been able to replace the banking system is that they live in a purely digital realm. What can you do with some digital tokens which you have obtained bypassing the government and powers? Not much. If you want to buy a house, or a car or anything substantial, you have to legalize your earnings, essentially mooting the very thing the “revolutionaries” thought they were doing (bringing down the banking system). So, they moved to do DeFi and other “virtual” stuff (basically a Casino), pretending they never meant to do that.
I still believe blockchains have potential, but I agree with most commentators here, not for the wrong use cases. And my own idea seems to be the wrong use case. Alas, my goal was to increase and incentivize solar energy generation while giving control to people and communities, more than what utility companies allow us to do.
What if people could earn money by generating solar energy and selling directly to vehicles, instead of the grid? I believe this could actually boost renewable energy generation over the roof.
If you’re cutting out the grid, how do you propose getting electricity generated by solar to the EV? In your system do they have to come to my house and plug into my solar array when its sunny to collect their purchase? Or are you expecting the grid to deliver it, but not expect any compensation for grid capacity consumption, transmission and distribution of the electricity?
Generators would be rewarded with a blockchain token for the energy generated, while consumers would pay for the energy in those tokens. Therefore speculation would be curbed as the tokens are for a real thing, energy, which on top is a stable unit - kWh.
I’m a generator. Why would I want a token to buy electricity I already have a surplus of for my EV? How do non-solar EV owners get tokens? Does your system propose non-solar owners buy tokens on the open market with real money (dollars/euros) from solar generators? If I’m spending dollars/euros to buy tokens, why don’t I just use my dollars/euros to buy electricity for my EV instead?
My fundamental hope was that with this idea solar energy generation would be boosted by some order of magnitude, and that people and communities would own the infrastructure and not be dependent on any government agency. Solarpunks say a lot that Solarpunk is about communities and people, and for such a vision, I thought that independence (self-reliance?) is a major requirement. However, after reading a lot of very thoughtful responses, like yours, I already came to the conclusion that it won’t work in the way I explained. But I wanted to honor the time you took to respond.
The idea about the tokens would be that you could go to any community doing this thing, and use them there. They would not be confined to where the energy was generated. You generated in a LA neighborhood but spent somewhere in NYC. Even in Seoul or Kuala Lumpur, because they are kWh and not USD, so there’s that utility. Consumers need to buy anyways, right? Of course the only reason to why they would buy tokens instead of paying in USD is if it would be cheaper, or if it offered some kind of other surplus utility or ease of use - for example if the tokens can also be used to pay your energy bill, or any other good. Which requires that those tokens somehow become widely accepted.
None of these criteria seem to be properties of the design I propose, and various people have already pointed out serious flaws or areas for improvement. So I guess the idea was noble but not so feasible :) Thanks!.
I disagree with your original position, but it appears even that too has evolved. I appreciate you taking the time to reply. Thank you.
