With you on decarbonised, can at least get behind digitised, but why decentralized? Two significant functions of the electrical utility business are clear natural monopolies, transmission and distribution. Markets and competition on the generation side have proven to be very difficult to manage, e.g. in California with Enron and the recent Texas ice storms.<p>It seems like a situation where there is a clear central authority, and one that in many places historically has been government-owned and at least in theory democratically accountable to the people. So why not let the utility company manage storage, transfers between different houses, etc.? What's the upside of a bunch of connected microgrids?
For anyone wanting to read more about the need for and benefits of electrifying everything (the ones in the home being cars, clothes dryers, stove/oven, heating/cooling, water heaters, etc) check out <a href="https://rewiringamerica.org" rel="nofollow">https://rewiringamerica.org</a><p>They have a lot of technical details of how much carbon it would reduce, how many jobs it would create, how much it will cost, and how to do it on the time-scale necessary to stay below 2 degrees warming. It's really inspiring.
Just a bunch of buzzwords. Is there any estimation what is the overhead to ensure reliable continuous electricity supply in microgrid? In some places even a week-worth amount of energy storage is required, that means oversized batteries or fossil fuel backup generator anyway. As compared to grid that has many sources in many places and can more easily use them effectively.
Good article. But I think there needs to be something like a sustainable fuel also because using batteries for long-term storage does not seem feasible.<p>So things like oil from algae, digesters for methane, ammonia, and ethanol are all interesting. Maybe even just buried pressurized hydrogen. Maybe potential kinetic even.
> It needs to supports, out of the box, cloud connected or wifi enabled (wireless lan connected) devices.
When the physical layer of devices in the home don’t offer Wireless connectivity, hardware communication modules needs to be adopted to bridge the existing connectivity.<p>The protocol the OP wishes for exists already, it is called PJON: <a href="https://github.com/gioblu/PJON" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gioblu/PJON</a>
Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into regenerative agriculture. (This is different from large-scale industrial ethanol production.)<p>You grow e.g. sugar beets, convert them to alcohol and some byproducts (that go back into the farm as feed and fertilizer), use the alcohol in generators and vehicles. You're operating within your solar budget, the atoms that make up the alcohol came from water and air so all your nutrients and trace minerals stay on the farm and the fuel is carbon-neutral (all the carbon released when you burn the fuel originally came from the air in the form of carbon dioxide, not from underground fossilized carbon), and it can be done with simple off-the-shelf tech that has been around for literally thousands of years. You don't have to scrap your ICE cars and trucks, you can modify them to work with alcohol as fuel (some cars it's a software mod!) and the exhaust is not poisonous.<p>- - - -<p>Here's a video of Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". <a href="https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk</a>
The presentation is IMO very interesting, and the conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( <a href="https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283</a> )<p>We use too much power. And when I say "we" I mean mostly the USA but the rest of the world is ramping up rapidly. Unless there's a miracle (like clean fusion generators that kids can make in the garage out of chicken wire, tires, and ducktape) the only physically realistic way to de-carbonize fast enough to really matter is a drastic reduction in power use.<p>This is possible, and we can (I believe) maintain our quality of life, but we have to start now and work quickly.<p>The good news about that is that our systems are enormously wasteful so there is a lot of "low-hanging fruit" when it comes to reducing power usage through increasing efficiency.<p>The bad news is we are still going to have to make changes, pay for them, and yeah, make some sacrifices as well.<p>- - - -<p>In re: software to manage local grids efficiently, IMO that's not interesting. It's covered already. If you need fancy real-time dynamic "smart" manager software for your local micro-grids you're almost certainly doing it wrong.<p>Put something like Factorio in front of your grid as a UI and scenario planner and let the local kids run it. "Energy Club"