I truly love this aesthetic and it's vision of the future. Clean air, healthy food, empowered communities. Abundance without waste, progress without destruction, and equal opportunity without tyranny. This is the future that we should be developing software to enable. Instead, I'm frequently disappointed by the modern usages of software, which seem to cause excess waste, accelerate the destruction of our planet, and enable authoritarians. Maybe it's time to rethink what we're working towards.
Everything gets captured by capital.. This aesthetic resonates the same with me. Its partly what drove me to join a startup to do global solar radiation forecasting as first employee. Burnt myself out over 4 years, but built platform that enabled higher penetration of solar pv power into grids all over the world, and was successful in this. I left due to burn out and realizing that most of the customers we would talk to about large scale solar utility sites that wanted integration with the data were basically banks/finance/insurance companies trying to return a better yield, they didn't care how. After I left got bought out by a risk management company.
Call me naive, but I went into it knowing solar power is _cheaper_, and the inability to measure how much solar energy was in an electricity network, and uncertainty about the generation were the main problems the startup was aiming to solve. The finance made it attractive to capital, I got that, partly why I was convinced it would succeed, but I underestimated how laser focused these groups are to "line go up". They would outsource everything because they were there as the money people, and have people in the meeting knowing just enough to gauge if project was on track for expectations of "line go up".
Problem being is that the margins aren't there. Everytime a solar panel is added to an electricity network, the life time ROI for ALL panels in the network goes down. This is due to pushing down the price of electricity during the day. Eg, when oversupply occurs in the middle of the day (and they don't store it cause X is cheaper), it causes electricity markets to drive prices down and even negative, meaning the return of possible life time generated power for each panel also gets reduced.
Saying all that, the adoption of renewables is growing at a rapid pace due to it being cheaper, but also slowed down by constant value extraction shenanigans.
Sorry about the burnout. Sounds like you've got skills and I'd encourage you to explore something smaller. There is a path as a solopreneur. I do sun and shadow modeling using publicly available datasets [1]. My customers are gardeners, permaculture, hunters, fishermen, photographers and also real estate prospectors but they're people not big orgs or banks. It feels good to work on this level and personally answer emails and questions. I don't make much revenue but I like the grassroots path. Maybe you'd find it rewarding as well.
I came across shademap.app a ~month ago, and had a "the internet can be so awesome" moment. I wrote to my property mates: "I found a cool free website for seeing shade at our site throughout the day and year. Maybe helpful for garden planning. Our address is loaded in [here]". Reply: "Wow! That is cool!". It seems to be very much in the solarpunk spirit (even more so with your engagement here). I hope to incorporate it into my solar installation work. Thank you :)
Thanks for the work you've done with ShadeMap - I used this extensively when I we were looking for somewhere to rent, as living in hilly city some areas lose the sun quite quickly. Happy to say we are now living in a place that gets plenty of sun, and this summer has yielded a lot of tomatoes in a city where that can be difficult.
Super cool, I just used your app to figure out where to place my clothes drying rack so it'll get sun sooner! Okay, I already new the result mostly, but still fun and useful!
In one sense the more solar we install, the more energy is produced, the cheaper that energy gets. I'd suggest that's a feature not a bug.
I'll start by noting that in my region variable pricing does not exist, so that effect is not in play.
I'll also note that we use a lot more energy during the day than at night. They are very much not equal. (Residentially, WFH, about 75% of my daily energy is I the daytime, and hence "free".)
Lastly I point out that storage is the next silver bullet. I generate excess during the day (10 months of the year) and I have a small battery attached to the home. Potentially a larger battery in an electric car. Grid-level storage solutions (perhaps sodium-ion, perhaps something else) will radically move the needle.
Maybe one day we'll have so many panels installed that energy is "too cheap to measure", but its not today. Water is still measured, and that's already 100% renewable.
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In one sense the more solar we install, the more energy is produced, the cheaper that energy gets. I'd suggest that's a feature not a bug.
I agree, was trying to convey the purely economical point of view that owner operators of large utility scale solar likely have.
> I'll start by noting that in my region variable pricing does not exist, so that effect is not in play.
Where abouts are you located? Most electricity networks have market mechanisms, even if the end consumer of the electricity only pays flat usage rate. Although it is a supply and demand problem to balance an electricity network, regulation needs to be carefully controlled and enforced since generators will actively seek out exploits to save/make money that goes against stability of the network.
> I'll also note that we use a lot more energy during the day than at night. They are very much not equal. (Residentially, WFH, about 75% of my daily energy is I the daytime, and hence "free".)
Yup, that is pretty normal in my neck of the woods as well.
> Lastly I point out that storage is the next silver bullet. I generate excess during the day (10 months of the year) and I have a small battery attached to the home. Potentially a larger battery in an electric car. Grid-level storage solutions (perhaps sodium-ion, perhaps something else) will radically move the needle.
It will likely move the needle yes, and for countries with publicly owned networks, they can do this now just at a larger upfront cost. As much as I like home solar panels for generation, but I'm actually not a fan of home batteries. They have a non zero fire risk (unless chemistries like LTO are used, again deemed too expensive) and require more equipment that can fail and then has to be maintained for such a small installation (less than 50kwh for example). When multiplied out, you have a much higher frequency of issues that can take out home power. Distributed solar generation has several weather based advantages as you spread out the generation, cloud disruptions get smoothed out for example. I get that home batteries make the system more resilient in ways, I still just don't think it should be in/around homes. Neighborhood batteries make a lot of sense, especially since networks commonly have zone substations distributed around.
>In one sense the more solar we install, the more energy is produced, the cheaper that energy gets. I'd suggest that's a feature not a bug.
That's a feature from an overall perspective. Not for the seller.
Additionally when those panels then don't or barely produce electricity such as at night or in most of europe during much of winter it mandates a costly variable additional source that can output for days on end so many battery solutions end up out of the question at grid scale. Often when pumped hydro isn't an option only co2 emitting gas remains.
Batteries don’t have to be huge to be useful. You’d have to run the calculation for each location, but avoiding peak rates can make a big difference to power bills.
The ROI might be longer than the battery’s life if it isn’t combined with panels, but in a location with high peak pricing, it may be viable.
To the individual. What i'm referring to is when you want to be climate "neutral" and collectively use that solar whilst your peak is not just at a recurring 10pm or so but also across many days/weeks/months and it's not just for you as an individual but for your wider region or country. After all there will be long periods where my panels will produce not even a 10th of what they might produce on average in summer.
Mate, don’t give up! I think it’s time for you to go work on batteries!
Capital is never going away I don’t think, but that doesn’t mean you have to be resigned to its inexorable subsumption of all productive potentials for value extractions… just means you need to keep finding ways to leverage your own knowledge of its behavior and response modes to make positive change (eg start working on demand forecasting in p2p battery storage networks, or utility scale deployment controls, etc etc).
There was a time when capital knew its place though.
I humbly suggest we start to think about how we all can get back to that time. It’s come to rule the roost over all other concerns and we are not seeing the bright future we deserve as humanity in part but not solely, due to this fact.
We can change that, but it means drawing the line. And I mean all of us
I think you are right there. However everyone has been endlessly told "everyone is equal" (and not just in the eyes of the law of the land) for decades now. So there will be enormous inertia. As Lee Kuan Yew said, "humans are an unequal animal", so there is hope that reality might eventually break-out in their minds.
and thank goodness for that, or we'd rapidly get stuck in local maxima and stagnate. Some of these things are kind of non-intuitive, but if you've studied artificial life you pick up some helpful insights into how populations work.
Ideally, everyone is sustainable. 'equal' is neither possible nor desirable, and naively trying to reward the 'superior' is a path to Hapsburg-ville.
There's been a huge cultural shift over the past several decades, which I would broadly describe as moving from a philosophy of "companies are here to provide a good or service, and make money by doing that" to "companies are here to make as much money as possible, and most of them have to provide a good or service in order to do so."
Naturally, there were people and companies with the latter philosophy before, just as there are with the former now, but the overall attitude of our corporate world has moved more to the latter.
I think that to a large extent, this has correlated with the dismantling of regulations, the gutting of unions, the relaxation of antitrust enforcement, and the rise of the unchallengeable power of wealthy corporations. (Causality is definitely murkier, and probably goes both ways to some extent.)
It’s a clear reference to shareholder primacy and it’s not wielded democratically nor is it something most even have a chance to participate in even though most have stock market exposure through retail buys, 401Ks, IRAs etc.
Half of the us population being shareholders doesn’t translate to a seat the table economically, not to mention is a red herring to the topic
The real issue is that there is legal doctrine that makes it hard for businesses to not be dominated by their largest investors / shareholders in such a way that extracting short term profits every quarter has taken precedence over building healthy sustainable businesses. Everyone is chasing the absolute most % of profit to the detriment to even the business
I really wish there was a finance group for solarpunk stuff. It's a constant problem, and when I join any of the many groups online, no-one seems to acknowledge it. If there was some sort of fund that we could contribute to that handled the financing, and looked strictly for long term investments, I'm sure that it would make money, that could then be put back into more long-term solarpunk investments, for the good of all. I don't know how to set such a thing up, or I'd do it myself!
I can't contribute that much yet. I'm working on a set of real estate investments to hopefully start the chain within 5-6 years. One of the things that would help for now is to experiment with small projects and hopefully identify something(s) that could make a good long term investment engine.
While I do like the appeal of this aesthetic, I honestly feel like putting solar panels on everything you own is a bit like growing tomatoes in your backyard.
If we as a species, were truly committed to clean energy on a civilization scale, we would go all in on nuclear, and have renewables be produced at dedicated sites, built and maintained by professionals.
Which goes against the DIY 'punk' idea of it, but I think 'punk' itself is a contradiction - the ability to live free from the constraints of society means you are using much more resources than someone who makes use of communal resources - flats, public transport, etc. The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
Those tomatoes taste like real tomatoes, unlike those things, you can usually buy in a supermarket.
And nuclear as the only sane choice is just your personal opinion, not a fact.
What is the worst outcome, with too many solar panels vs too many nuclear reactors?
Only in your nuclear Utopia all those reactors will be maintained to the highest standards. In reality humans cut corners, are still lazy, don't give shit and who cares, "it will be allright". Until it isn't when multiplied with lots of reactors and time.
and would rather like some cheap solar panels and insulation to help get away from our impressively high energy costs. Sadly I live in a flat so it's not really a goer.
My dad had a 160 acre farm outside London on which you could have had loads of solarpunk type dwelling at zero cost to the government but instead it's impossible to build anything due to regulations plus they spend the billions on overpriced Sizewells.
I daresay the reason you can't build anything is people want green countryside rather than packed in unsightly housing estates but maybe something like the art in the Wikipedia could satisfy both? Functional while not hideous?
I live in an area of Belgium with plenty of countryside sprawl. We're kind of famous for our endless suburbia fragmenting the agricultural land and nature.
In my grandparents era most people out here were backyard farmers. That's not even remotely the case now.
Assuming you want to not grow less produce you can prep for higher agricultural land prices.
Meanwhile It's ridiculously bad for traffic and getting every other kind of utility available everywhere.
An aspect of solarpunk is that individuals and small communities can opt into this mindset and change their habits. E.g.: having your own power source, growing your own vegetables, etc. It's not only sustainable, but quite resilient; there's not as much dependency of a larger scale network.
Switching to solar requires a nation-wide initiative (or something close to that scale).
> The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
This is true, but you don't need a detached house. A row of houses can also have solar on top. A building with a couple of floors and a few apartments can have a shared roof and garden.
Sure, none of this works in a large metropolitan city, but living in a metropolis is kind of the antithesis of solarpunk.
Might be controversial, but I don't. Because solarpunk is insistent on the notion of negative rights, the notion of how one lives their life remains the same as today, and no better than the hunter-gatherers of the past.
There will always be those who seek more, who admire those towers reaching into the sky, even as others admonish it as tyranny. And they are right, ambition will result in tyranny, in oppression and conflict, but even so, I would still believe in a future over an eternal present.
