7mo ago

Why hasn't a renewable energy blockchain REALLY been successful yet?

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.

141 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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".
  
  Bitcoin is the only inflation resistant currency I know of.
- 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?
  Edit: Turns out, it would be more accurate to say that it redistributes trust away from a central authority... well at least in most cases it does. There are still situations when even a blockchain has a central authority you need to trust. It's not guaranteed to solve all trust issues, but in the best case scenario it can solve some of them.
  
  So we should waste perfeclty good electricity to mine some blackchain ... for what reward? Some meme currency?
  
  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.
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).
  
  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.
- 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?
- 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.
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.
  
  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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
  
  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.
  
  Lmao yeah sure, conpared to now, where the government sets taxes and you pay it already? That doesn't sound much different tbh
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.
I think this idea has at least two problems:
Energy consumption is only a problem for outdated cryptos like bitcoin. Prettymuch every modern crypto runs on much more efficient proof-of-stake, etc.
Even if we wanted a solar crypto, how would we verify that it's generated by solar power?
- Also, "Proof of stake" would just mean that the owners of the ledger are unaccountable random rich guys instead of the shareholders of the utility company. That's a distinction with absolutely zero difference.
  
  Like most new technologies these days, blockchain doesn't add anything besides a layer of plausible deniability for the rich to hide behind when they inevitably steal from the poor.
  
  No, that's not how proof of stake works. Or it doesn't have to, at any rate. Ethereum's staking token is not a governance token, holding a lot of it doesn't give you any "ownership" of the blockchain as a whole.
  Quite the opposite in fact, if you're staking millions of dollars worth of tokens then that means the blockchain has millions of dollars worth of your assets "held hostage" to ensure you follow the blockchain's rules. If you don't then the hostage gets slashed.
- I thought the same way as validating in Proof-of-Stake works: The devices have a private key (yes there are issues there about securing them for non-authorized access, but they can largely be addressed like also nodes do) which is registered on the blockchain. Then only these registered devices can issue coins. This is critical and there might be a lot of ways this could be hackable, which could or could not be mitigated. However I thought it's not more of a challenge than running say an Ethereum or any other node.
  
  This isn't anything like how validating in proof-of-stake works (at least not in Ethereum's version, which is the one I'm familiar with). Validating is permissionless. Anyone can set up a validating account, there's no authority that can reject you.
  Who "authorizes" keys to determine if a particular solarpunk miner is sufficiently solarpunk?
  
  Proof of stake is a centralized system. If access to your ledger is going to remain centralized then there's no need for it to be a blockchain. You can just have a regular distributed database.
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.
Which is completely useless if the data that goes into that blockchain isn't guaranteed to be correct. And if there's money in it you can bet your ass that someone will try to game the system.
You're also glossing over the existing grid that needs money to be maintained while complaining that energy companies want money. Yes, there's a general problem where society allowed (and partly encouraged) sociopaths to be unrestrained greedy assholes that needs some kind of solution, but not all companies are useless leeches, it's "just" an all-pervading corruption that needs to be dealt with - and as long as that hasn't happened, every idealistic solution faces the threat of being corrupted itself.
- Which is completely useless if the data that goes into that blockchain isn't guaranteed to be correct.
  You're missing the point of this. It just matters that it's consistent. The transactions that are put into the blockchain just have to follow the rules of the blockchain and be the same for everyone who reads the blockchain. That's all that "correctness" means as far as the blockchain is concerned.
  And if there's money in it you can bet your ass that someone will try to game the system.
  Blockchains depend on everyone involved trying to game the system. They're built using game theory to ensure that the most selfish actions for any particular actor are the best ones for the blockchain as a whole.
  
  It just matters that it's consistent. The transactions that are put into the blockchain just have to follow the rules of the blockchain and be the same for everyone who reads the blockchain. That's all that "correctness" means as far as the blockchain is concerned.
  Still useless for anything that depends on external data, since there can be no guarantee that what has been entered is correct. What's the point of a consistent record of garbage?
- Can't disagree, but then why do we think Solarpunk? To have some nice pictures and inspiring stories?
  
  Solarpunk is an anti-capitalist, pro-ecology aesthetic, not a coherent political ideology.
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.
This still feels like it's not answering the fundamental question for any blockchain project: why is this a blockchain instead of just a database with well configured permissions, and why are the advantages of the blockchain relevant to the problem it's trying to solve? Traditional databases can be configured to be append only, accept new data from users without needing a central authority to approve each new user, be queried by any random person, etc far more efficiently than a blockchain could and without requiring every solar panel owner to download multiple terabytes of historical transaction data just to run their panel.
As for the coins, they don't really add democratic control over a system so much as they empower whoever is best able to maximize coin generation. In a democratic system, 100 small solar panel owners would have more of a say in the governance of solar panels than 1 really wealthy South African billionaire, because they would represent more votes than the billionaire. In the coin economy, if the billionaire has at least twice as many solar panels as the rest of the small owners put together, the billionaire would have sole control over the governance of solar panels because they would be generating twice as many coins.
I admit I'm skeptic to see anything blockchain or coin related, but I've yet to see a problem that either technology are solving for other than "I want to be able to do financial transactions over the internet without using a bank or bank-like institution" and "I want an extremely volatile asset to speculate on"
- There is one core purpose that blockchains solve that traditional databases don't; decentralization.
  If you're running something that can work just fine with a centralized database, go ahead and do that. Use the right tool for the job.
  Blockchains are for applications where you can't depend on a "trusted authority" to support you. When you want to be sure you're free of any outside interference in the things you're doing, that no server can "go down" and take all of your data or operations with it.
  An example of a non-financial-related activity I can offer is the Ethereum Name Service, ENS, which is a decentralized version of the DNS system. You can register a domain name with it and never have to worry about it being "seized" or going offline due to a networking failure.
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.
Would it be possible for a bad actor to connect a gas powered generator and get more tokens?
- Great question. This can be prevented by technological means. Basically, "minting" of the coins would happen at the generation devices. There would have to be some cryptographical means of preventing misuse.
  
  At that point the devices could just report without the use of cryptocurrency and we could use normal money, it would also have less power usage because no mining is happening.
  I just can't really visualize the advantage of cryptocurrency here, it increases power usage, cost, and complexity.
  
  For your info, this is known as 'hand waving'
A blockchain that uses proof-of-work would waste far more energy than it would save, just on doing the accounting. What blockchain do you propose using that would have a minimal transaction cost, in watts and in coin?
If we're talking about local charging of EVs, I guess that would be a little like putting a gas pump in my front yard for my neighbors to use. Probably going to hit zoning issues if you open that up to general commercial use.
How does a 'solar energy blockchain' know where the electricity used to run it comes from? There's no difference between 120v ac coming from a generator or coming from the grid, or coming from a solar array.
Because crypto is a scam.
- I can't blame you for this sentiment because there is a lot of scamming. So is the current monetary system btw, even at a bigger and blunt scale.
  Crypto is just math, what people do with it is something different. It's a tool, and it can be used for good as for bad.
  
  Crypto does not offer any real value other than to scam people it is a shit sandwich.
  
  Crypto is just math
  Then crypto is already involved in the electrical grid..
- Please explain the scam.
  FWIW I agree that capitalism is a scam but I think crypto is a slight improvement over imperial currencies.
  
  Sure here you go. Crypto can’t be actually used for money. It has no intrinsic value and since the price fluctuates so rapidly it can’t be used at store checkouts because the store owner can lose their shirt in the time it takes to convert the crypto garbage to real money. The only value that it has is the added value of other suckers adding their money to the pyramid scheme. Bitcoin and all its little scam buddies are a piece of shit that needs to be flushed.
  
  Crypto is just capitalism with fewer safety nets. No FDIC insurance on deposits and no SEC to prevent scams and fraud.
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!
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.
Solarpunk is embedded in leftist thought, and the endgame would include becoming a moneyless society. There's various debates on how to get there from here.
Does crypto help with the transition? I would say no. It requires hooking up more renewable energy just for the sake of money.
- Blockchain is an accounting system first, which happens to underpin a lot of the crypto money space. But it has nothing to do with money per se.
  In a future moneyless society, is everyone free to consume as much as they want? Maybe that works, I don't have an answer, but maybe it's also an option to just account for everyone's consumption (maybe in absolute terms, e.g. kWh?), and apply some limits. The disregard of limits is probably the first culprit against sustainability, and this society is not the first in failing there.
  
  Generally, the aim is to rely on mutual aid and community. People don't consume beyond the system's ability to support them because their neighbors take a dim view of that, and they rely on their neighbors for a lot. Of course, this would take a significant change in how we do things under capitalism.
  Having a chain of hashes that need to be verified and created doesn't seem to have any application that would move us there. The issues to solve are largely social, not technical.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RpWU05YxsU
- 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
Wasn't this tried years ago? I forget the name of the coin/chain.

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