Home Solar as User Generated Content

In a conversation the other day, Ed Kummer of Disney made a really thought-provoking observation: the spread of solar energy units to homes and businesses is an analog to other forms of user-generated content, and the overall trend towards a two-way network. While it's possible to set up a solar system completely off the grid, most of the new customers feed power into the grid during sunlight hours, and draw from it when the daylight wanes. If we move to a solar power economy, it will be much more distributed and cooperative than the current one-way model.

It's fabulous to put the internet and Web 2.0 into a broader context, and to think about how the new network economics that we're seeing on the internet may be adopted in other fields. With VoIP, we're seeing the internet subsume the telephone network. With distributed solar, and the kinds of distributed energy monitoring technology that Adam wrote about the other day, will the internet model also colonize the power grid?

Hmmm... What was I saying about the internet as the network of networks?

George [20 August 2006 10:24 AM]

Your "the network of networks" link is broken. It points right back to this post.

It should be http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/round_2_the_internet_as_networ.html

Tim O'Reilly [20 August 2006 10:46 AM]

Thanks. That was because the scheduled entry that I wanted to point to hadn't yet been published, so I couldn't fill in the URL, and forgot to go back and do it once the URL was live. It's fixed now.

Brit [21 August 2006 01:58 PM]

Awesome. I'm not sure when I first stumbled across the notion of democritization in the energy industry. I suspect it was either through Steven Weber's The Success of Open Source or a friend of mine. At any rate, the sheer beauty of how that could scale to form a group of consumers producing as much or more energy than the power companies (depending on the speed of adoption) knocks my socks off even now. I think I blogged about it but I can't find anything. I guess that means I should.

Rick Brown [30 March 2008 01:54 PM]

I thought I remember seeing soemwhere that you guys were going to do a renewbale energy conference next September...I'm a local (Sebastopol) and an exec in a company that is currently the largest owner/operator of commerical solar PV in the country (www.mmarenewableventures.com).
I'd be very interested in working on this...who's the contact.

Home Solar as User Generated Content

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