More Tech Wiz on Micro-Grids and the value….

One of the things driving me crazy is that I put some things away recently and I cannot remember where. I didn’t, include a tile (a system that allows you to find lost items quickly). I should have, but I didn’t. I know, I was thinking at the time that I would be able to quickly find the item when I needed it. Yesterday I needed it, and now I am searching for it. I guess I am, to use the nautical term, hoisted by my own petard.  Funny how sometimes you do things to yourself. In this case, it is wholly my fault. I ended up having to use a different version of what I needed to get the job done. I didn’t have a lot of time to launch a hard target search to borrow Tommy Lee Jones line from the movie The Fugitive.

I’ve spent a lot of blog space over the years talking about Transactive Energy and the future of what energy will hopefully become. The ability to operate off the grid is going to become more and more important. If we look at the existing impact of climate change, it isn’t the old-fashioned “global warming” issue. While global warming is bad, and the temperatures have gone up in the past century, very rapidly, it is the energy created by the change that impacts us. Storms are bigger, there are more of them, and the impact of the storms is greater on humanity. Think about the number of 100-year floods, storms and the sheer number of hurricanes last year. The impact is huge already, and it is going to get worse.

Personal Micro-Grid lets’ you go offline. You get power from the system in your yard, on your roof and so on. You are not dependent on the power grid. If you think about storms, and the impact of the storm on the area around you, you understand the reality of power. Power companies have to get the critical infrastructure back up quickly. Then, in theory, the remaining systems that fix are bound to how many customers can we get back to functional by fixing something. They have to triage issues and balance time against the number of people impacted. Fix problems not in the order they occurred, but in the order of the speed and impact of fixing them.

Solar takes you out of the equation during the day. If you get the new Tesla battery system, you are out of the equation all the time. Solar + wind or Solar + geothermal also gives you that. Or Solar + Generator, in all those cases you cannot draw power from the grid in emergencies. Your neighbors will want to come to your house for a blackout movie party. Plus, you can do laundry when you want to, not when the laundromat is open!