Technology

Successful in accomplishing what?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think this idea has at least two problems:

1. Energy consumption is only a problem for outdated cryptos like bitcoin. Prettymuch every modern crypto runs on much more efficient proof-of-stake, etc.
2. Even if we wanted a solar crypto, how would we verify that it's generated by solar power?

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.