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First, the data is helpful in aggregate to learn about homeowner power usage and sell and stuff. Second, these companies are often selling some sort of contract

by ok_dad 4y ago

First, the data is helpful in aggregate to learn about homeowner power usage and sell and stuff. Second, these companies are often selling some sort of contract or carbon token, or some sort of virtual aggregation of power to a utility. For example, Tesla is famously paying huge amounts to sell their customer's power to SCE right now in a pilot program. I can tell you from experience, the prices they're paying their customers per kilowatt-hour are way higher than the market rate for that sort of thing, so it's not going to last. Eventually, these Tesla customers will be stuck in some contract, probably, selling Tesla their power for pennies on the dollar. None of the VPP software running in the cloud cannot be run locally. What we should have is a small computer optimizing homeowner's devices (solar, batteries) on-site, but instead all that crap is in the cloud. It's "Generation as a Service" at this point, and it's bullshit. What we need is an open-source building energy management supervision software with a diverse driver and plugin ecosystem. I want to write it, but I have a family to feed.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> It's "Generation as a Service" at this point, and it's bullshit. Wow that really is bullshit! Is this a US thing? My solar equiment is german... I think. Vendor is Fronius. There is a locally hosted monitoring web app, it can even create a wifi access point if necessary. It apparently works fine even without the network. There is a cloud service too. It's meant for me as an end user but the solar company that I contracted took over the account I created in order to "provide remote support". I really have no clue what they're doing with it but I can't figure out if they're selling anything I'm generating. Where I live (Brazil) the solar energy I generate gets converted by the power company itself into kWh "credits" which will offset energy consumed from other sources. These credits expire if unused so I have zero incentive to generate more than I consume. Not sure if this is the same as the carbon token you mentioned.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  Yea, I am in the US, so I know mostly about stuff here, but I also think the US tends to use "* as a Service" more often than EU, right? Inherently, there isn't anything wrong with internet connective services, such as if your solar company is using your data to actually optimize the hardware on your home site. However, most of these today are middle-man cash grabs, IMO.
solardev 4y ago
> What we need is an open-source building energy management supervision software with a diverse driver and plugin ecosystem. I want to write it, but I have a family to feed. I work in the industry too, and would love to see something like this -- not just so homeowners can maintain first-party control over their assets, but also so there can be a "reference design", so to speak, with best practices and peer-reviewed code & data tables, etc. that any manufacturer can use (instead of crappily reinventing the wheel every time). Have you ever spoken to your coworkers about this? I tried to bring up open-sourcing some of our stuff at work and got a lukewarm reception... people were cautiously interested but wary of navigating the bureaucracy (especially legal). But still, it's SUCH an important field -- energy security is national security and climate policy rolled into one -- that I wish there was more of a coordinated effort to make these things better. NREL used to lead efforts like OpenPV and that was a great start, but then the previous admin shut it down :( It should probably be a citizen-led effort and not subject to political whims...
- ok_dad 4y ago
  Yea, none of the companies I have worked for would have gone for anything like that due to the tight coupling between their code and algorithms. The thing is, the algorithms to optimize these things don't have to be that complex, a simple solution with if/else statements would get you a TON of energy savings and optimization of time of use. I do plan on writing this software, but I am not sure when. I've been considering taking a year or so off (if I can save enough, or perhaps if my company dissolves or I am fired) to write a framework that you could add drivers for hardware to and add your own algorithms to. Basically, it's just a simple loop of "read telemetry from devices -> save telemetry to local database -> data processing steps (ELT/ETL stuff) -> optimize the use of these devices for some metric (energy use, peak power use, comfort, etc.) -> store results -> send new commands/parameters to the devices -> sleep(interval)" and then adding hardware device interface drivers and algorithms in there. Edit: If you need to aggregate devices it's a bit harder, but I think it could be doable with distributed algorithms or with open-source interfaces between the utilities and individual customers. I am not sure of how that looks right now, but I prefer a world where millions of individuals run their grids the way they want (within safety regulations) and then they can sell their excess power to the grid via a standard protocol. Right now we're doing a lot of vacuuming of data that isn't necessary, since the data can easily be stored locally for these applications, with a distributed protocol. I actually think this is an application that could use blockchain in a neat way, but I would prefer to avoid that, if possible, due to the implications.

by ok_dad 4y ago

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> It's "Generation as a Service" at this point, and it's bullshit. Wow that really is bullshit! Is this a US thing? My solar equiment is german... I think. Vendor is Fronius. There is a locally hosted monitoring web app, it can even create a wifi access point if necessary. It apparently works fine even without the network. There is a cloud service too. It's meant for me as an end user but the solar company that I contracted took over the account I created in order to "provide remote support". I really have no clue what they're doing with it but I can't figure out if they're selling anything I'm generating. Where I live (Brazil) the solar energy I generate gets converted by the power company itself into kWh "credits" which will offset energy consumed from other sources. These credits expire if unused so I have zero incentive to generate more than I consume. Not sure if this is the same as the carbon token you mentioned.

ok_dad 4y ago
Yea, I am in the US, so I know mostly about stuff here, but I also think the US tends to use "* as a Service" more often than EU, right? Inherently, there isn't anything wrong with internet connective services, such as if your solar company is using your data to actually optimize the hardware on your home site. However, most of these today are middle-man cash grabs, IMO.

solardev 4y ago

> What we need is an open-source building energy management supervision software with a diverse driver and plugin ecosystem. I want to write it, but I have a family to feed. I work in the industry too, and would love to see something like this -- not just so homeowners can maintain first-party control over their assets, but also so there can be a "reference design", so to speak, with best practices and peer-reviewed code & data tables, etc. that any manufacturer can use (instead of crappily reinventing the wheel every time). Have you ever spoken to your coworkers about this? I tried to bring up open-sourcing some of our stuff at work and got a lukewarm reception... people were cautiously interested but wary of navigating the bureaucracy (especially legal). But still, it's SUCH an important field -- energy security is national security and climate policy rolled into one -- that I wish there was more of a coordinated effort to make these things better. NREL used to lead efforts like OpenPV and that was a great start, but then the previous admin shut it down :( It should probably be a citizen-led effort and not subject to political whims...

ok_dad 4y ago
Yea, none of the companies I have worked for would have gone for anything like that due to the tight coupling between their code and algorithms. The thing is, the algorithms to optimize these things don't have to be that complex, a simple solution with if/else statements would get you a TON of energy savings and optimization of time of use. I do plan on writing this software, but I am not sure when. I've been considering taking a year or so off (if I can save enough, or perhaps if my company dissolves or I am fired) to write a framework that you could add drivers for hardware to and add your own algorithms to. Basically, it's just a simple loop of "read telemetry from devices -> save telemetry to local database -> data processing steps (ELT/ETL stuff) -> optimize the use of these devices for some metric (energy use, peak power use, comfort, etc.) -> store results -> send new commands/parameters to the devices -> sleep(interval)" and then adding hardware device interface drivers and algorithms in there. Edit: If you need to aggregate devices it's a bit harder, but I think it could be doable with distributed algorithms or with open-source interfaces between the utilities and individual customers. I am not sure of how that looks right now, but I prefer a world where millions of individuals run their grids the way they want (within safety regulations) and then they can sell their excess power to the grid via a standard protocol. Right now we're doing a lot of vacuuming of data that isn't necessary, since the data can easily be stored locally for these applications, with a distributed protocol. I actually think this is an application that could use blockchain in a neat way, but I would prefer to avoid that, if possible, due to the implications.