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This energy scam has been going on for more than 30 years in Europe and the UK. The former Economic minister and professor Yanis Varoufakis explains [1]. My F

• pjc50 6mo ago
  Is this a thing that people can actually sign up to, or is it vaporware? Varoufakis says a lot of things that aren't necessarily true.
  • fiberhood 6mo ago
    You can sign up by becoming a member of the Fiberhood cooperative for free. Send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com. We must have your address and map location link or Google map address code so we can draw maps and make a website for your neighborhood to sign up and form an Enernet. We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries. We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades. In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now. Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI&t=5574s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI&t=5574s
    • toomuchtodo 6mo ago
      Sounds like Fiberhood is adjacent to https://solarunitedneighbors.org/ https://solarunitedneighbors.org/ ?
      • morphle 6mo ago
        Yes and no, not really. There are many smart grids and more not-so smart grids around the world, but only a few are non-commercial or owned by the members. Fiberhood is unique in that we have our own Enernet power routers (a software controlled multi-port bidirectional AC-DC-DC inverter peer to peer network) that can share large amounts of DC current, has special power aggregation to enable megawatt EV chargers in every house, battery nano-inverters that make cheap batteries last up to 20000 charge/discharge cycles, integrate (free) discarded solar panels and has a range of software defined networking options including 4 x 25 Gbps internet ports per house. Most smart grids are just a different meter and payment scheme, not a radical rewiring of the entire electricity system in the neighborhood without a commercial company or government controlling what citizens pay. Other smart grids raise the cost of grid defection, Fiberhood tech makes it possible to have abundant redundant solar energy at its cost price $0.01 per kWh, many times cheaper than national AC grid pricing anywhere in the world. The tech was made to prevent making money on energy but incentivize solving the climate crises by making Solar by far the cheapest option. Stop almost all carbon and methane greenhouse gas emissions by going 100% solar.
    • morphle 6mo ago
      The Fiberhood planner maps are in the first slides in the first minute of the video. We used to have an interactive zooming map of Fiberhoods for every house in the Netherlands online but now we only have them available for Fiberhood members because of privacy rules. On the maps you can see where the batteries, solar panels and power routers are located in a Fiberhood version of Google Streetview.
    • goobatrooba 6mo ago
      Hi, I tried to find more details of this initiative which sounds quite interesting (I'm living in Belgium) but it seems there is no website or summary info available - is the only way to learn more about the model a 4h lecture recording? Would you have any kind of package or info you can share on how this really works, wha the financing model is, etc? Thank you!
  • morphle 6mo ago
    Please give some proof of Varoufakis lying. I always check what he claims in his books and talks and I never spotted a lie. I also check Saul Griffith and Amory Lovins talks, books and papers on factual errors and never spotten one in two decades.
• konschubert 6mo ago
  People seem to have trouble understanding how commodity markets naturally price their goods but the whole point of this website is to show that electricity prices are finally decoupling. edit: I didn’t watch the videos, I don’t have time first watch a video and then to dissect bullshit from truth.
  • fiberhood 6mo ago
    But the solar electricity is still overpriced and taxed. People pay several times more for solar electricity from the grid than what they get if they sell to the grid.
    • michael_j_x 6mo ago
      If you are selling to the grid, there is probably over-supply. Prices are driven by supply and demand. If you want to avoid selling at lower prices and buying at higher, try and get a battery. Check ecoflow to get an idea of the costs.
      • fiberhood 6mo ago
        Ecoflow is a good example of overpriced American tech. I payed $1500 for a 2 kWh battery. Our Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800. Prices in China are lower still.
        • cogman10 6mo ago
          Prices have been dropping like crazy as the various battery manufacturers have been competing with each other. They are all pretty similarly priced at this point. A 2kwh ecoflow now costs $800. Still overpriced, but the gap is steadily narrowing. Also, $1800 for 16kwh is a great price. That's $112/kWh. That's pretty close to raw cell costs. Does the battery pack also come with charge circuitry, inverter, bms?
          • morphle 6mo ago
• TacticalCoder 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • sojournerc 6mo ago
    This is an ad hominem argument but at the scale of a whole country.
    • izacus 6mo ago
      It's a bit relevant to the conversation when the person making it has an incentive to deflect blame from their own corrupted country to evil EU.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Balinares 6mo ago
    Greece defaulted after the previous, right wing government falsified the country's accounting, but by all means, don't let reality get in the way of your ideology.
  • Glaklloo 6mo ago
    We do not know if 'leftis' would have build all of it too. We only know that capitalism did. But we also know that capitalism is pushing our earth to a runnaway heat death for a lot of humans. For a long time our planet and we have the capacity to rebuild our whole ecosystem on clean and cheap energy but we don't. Instead we still kill mmillions due to pollution and bring extential crisis to millions just because some lunatic behind the biggest military power on the planet decided to kill a whole civilization in one night.
• zoobab 6mo ago
  Plus you become indépendant from toxic decisions taken by politicians.
• anovikov 6mo ago
  But it means you are simply exploiting the "normal" electricity grid this way by using it when your solar doesn't work and batteries run dry - that is, when the cost of elecitricty in a normal grid, with the high penetration of renewables, is highest. You do the normal capitalism thing: privatise the benefits, socialise the costs... And the higher proportion of renewables in the grid is the higher is your upside. If you want to completely stop using normal grid and rely on solar alone, you will need to overbuild your solar so massively, you won't be able to afford it (and will run out of land, too). Cost of electricity produced will be several euros per kwh, and a simple calculation shows just how massively unrealistic it is.
• h3lp 6mo ago
  They say $0.01/kWh is the target price, to be reached after some decades. Don't get me wrong, I am excited about solar power but careful about the economics: the capital cost of solar right now is well over 1$/W (panels+inverters+installation/hookup) and even though it is falling nicely, the amortization schedule needs to be considered. A rule-of-thumb figure is 1kWh of power per year from 1W nominal installed, so the capital cost will have to be amortized over 100 years to reach $.01/kWh. The installed price has to come down by a factor of 10 for this to work out.
  • morphle 6mo ago
    No, $0.01/kWh became possible in 2024 and is easy to achieve in 2026. But you have to follow the Fiberhood procedures based on our simulations and our electronics to actually achieve prices under one dollar cent per kWh. We reach this price in China, most of Europe and Australia but in the US you generally pay thrice as much (in labour cost, tarifs, etc). You can only get an accurate cost if you create a simulation of every step of the industrial processes of manufacturing the silicon ingots, the glass, aluminum, the silver and labour that goes into making solar panels. Same for batteries, electronic components, etc. You have checks and balances in the simulation, for example you get the cost price of all the material components that you can check against the actual price for sale at the factories, the shipping cost, the wholesale prices on offer, the retail prices in different countries, the installation cost, the underlying loans and their interest rates and labour. But that simulates just the cost of the materials, you have many other factors. For example did the energy used to make the solar cells come from solar or from coal plants? Did you make thin film solar or silicon wafer solar cells. What battery chemistry. How much losses if your solar panel overheats 3 percent of the time. What latitude and longitude did the solar panels operate, at what angle to the sun? Compared with such accurate cost simulation models calibrated with actual prices paid your claim is very vague and hand-wavy. The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) is a metric representing the average total cost of building and operating an energy-generating asset over its lifetime, divided by the total energy output produced during that period. It serves as a, "break-even" price per unit of energy (e.g., $/MWh), allowing comparisons between different technologies.
    • 6mo ago
• Nelkins 6mo ago
  When you say "power router," what product are you referencing specifically? I'm trying to search online to find a similar product but I don't think I'm finding the right thing.
  • morphle 6mo ago
    Enernet power router is the name for the hardware that my small research institute developed since 1997. You find partially similar power router designs at the Fraunhofer institute and in several scientific papers. A power router routes "packets" of electricity around (converting from low voltage DC to high voltage DC or AC and vice versa), packets of internet data and packets of matter (like hot water in a district heating system). It is a fully software defined electricity network and internet router, power meters, firewall, inverters/converters, ground vault protection, vibration measurement and electrocution prevention cable monitoring system. I'm referencing all the prototypes I built over the years, the final mass manufactured model will be an order of magnitude cheaper because it will from only CMOS and SiC chips that we designed. Current 4x25Gbps/40kW models cost under 800 euro's (936 dollars excluding VAT and import tariff), the mass produced custom chip based model will be under 100 euro's. A power router replaces your breaker box, your solar panel and battery inverters and obsoletes all the power supplies in your house. It starts your washing machine, dryer, fridge, freezer, heatpump and optionally runs a small datacenter in your hot water vat from which you shower or brew tea. A power router saves more than 10% electricity now lost in your power inverters. It bypasses the national grid and the laws, taxes, grid costs, profit margins and transmission losses and the price for electricity generation. It saves thousands of euro's per year on your energy use and internet bills and optionally your water and sewage bills. A power router rewires the electricity infrastructure of the planet, energy expert Saul Griffith references it in the names of his organisations Rewire America and Rewire Australia, his youtube lectures, his books Electrify, Plug in and the Big Switch. Amory Lovins references it in his books and talks and Eben Moglen in two of his talks. It is a bunch of chips in a network of conductors (metal cables) and optical fiber that connects buildings together in a neigborhood. You directly connect a network of solar cells (there are between 60 and 122 solar cells in each solar panel) to mppt dc-dc inverter chips that output around 3 volts directly to a network of battery cells (that form a battery pack) and that aggregate flows into a runtime programmable first stage dc-ac-dc inverter module that than outputs (power routes) high voltage AC to legacy machines, USB-C low voltage to charge all your electronics and high voltage DC to cables to the neighborhood (a replacement of the national grid) or to the ev cars and trucks. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publication/309254511_Fiberhood_Smart_Grid/links/5807410c08ae5ad1881691e3/Fiberhood-Smart-Grid.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...