Agreed with you that full decentralization of the grid will of course never happen, but the trend towards more DERs penetrating the market certainly seems like it will happen. One of the issues in the spiral you present is that the ones who are most likely to get left behind are low income households who may not be able to afford the investment, but for whom the benefits would be most profound. Is GIS something that can tap into this market in a useful way?

Dear Bill from ESRI, 

We are building exactly what you are talking about. We have taken it a step further. We are installing the first prototype of our design of a 9.6 kiloWatt solar concentrator.

Yes, you got it right - a solar concentrator in household size. Not the usual, non-scalable fresnell-lense, or similar. It can be scaled up (if one has the plot size..) to maximum 12 MegaWatt as I write these lines. We expect 99% of the use to be in the range between 10 kiloWatt and 250 kiloWatt. 

With most of the human-inhabited world having more than 1200 kWh per square meter per year, it is not difficult to get sufficient with power, almost no matter how this is done. Someone calculated that in a distributed system, we can cater for the current 159 PetaWatthour annual world energy consumption, by around 100,000 square kilometer of solar receptors. In comparison, we currently NET - that is - when additions are being included - slaughter 73,000 square kilometer of forest every year.

If a few thousand men with machines (largely in Brazil currently) can slaughter 73,000 square kilometers of land, annually, then we (7 billion people) can also build 100,000 square kilometer of solar receptors!

Besides which - the occurrence of deserts or "useless" land areas all over the world, is rampant, so we do not need to "set aside" special areas. In fact, setting up a distributed system of energy in such arid areas, could cater for re-grabbing some of the useless land and make it more habitable (irrigation etc)

So. What is it, WE are doing, in Rational Intuitive ? (We are producing this, in Denmark). 

We are somewhere 5 times cheaper in energy production than solar panels.

Our systems are designed to last 50+ years with minimal maintenance.

The system is designed so that it can be produced in each country of the world. It can be built by a metal workshop, and it can also - largely - be lasercut in an industrialized process.

Once we have tried out the production of the system, ourselves, we will give it away to those who would like to produce it, against a license. 

So this is a fully modern, industry quality steel construction, with modular engineering for full scalability - heat storage for grey days (we expect, around equator, to be able to hold 30 days of heat consumption for a household, in a 20 tonnes of stone-storage) - and use of TEG's for electricity generation (and much more).

As we do not need electricity for cooking, baking, household heating, water boiling, showering - as that is covered by the solar heating storage - (to which we feed the solar concentrator) - all that is needed is a few hundred Watt for light, TV, music system, chargers... Light power consumption has come down from 1,000's of Watts to some few hundred Watt's as LED's came onboard. LED's are easily fed with DC power :-). Put 6 LED's in a string, and you can lit them up with no loss, from a 12 Volt source. Put 20 LED's in parallel and feed them with power from a TEG. None of this is unusual.

So. 

Your vision is indeed true. There may indeed be industries where we still think that we need large scale energy - in example - Cement factories, Paper mills etc. - however - even Cement can be manufactured in small scale. That was done even 1000's of years ago by the Egyptians and other nationalities and cultures. So. The only reason why Cement factories and other large scale factories were built was to make it more efficient, and to centralize production and / to profit.

A lot of the industrialized food production is apparently also going down the drain, as it is being labelled unfit for human consumption - full of chemicals, production optimizers, fertilizers, pesticides and what do you have. In general the agenda now is: Everything coming from a box from a factory is largely not edible.

So - yes, Bill, you are right - this development is happening as we speak. This is not theory. This is my reality every day, in Rational Intuitive. 

I am in a few minutes going down to my workshop - a shipping container - where I am building it. We are two founders of this.

To Matt Chester's comment here below - our solar concentrator construction is by far cheaper than charcoal and firewood. We expect it to be used 24/7/365 in the poorest of all households.. This will render the need for daily multiple hours of firewood collection obsolete. This will ensure that trees growing here and there, are not being cut down, but can grow, and hopefully, in time, regrow the forest cover on Earth.

Sincerely

Rational Intuitive IVS (Denmark)

David Svarrer / Thomas Høyer

CEO / Chairman

Dear Bill, 

I have chosen to answer the later part of your post in this step 2. You mention that the energy / utility grid is like the internet, and that we can deliver back to the net etc. etc. - yes, that is theoretically true - however - if you see how this went in Denmark (where I am from), it is like you are being thrown peanuts to, when you deliver back to the net. The rest is being absorbed in exorbitant "net, transmission" fees and costs. Some 5% of the revenue is then the energy, the rest is simply fees and cost.

There is an important part, which makes your allegory to the internet not hold: If I have energy locally, it is not like this energy has another flavour than the energy I would get from the utility. You mention a need for "extra boost"? Well - the solution we are putting up, based on a heat storage, can do all the boost you need. We set up a 5 kiloWatt generator (running on the heat), and we normally only need some 500 to 1000 Watt. SO, if we need to lit up the entire house, and garden and neighbour municipality - we will have plenty of extra power if we want. 

The energy is different from the Internet in that the energy does not provide another flavour. THe internet truly runs on a networked structure - but even that may become history soon. Did you read about the Hiperlan I and Hiperlan II ? These "Fishnet structures" are spreading slowly and surely, rendering the utility-grid-based-like internet also not working. We have serious problems with centralized structures - namely that these can be overtaken by people who have sinister motives - like we have seen in India, where Modi has closed down Kashmir - locked down phones, internet, and everything.

We have seen it in "Gods own country" (not so Godly anymore after the election of Trump), where huge magnates are abusing their powers against the people, against the constitution - but due to systematic under-education of the American population the Rama Scream which ought to happen - in the wake of Cambridge Analytica's assistance to Trump to get elected - NOTHING HAPPEN. It is like - people either do not have the energy - or the knowledge - or the insight - or - they have been segregated by their own addiction to devices - so they do not meet anymore - and - get alienated - and manipulable. 

So - the energy utility net is by far not the same as the internet - due to the enormous difference, that energy comes in one flavour - power or not - while the internet carries the at least currently broadly accepted illusion that its content is of huge/great value.

Therefore, you cannot disconnect the communications channels - but given that people have a local energy source - indeed there is no need for any "Cloud function". Let us just take the Cloud function, and the industrialized approach to everything (Centralize and your business is set) - given that the Internet is likely to become a massively distributed function based on massive local communcation cells forming the net by their presence - even that ICANN operated, centrally controlled, massively surveilled system will be rendered obsolete, and replaced by massively distributed, completely uncontrollable communication structures.

This is a natural counter-move from a more and more suppressed and oppressed global population. Suppressed and oppressed both politically and automatically, so to say. The automation leaves / renders lots of people without means to live, based on this also largely accepted falsehood that one must have money to live - and in order to have money, one either need to be running a business or having a job. It means that hundreds of millions of people, who are potentially valuable in terms of their capability, are lost on the ground, due to that the automation renders them unable to fit into the industrial watch-clock - there is no space for THEIR cug-wheel. 

Therefore, Bill, there are things coming up now and in the next decades - which you may see as the quietest revolution on Earth - No blood shed (hopefully!), no unrest, just slow change-over, gradually, where the new form of money will be in the form of energy - which cannot be abused like the current American  borrow-out-the-american-dollar-note abuse of outer countries. America is for instance printing their notes, free of any cost - it just cost the paper they are printed on - then borrowing them out to other countries - and thereby they finance an inflation while receiving goods for it. When the energy-backed notes comes out - and wait and see - they will -... This story of abuse ends. 

So - the energy-revolution where energy become owned by the people - is the first step. What is coming after that, is a disruption of a scale you may not have even dreamt about ... 

IF THIS DOES NOT happen - then you will see Jared Diamond's words become true about America (and many other so-called civilizations too) - they will become extinct, in a speed more rapid than your worst nightmare. America is - if you have not paid attention to it - on its way down the abyss. Canada is not. America only. Certain of the higher developed countries - including Denmark where I come from - are on the same death-path. According to Jared Diamond the descent into the abyss starts at that point where the rulers / political leaders finally manage to disconnect themselves from any repercussions of their misdeeds. If you therefore are in doubt - read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. If you are in doubt about who Jared Diamond is - just check his background... :-)

Well. I am heading for my workshop - because I am massively heading to establish a more peaceful world, where everyone has their own, cheap, storable energy or their own consumption - and - to support their neighbours too when this big party is coming up...

Have a nice day

David Svarrer

Hello Bill,

Thanks for your interesting post and we agree with your overall metaphor that tomorrow's grid will be like the IT cloud - here at GenCell we call it the "Energy Cloud" if you will. In this distributed energy ecosystem, in addition to the important role of the GIS, there is also a need for extremely reliable independent standby power sources that, in case of grid outages, can startup on-demand and contribute stored energy for any prolonged duration until the grid can be restored.

By connecting across the grid in a microgrid topology several of these power sources - i.e. fuel cells that rely for fuel on stored hydrogen electrolyzed from water - we reinforce grid stability, stability that is now more important than before because going forward the grid is increasingly incorporating numerous intermittent renewable energy sources whose availability is at times limited in certain weather conditions. It is important to note that the energy for the electrolysis can leverage surplus renewable energy in the grid that would otherwise be lost.

On the Cloud comment - I guess you have studied that cloud systems are now being insourced by the corporate businesses. 

Thereby they run the cloud systems on their own bare metal. They then run their application on the cloud system which now runs on their own hardware. 

The cloud system ensures that there is a standardized, scalable system to run on. The normal hardware with the normal operating systems does not provide that. 

In your context it would now resemble that the existing utility companies literally cuts the cables (distribution net), and centrally controls the utilization of the DER's and coordinates (with their massive experience in handling this) the distribution in local / smaller energy nets.

There is a very interesting example of this, on Bornholm - (country: Denmark) - where 800 houses have entered into an agreement where they within certain parameters are coordinating their energy consumption and storage - See https://www.danskenergi.dk/nyheder/bornholm-viser-vejen-fremtidens-energiforbrug - (Click on Google Translate - from Danish language to English) - and they save up to 30% in cost - as peaks are being flattened. This is a predecessor of DER's. 

Sincerely

David Svarrer