Brooklyn’s Latest Craze: Making Your Own Electric Grid | Hacker News Reader

Brooklyn’s Latest Craze: Making Your Own Electric Grid

politico.com

86 pointsohjeez51 comments

Can someone explain how this works? It's not like they built a new grid in Brooklyn. I'm not sure why it's called a micro grid. Presumably if the house with the panels sends its excess into the regular grid they get credits or money for this from the local electricity utility. But to make this trading across the grid happen is there some market system that allows them to say, hey this electricity generated over here is bought by this consumer over here? If so that seems like it has nothing to do with block chain and is just an offering of the local utility and/or the energy market regulator.

Actually, it kind of sounds like all this company is doing is being a middle man to collect money from customers who want to feel green without adding any value.

(I may have this completely wrong, I am genuinely curious how this makes sense though.)

It's an ETH coin scam. Swoop in, act as middle man, skim off the top of ever transaction, use puff pieces like this article to pump up the value of your coin, then cash out.

As a rule, anytime "blockchain" shows up someplace where it makes no sense someone is pulling a scam somewhere.

Especially with a centralized authority being LO3. I don't get the point of using a blockchain in this case, who is confirming the transacations? What is the incentive for confirmation?

Also if LO3s customers are just buying from the grid, are they paying LO3 on top of what they pay their utility? If so what is the value added by LO3 at all?

The value is added to LO3's shareholders, not the users. This is a common theme with companies nowadays.

Right. Because if LO3 is the one who is auditing and moving money around, why do we need a Blockchain at all? Can’t a database they admin do the same thing?

Well a block chain is inherently auditable isn't it ? I thought it was an open tech, not a closed system.

But is that something people really need? To be able to audit their electricity transactions via the blockchain? Someone is going to have to write a tool (this is well beyond the average person), and that tool could easily be flawed. The meters themselves also aren't easily auditable... so many points of failure why is a blockchain the thing that matters?

I thought the tooling was already there, you would "just" push your transaction on the network and let it be.

What tooling exists for me to aggregate my electricity costs against anonymous wallet hashes and see the unique amounts to each neighbor?

Disclaimer: never used BC. I meant BC and ETH are generic data structure, you put anything you want in it and retrieve later to create a new transaction.

Regardless of the actual coin, where's the tooling for the enduser to do this verification? They go to there computer and... what happens?

This has to be built by someone, and then that has to be trusted. I can't imagine many people wanting to do such a thing on any side...

The article even mentions that the utility provider ConEd in Brookyln offers green energy, so there's almost no point in LO3's services.

Not that I'm an expert in electrical grids, but I'd rather the actual grid coordinate a changeover to renewable sources, because these actors just sound like they're selling a scam that'll end with a class-action lawsuit someday.

But this company allows homeowners to sell their electricity in a competitive market instead of accepting the monopsony price of the electric system.

Not sure how charging a transaction fee makes it a scam. That's what every company that provides a market platform does.

While it's entirely possible that the blockchain serves no functional purpose in this case that couldn't be done equally well with a web server, it's also possible that they've structured the company so that some parts are done automatically, by a smart contract on the blockchain, resulting in the company having less control than it would otherwise have.

Scepticism is a good thing. Making serious allegations based solely on speculation is not.

I think you're mostly right, but it's hard to tell.

The company doing this, LO3 Energy, is installing one piece of hardware - a "Tag Element" - next to a participant's existing energy meter.

The Tag measures how much excess electricity a PV/Solar panel generates.

The Tag sends that information on LO3's blockchain ("Transactive Platform") - essentially crediting whoever produced the electricity, and giving another participant the option to buy this "excess energy" directly from the PV/solar installation.

The end result is that someone can feel like they've bought the exact electrons from the participant with the PV/solar installation, while in reality, they've just bought some more energy from the grid.

I'm not sure how the pricing scheme operates, and if there are different prices for dirty grid energy vs renewable neighbor microgrid energy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLsKQfjbYNg

I'm also not sure how or why the project is marketing that this grid could withstand a power outage or extreme weather as they are not installing direct physical lines between the PV/Solar producers and other microgrid users. Presumably the entire system would go down if the main utility went down - the PV/Solar guys could power their own homes, but there would be no way to get that electricity to other consumers.

Under New York State's net metering rules residential solar panel owners get 1:1 retail credit for excess power put back onto the grid. The only way I could see a seller coming out ahead by selling to a neighbor vs selling to con-ed would be if the neighbor is willing to pay above retail. And even in that case NYS has solar power collectives and private third party energy producers selling solar power through the grid.

It's true that you can't really "buy" specific electrons from a micro-producer.* But providing a platform for the exchange can be beneficial, because it allows the producer to monetize their activity in a way that might not otherwise be possible, creating the financial incentives for them and others to (further) invest in creating more production capacity. Of course, for this to be useful the revenue obtained through the platform has to be higher than what you could get without it.

This is the same idea as Google and Facebook signing power purchase agreements with wind or solar farms. Goog/FB of course get their power from the grid and not a direct link to the wind/solar farm, but by creating the financial instrument of the PPA (typically at a higher than market price) they allow the producer to finance their project which can make the difference between it being built or not. It's a lot easier to finance a project when someone has committed to buy all your power at a fixed price for 20 years vs the uncertainty involved in the spot power market.

* this is true even at a conceptual level without getting into the physics of how electrons don't actually get transmitted from a power plant all the way to your house

It seems to me the benefit would be to remove the monopsony purchasing power that the traditional electricity systems holds over ordinary buyers and sellers, by allowing other homeowners in your area to bid on the price.

I am not sure how the LO3 system works in particular. But I have been involved in helping create a still experimental system that enables exactly the use case you described: make trading across the grid happen by allowing producers and consumers to agree on the amount and origins of the electricity in circulation at any given point in time.

https://drive.google.com/a/stromdao.com/file/d/0B0DEak0BnhBf...

https://github.com/energychain/StromDAO-BusinessObject

Personally I think we are missing "peer authority" in the Brooklyn grid. As long as we just electricity vs. money exchange is dealed with there is no real added value. From my point of few a Business Object (as linked) for the energy blockchain drives new services and general business transformation better than just redo something based on Hype-Tec.

Many commenters are missing two big advantages of this system. (1) This is a micro-grid. "Microgrids minimise the amount of energy lost through transmission; as an estimated 5% of electricity created in the US is lost in transit, microgrids provide an efficient alternative. The Brooklyn microgrid also economically benefits those who have installed solar panels." http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-brooklyn...

(2) The market is peer-to-peer, so prices for buying and selling aren't dictated by a monopoly and monopsony power which could ripoff both the regular homeowners and solar-panel owners, but rather a competitive market.

(3) The grid is p2p and thus is disaster-resilient. Think back to Hurricane Sandy and the 2003 NY State blackout.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLsKQfjbYNg - "Right now the way the utility grid works, you don't know where your electrons come from and there isn't really a way for you to account that those electrons are making it to you, and no way to account for who touched the electrons on their way to you. That doesn't have to be the case."

I may be cynical here but the problems described in the above either don't seem like problems or they don't actually solve them. I've never wondered "who touched my electrons". I've never thought "I wish I could audit my electric utility's transaction history through a blockchain". They talk in the article about about having backup power if the main grid goes down, but there's no new wiring here so it doesn't do that.

I just have no idea what value this company provides other than a box that tells you who touched your electrons.

I think they're just working up to a business model whereby the company will sell bespoke artisanal hand-made organic gluten-free electrons.

If they want to make it in Brooklyn, those electrons better be vegan and cold brewed with optional avocado.

waka waka waka

may be confusing with the bay

Electrons travel way slower than the energy they transfer. Also, the grid provides alternating current, so the electrons never travel more than a few inches.

So if you want to know where your electrons come from, well, they all come from the wiring in your house.

"Electron". There's only one ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

In an AC power grid, which is what all city scale power grids are these days, there is NO net movement of electrons in the wire. The electron that just went into your "light bulb" will pop out the same wire (not the other) a moment latter without actually reaching the light emitting part. Thus accounting for where the electrons come from is complete nonsense.

The field travels at nearly the speed of light, but there is no movement there.

Also, electrons are fundamentally indistinguishable, so even in a DC circuit, wondering where they came from is stupid.

I thought the same, until I tried free range, single source electrons.

I prefer uniformly spin-aligned electrons.

That is beside the point. THe advantage of trading energy credits with your neighbors is that you don't have to obey the monopoly selling and monopsony purchase price that a traditional electric company dictates.

I love the idea. I think microgrids make sense for a lot of applications. However, I don't see how the blockchain really fits in to it. At the end of the day, someone has to maintain the shared infrastructure: the wires that connect the homes in the microgrid, and presumably some hardware to manage connecting to the macrogrid. That organization a) needs to be funded somehow and b) is a logical central party for managing the flow of electrons and money.

Yeah, it really seems like a better application of a 'micro-grid' would be to provide alternative green electricity to your neighbors.

Like okay, you have a bunch of solar panels and a battery bank. Why not let people plug in at a kiosk near the bank? At a micro scale, your neighbors could hook up a heavy-duty appliance cable or two to their houses. You could use RFID cards, magstrip cards, username/password, a web frontend, an app, etc for identification, metering, and billing.

Sure you could accept cryptocurrency for account credits, but you could also accept cash or credit/debit. It's just another payment processor.

Yes, for example I think this makes sense for apartment buildings and other communal living situations. I think it would make sense to do solar and/or CHP depending on regional weather.

Well, assuming the law lets you do that at all. In my European country, my uncle tried to do something similar (purchase a wind turbine and sell electricity to his village neighbors) and he discovered there's simply no legal way to sell electricity except to the main grid company.

I think "where did my electrons come from" is a question that many environmentally conscious but not particularly technical people are asking. My parents got a letter from our power company about ESCOs and I wound up having to explain to my mother how a power grid works and how the generators put power in and we take power out, but not necessarily the same power that we purchased from them. (It seems a lot of people have trouble with the concept of fungible commodities in general, which is why the envelope budgeting method is so successful: it 'de-funges' the money and makes the budget a lot easier to think about.)

It sounds like this company is taking advantage of this confusion to give their customers peace of mind about actually "knowing" where their electricity came from, instead of sending some money off to the power company and hoping they do what they said they would with it. To this they add some buzzwords like "blockchain" and "sharing economy" to make the company more interesting so it gets featured in news articles. There may be some actual technical merit in there, but it's very difficult to tell under the hype.

The article is pretty light on details. It's unclear if there's any new physical infrastructure being put in place or if the "microgrid" is a financial overlay built on top of con-ed's wires. And I'm entirely unclear where exactly a blockchain fits into the architecture.

Is this a pg-style submarine?

I don't think there's much substance, to read this.

If anything it almost seems like this company is "Enron"-ing its way into a middle man rent collector role without doing much of note.

I would live to sell my excess solar energy on the public markets for anything near retail costs. Currently PG&E has a sweetheart deal where they resell it for retail and pay me wholesale. That's approximately a 1000% markup. Not bad.

How is that a sweetheart deal? Would you be outraged if the local supermarket wouldn't buy eggs from you at retail price? How could they possibly stay in business if they were forced to pay their suppliers the same amount of money they charged their customers?

Even wholesale is generous since actual suppliers they deal with voluntarily do things like guarantee certain availability and sell in bulk.

If only the supermarket could resell eggs at a 1000% markup! That would mean a dozen of eggs only cost them 3 cents.

The article didn't really go into detail on how LO3 uses the blockchain as part of their technology, so this may be unrelated, but this podcast [1] better articulates some insight into on how the blockchain could be used to affect the energy sector, specifically the grid.

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/beyond-bitcoin-...

Blockchain! Blockchain! It's how you know something is a gimmick.

Love the idea of micro grids. Why does it need to use blockchain?

Given how notoriously energy intensive it is to process a blockchain transaction, I wonder what the lower bound is for each transaction to use more energy than the solar panel outputs. Not sure how to do the math on that :)

Perhaps you were thinking about Bitcoin instead of blockchain? Blockchain doesn't have to rely on expensive mining, it's all matter of incentive structure. For a microgrid, fees and algos don't have to be that expensive.

I found an article saying they're working with ConsenSys, which uses Ethereum. Of course they might have an independent chain but that was my impression.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604227/blockchain-is-help...

Just wanted to say as a Brooklyn resident: I know nobody doing this. So maybe not "the latest craze"? Cool idea though.

Admittedly, I didn't read this yet but all I could think of when I read the title were hipsters dressing up like Nikola Tesla, accidentally electrocuting themselves.

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