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Comment by qqqwerty | Hacker News Reader

Please tell me how the output of a solar system will ever be useful to an ad company. The fact that you own a solar system is easily obtainable in a number of different ways (permit data, google earth, etc...). The fact that you own a solar system might provide some minuscule value to an ad company but the production data of that system is literally useless for ad targeting. A solar system is passive generation asset. It literally sits there and soaks up irradiance from the sun. The variation of that output is completely independent of the people that live in the house.

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The telemetry from a solar system includes the power being consumed in real-time, which can be used to infer occupation of the premises.

Data brokers accumulate various bits of data that are unreliable and useless on their own but in aggregate they can be used to "connect the dots". If an IP address & user agent pair or tracking cookie only lights up when the solar system detects significant power draw suggesting someone is at home, you can tie a pseudonymous IP or tracking cookie to the solar system data which presumably would include name or some other bit of identifying info.

Now repeat that with all the other information you've got and you're able to paint a very detailed profile off someone.

Everyone in this sub-thread is shifting the goal posts. There is no requirement that solar inverters need to be aware of household power consumption. You can certainly set that up if you want, but an installation in its most basic form would not include that feature. You simply connect the inverter to the house panel and what you don't use flows back through your utility meter and onto the grid.

And again, the solar data by itself is going to be nearly useless as it is entirely a function of the irradiance on the panels, and does nothing to reveal customer behavior.

A little fuzzy AI and it will know your routine to the minute. It can guess what room you are in and what activity based on power usage alone. It is not only monitoring the sun, but how much power is left it can feed back into the grid.

I once worked at a greentech firm. Someone's hackathon project one year used energy usage data to predict customers' stock prices.

Will it work on the micro level of an individual home? Maybe, maybe not, but the potential for that data to be used to model behavior is definitely there.

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