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Comment by morphle | Hacker News Reader

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 Fiberhood cooperative has a solution: the Enernet smart grid where you pay $0.01 per kWh. We wire up one in three houses or more in a neighborhood with power routers. People buy and sell only solar electricity from panels in the neighborhood, from batteries and from every ev charging station on every parking spot in the neighborhood and from every parked ev. Each participating house saves $2000 to $5000 per year for 30 years or more[2]. You also get free 25 Gbps internet. You heat your house with a heatpump or cool the house with an ice storage ac powered only by solar. If the cooperative makes any money the share the profit with all the members or they vote to buy more solar panels and batteries. The cooperative gives loans to houses that can not afford their own panels.

[1] Best version with info graffics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3bo-s_OY4Q or

Longer version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NicE0-N9ux0&list=TLPQMDcwNDI... or

short version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaHepQyE37Q

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Of course it comes with our charge and discharge circuitry which is the inverter and also acts as the bms. As far as I am aware as a scientist, we are the only one in the world who charge each battery cell in parallel and slower or pulsed without maxing out or overheating, that's why we get 20000 discharge cycles versus the 5000-8000 the battery manufacture quotes.

Ecoflow is actually a Chinese company.

> Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800

Is that available in the US? Can you share a link? That’s an amazing deal. I’ve been recommending server rack batteries (5kwh for $750) to people but if there is something better I’d love to see it.

Fiberhood has an office in Tucson Arizona and will ship to the US if you want to to pay Trumps tariffs. I'm not aware of reasonably priced good battery or inverter makers in the US, besides ourselves (we are a non-profit so we are cheaper).

It is however not that simple to just give you a link, we need to hear from you for what electronics the software system needs to be fine-tuned. We need to understand what battery and electronics you need for each situation. As a scientist I know for a fact that no one in the world makes good battery systems yet, they are all wrongly designed (especially the ev and car batteries). You can easily spot that yourself, no one charges each individual battery cell individually in parallel. Everyone, including the scientists, charges battery packs in series and has battery management systems and ac-dc or dc-dc inverters that are not designed for the particular battery type and brand. Not a single one. If you ever find one that does charge and discharge each cell in parallel and slowly between 50% and 80%, please tell us and we'll tell the world. Right now only Fiberhood electronics charges cells correctly with specially made charger circuitry. The $0.50 to $2 networked printed circuit boards per battery cell we currently sell are the prototypes for the $0.10 battery charging microcontroller chips that we are making.

You can find dozens of Youtube influencers who test and or build cheap serially charged battery packs and your server rack batteries and inverter systems that you can find on professional China business directories, Tabao, Aliexpress and the like. But they are not exactly what you need and they damage your cells by charging them wrongly. No service, no warranties, no insurance, no buyers protection, buyer beware.

Be aware that ordering such systems directly in China is fraught with difficulties, its easy to lose your money.

Price quote in this thread below, 10.680 kWh for $700.30, $230 for charge circuitry, electronics, we call Enernet Power router.

Ecoflow is overpriced crap for people who have no idea what ESS systems are like and so just buy a terrible product from a powerbank manufacturer.

That’s because that’s how the grid is paid for.

Maybe a max-capacity price would be better for household grid connections, but that doesn’t change the fact that the grid needs to be paid for.

The price for grid power ought to be somewhat higher than the the grid operator(s) pay at the place where the power is delivered into the grid plus their own costs for running the actual grid. So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?

The grid is a nationwide electrical circuit with requirements to connect to most buildings, and with demanding uptime and safety requirements. How much ought building and maintaining that to cost?

>So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?

Zero. I think we do not need the national grid and its vastly overpriced (order of magnitude) electricity anymore. A local DC grid, an abundance of solar and huge batteries is all you need.

For example in the Netherlands, 18 million people, 9 million houses or buildings, the national grid needs to triple in size and 1 million houses and almost 20.000 large companies are on a 10 year waiting list to get a connection (so the move abroad or build their own solar grid). And even if you are on the grid, you pay 50% taxes and €0,31 to €0,78 per kWh. If you are on our Enernet, you only pay around €0.0044 per kWh ($0.0051756/kWh). That is 70 times to 177 times overpriced!!! (calculations in this thread lower down).

It's not overpriced. If it was, the grid operator would be raking in massive profits because they're selling way above cost. In reality grid operators have small margins, this indicates there is no overpricing.

Do you get paid less for power fed to the grid than power sold at retail? Yes. Because they're different things. You get say 5 cents for a kWh fed back to the grid, while you pay more like 25c. But guess what? Wholesalers also get 5 cents to sell to the grid. It's just that there's an additional 20 cents in grid operation and taxes for a retail price.

Taxes you can't avoid, it's not a 'scam'. It's money you pay that goes into public funds and returns to the public, and is spent by people you can vote to elect to represent you.

Grid costs also aren't a scam, they're just a cost of doing business. Again, profit margins are small, so they're pricing based on cost, not based on scam.

And it's all entirely optional. You can just install batteries yourself. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to use the grid. But surprise surprise, there's no reason to think that a small network is on average cheaper than a big network. The bigger the network the easier it is to share storage capacity and offload excesses from one place to another. It's the reason most states and countries try to build interconnectors to even build international grids, and why islands like Cyprus that don't interconnect and have small markets have the highest electricity prices. It's why anyone who builds a home and has the choice to connect to an available grid or not, does so. And why land and homes in locations without grid-access are valued less, because they're more expensive to set-up.

The cost of a nationwide grid is significant. Depending on the terrain and population density, it usually nets out at somewhere between 30%-50% the overall cost of electricity. Sure, if you run a microgrid among a few houses, you won't pay those costs, but someone has to pay the cost to maintain the km of lines to reach deep into the mountains of Bavaria.

Microgrids also have some black swan events that can result in outage; if you are reliant on solar and storage but then experience a 7-day long period of stormy weather and no production. As you note, off-grid is always an option, and when you seriously look into it, you quickly find that costs to have that 24/7/365 service are many times more than just paying to connect to the grid.

At least in the us - the only way a utility can really make more money is by spending more money (as they get a return from the utility commission on a vested capital - massive oversimplification) but it means utilities are not incentivized to spend less rather than more…

The government employees who approve or deny the utility’s priced have an incentive to not approve higher prices. Their bosses are usually elected, and higher utility prices are very unpopular.

I was told by a former southern company exec that the McKinsey did a study for them and their largest competitive advantage was regulatory capture in the states in which they operate - unfortunately I think the politicians are more beholden to the utilities than their constituents..

Same in Australia, after they were corporatised (turned into companies run for profit rather than run as a service by some level of government) it was recognised that as natural monopolies there would need to be some sort of regulation on how much money they could recover, it was decided a method based on their costs was best, so they spent bad money agter good im expanding the network hugely (based on crazy projections of growth in demand to nowhere) rather than building resilience into the network and lowering their costs.

And that’s not even the cost of marketisation, that’s just the regulated network costs.

Series of awful blunders.

The price doubled in 6 years.

It’s really not - we built a rather large solar plant for one of our facilities offsetting like at most like 15% of demand, but because we were paying high utility rates it was a low double digit ROI project just on the spread between us it commercial rates and our cost of production (even higher when you added in the tax incentives) if you can build solar at utility scale costs and defray commercial or retail rates it’s a pretty good deal the problem is getting those utility scale cost structures when the projects are small…

The value of electricity is extremely time dependent. You can easily overproduce solar power for your house during the day fairly cheaply. However batteries + gas generators for cloudy day quickly make the cost significantly higher.

The grid gives you expensive guarantees about reliability. Just giving power does not do that.

We don't care. We want cheaper electric like other countries and want our politicians to make it happen

Blah blah contracts blah markets blah always an excuse in the UK for why everything is more expensive than other countries

Is there a wall in the way? Tear it down. Make it happen

God we demand so little of our politicians in reality

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.

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

Sounds like Fiberhood is adjacent to https://solarunitedneighbors.org/ ?

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.

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.

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!

We used to have a public website but Enernet is a technical and political solution for whole communities, companies and factories, not for single individuals.

Please send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com with the location of the proposed Enernet smart grid and we'll find out if there is enough interest in your neigborhood (around 10 participants) to set it up.

Enernet is a high tech solution for getting the best ,cheapest, sustainable energy, internet, mobile phone, transport (cars, busses, trucks) and housing in a neighborhood for people and companies.

If you wire up all buildings with fiber and cables to each other you can replace the national grid, its laws, taxes and always high prices with a solar energy system at cost price, saving several thousand euro's per house per year. Instead we put an abundance of solar cells up and install insulation, thermal and electrical storage tailored to the local situation. We fund it from the large savings we create. The participants will decide what will be installed, so every Enernet smart grid is different. Our Fiberhood coop has special electronics that make batteries a lot cheaper and safer and replace the National AC grid with a DC grid that has almost no transmission losses. We also distribute 25 Gbps internet and establish a small datacenter to heat water cheaply with the waste heat. The savings from all your utility bills pay for the installation and upkeep of the Enernet network.

A short description https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't doubt that you can have a low marginal cost, but you still have to invest money to get this system installed. You dismissed my argument as 'vague and hand-wavy', so please give a concrete estimate how much it would cost to install a 10kW system on a typical house in the US midwest, and maybe in Europe or Australia.

25 400W solar panels at $0,08/Wp =$800.00 solar panels bought in bulk

metal poles and brackets $275

10 EVE 334AH 3.2V= 10,680 kWh $70.30 =$700.30 batteries bought in bulk

Enernet Power Router components $290 (I left out 2/3 of components because this is such a small installation and needs no 4x25 Gbps internet)

Cables $230,50

Metal enclosure $61

Install fee 5 hours two people $23 per hour = $230

==============================

$2,587.80

So your "capital cost of solar right now of 1$/W" is 0.26$/W

10000 x $1W nominally installed =10000 kwh per year times 30 years = 3000,000 kWh total power yield

$2587.80/300,000=$0.00862333 per 1 kWh LCOE 30 years $2587.80/500,000=$0.0051756 per 1 kWh LCOE 50 years

These numbers are of day prices of today. Currently the battery and solar prices are high because of the high oil and gas prices of the US/Israel/Lebanon/Iran/Ukraine/Sudan wars, there is a steep battery and solar panel price rise. The overal LOCE is still hand-wavy in that several costs might happen in the 50 year of operation: Drop of 20% solar panel yield by breaking glass, cost of cleaning the panels, cable replacement, accidental electronics wear en tear, extra maintainance labour cost. Also, I doubt you need a loan to pay for $2582.80. If you did at a compound 3% interest rate with you would pay over 50 years, $11,344.67, more than 4,3 times than if you payed up front (from an online calculator, if you payed off per month than just the interest it would be lower).

But whoever is right, you'll certainly stay under $0,01 per kWh from solar and round trip storage cost in batteries.

If you are lucky, it will be almost half that, $0,005 per kWh.

To heat your apartment and drive all over the American continent with your electric car you'll need more than 10kW for an average US midwestern house.

Thank you, great info. You have great suppliers though: I can get close on batteries (I see four for $355, so $88 instead of your $70) but for panels the best I can get is $220 instead of your $32---how do you go about getting them at those prices? Also, what Ethernet Power Router for $290? Is that a Fiberhood product? How and where would I order it?

>how do you go about getting them at those prices?

Buy a 40 shipping container with aproximately 770 panels in the factory loading lot, truck to Shenzen harbor, ship to a port in the USA, Belém/Natal/Manaus or Rotterdam, Our own truck to the customer.

Please, where do you get your 4 LifePo4 batteries for $355? I only have one source for $70, I want more sources.

Edit: Thank you, I just ordered 8400 of your batteries (see h3lp his comment's Google link below) for less than $600,000 (at a discount). Picking them up in two weeks.

From googling, didn't actually use them https://eelbattery.myshopify.com/products/original-grade-a-e...

>Also, what Ethernet Power Router for $290?

My company product, you'll get the datasheets and video as part of the order contract. See my white paper for the old model, its much upgraded since.

>Is that a Fiberhood product?

A Morphle and a Fiberhood product. Morphle is the company mass-producing electronics and chips, including the chargers, dischargers, mppt a.k.a. the Enernet Power Routers. Fiberhood cooperative sells and installs the complete infrastructure systems: Enernet systems and fiber optic internet (since 1987, we were one of the first internet providers), batteries, solar panels, power routers, tiny houses and water tanks.

>How and where would I order it?

With me in Europe or Ukraine or our office in Tucson or Montreal. +31617428596 Signal, Facetime, Whatsapp, Telegram.

You can also bundle your solar panel or battery bulk orders with us, we'll ship them directly to you in the US from the Shenzen factory region or the Poland or US wharehouse. We won't charge you a profit margin, we get a larger joint order and that gets us both a discount, less chipping cost and lower insurance. We have an agent in Shenzen overseeing the loading at the factories.

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.

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/publica...

Got it, thank you!

>runs a small datacenter in your hot water vat from which you shower or brew tea

What?

Plus you become indépendant from toxic decisions taken by politicians.

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