Now You Can Buy Solar Power from Your Neighbor

As a Massachusetts resident with solar panels I can tell you that this is a useful service. In this state you do not get paid for the over production and instead it just accumulates in your account. I currently have a $500 credit with the electric company and no good way to cash out.

There is a mechanism in place to give someone else your extra credit but then you need to figure out how to charge them by looking at your bill every month. There is also a requirement that the person you transfer to must be in the same "ISO-NE load zone" and I haven't figure out what that means yet. It probably means that my neighbors are ok, but my co-workers might not be an option.

I don't know know how they set their rates, but I would be happy to sell people electricity at 75% of what they pay the power company since I am not doing anything with my extra as it is.

To answer the power or money question: This is just a money transfer. It is similar to the way anyone can purchase renewable energy for a 10% premium. They don't send you different electrons, it just gets paid differently.

This is just... odd! In the UK, the Government pay me (via my energy company) for every kWh I generate. I also get paid for every unit I export.

Once a quarter (or automatically if I have a smart-meter) I take meter readings and email them to the Energy Company. A few days later they transfer the cash to my account.

Why bother with this middleman? What's the use of an inefficient 3rd party? Energy is fungible. Unless you've actually got a direct wire between your panels and your neighbour's property, this is just nonsense.

Do they actually transfer power between "host" and "partner", or just money?

There is nothing new about the technology or the business model. Maybe it's an unusual one for Americans, but for everyone else, it's not.

Hasn't this been covered through the Utilities, already? Most utilities here allow you to buy different plans, normal electricity, or electricity generated from renewable sources. At the end of the day it's just a 'accounting trick', as it's not like the green energy is being routed specifically to you, you get the same energy, most of it from a coal burning plant, but your payments are earmarked (in the accounting) to pay for existing or new green energy projects, and you hope they're audited such that this is actually true (as opposed to selling 15% of their electricity as 'green' when their green sources are only 5% and growing slowly).

And this isn't even any different from having your own solar, unless you're in a remote location unconnected to the grid and uninterested in interconnecting to the grid. Most people who have solar simply get two energy meters. One of your power being generated and going to the grid (not to your own home), and one of power from the grid going into your home. It's pretty rare that you actually use the energy that the panels on your roof generate. Which means that whether those panels are on your own roof, or on the other side of the planet, doesn't really make any difference as long as they cost the same and have the same sun conditions. Except of course for the fact your home rises in value with panels on them because panels are essentially a small currency printer that takes sunlight as its ink, which has value.

Which brings me to the weirdness of this project. People with roofs get free panels and some free electricity. And people without roofs have to pay for that, which is obviously going to be quite expensive. Residential solar is already 2x, almost 3x as expensive as industrial solar projects, plus solar is still more expensive than your utility in the first place, and then you have to pay for extra panels for someone else's energy bill, plus the panels you do pay for aren't owned by you and don't add value to your home, and of course the energy of the panels doesn't even go directly to you, or hell even directly to the person whose house's panels you're paying for. I don't see why this would be a better idea than buying solar credits, shares in an industrial solar farm or green energy from your utility. It sounds like a waste of money to me, magnifying the very concern that is keeping solar from taking over the energy market.

For example that's what vandebron.nl does here in the Netherlands. They essentially sell green energy credits (I call them credits not because it's not green energy, but because it's delivered to the grid in general, and not to them specifically) to consumers by facilitating the financial link between independent producers (e.g. a farmer who has a wind turbine and who can sell to 600 households) and the consumer.