Preliminary info for those coming here from social media and other places online that I may have linked to:
- https://holochain.org
- https://redgrid.io (currently the site is down at the moment so here’s an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20190725081506/https://redgrid.io/)
- https://ioe-book.herokuapp.com
In this post I’ll attempt to explore how renewable energy farms might work as a commons. Note that I haven’t participated in any Commons Engine classes, and the Commons Engine website otherwise seems to have relatively limited info on how commons-based mutual credit, asset-backed, stable value cryptocurrencies may be designed.
Recommended background reading may include:
Think of the above design for Holo fuel being redesigned for renewable energy production, where the unit of productivity is in kWh of renewable energy. The intention is to provide a way to fund the creation of new renewable energy generation, that is, to increase the total available supply of it. However, it may not be necessary to have a separate app that does that. Rather, an app that allows adaptive electricity trading, which is planned to be developed by Redgrid, could also allow extending credit limits to generators, similarly to how Holo Fuel economics is designed in the above box link, as well as other mechanisms that dynamically stabilise the price in response and counter to economic signals.
On the other hand, since the capital expense of a renewable energy system is higher than e.g. for a Holo port, particularly for commercial and utility scale systems, unless the credit limit extended can be very large (which may be difficult or impractical to do), it is likely to be helpful to provide a way to fund the installation of new systems. This is as opposed to providing an income stream for existing systems with adaptive electricity trading. It may be possible for multiple agent-generators to pool their credit limits together to fund a large community-owned renewable energy system, even at a utility scale. Whether that functionality would be within the adaptive energy trading app or used outside of it is an open question and is yet to be designed or implemented.
That said, it still seems worthwhile to build energy use cases, like those mentioned in this Internet of Energy book, as well as others like for electric vehicles and EV charging networks, with Holochain, the Internet of Energy, and Holo-fuel like cryptocurrencies. Think of apps and services like electric vehicle subscriptions (a la Steer EV) and electric vehicle charging and fleet management software (like e.g. Amp Control) being redesigned to run on Holochain with an Holo-fuel-like cryptocurrency, thus harnessing the benefits that these would provide relative to blockchains and centralized systems: namely better scalability (resulting in an ability to more quickly address the climate crisis/emergency); distribution in a p2p sense of the network, as well as better distribution of energy, production, influential power, wealth, and equality.
Renewable energy generators may include solar photovoltaic and thermal systems, wind turbines, pumped hydro; hydroelectric power that does not involve flooding vegetation to create a dam; geothermal; ocean thermal; tidal; or any other form of generation that is derived from renewable sources of energy (the Sun, wind, thermal gradients, motion of fluids like water and air, piezoelectric, waste biomass, etc), and not from fossil fuels or large-scale hydro, the latter of which involves flooding of vegetation. Bioenergy that is derived from primary agriculture should also be ruled out as it competes with other land uses, such as agriculture for food production, rainforests and other ecosystems, and other human land uses.
TODO: write more about the design with mechanisms to create a dynamic supply that stabilises in value in response and counter to economic signals.
A suggested approach to working on a smart energy app for EVs (maybe including charging management and usage, subscriptions, pay-per-drive and pay-per-ride, or probably just one of these to start with, while allowing for future extensibility) may include forking the Internet of Energy and developing that, in tandem with designing and developing the app. However, I don’t really need EVs enough to start a company built around them. Most of the time I’m happy to get around by pushbike! I gravitate more towards the idea of funding new renewable energy projects, and the apps that are already being built (or may have already been privately built with centralized, proprietary apps) by Redgrid. So perhaps it would be better to either work on the IoE with the hope of getting hired by Redgrid—which seems like a risky move, especially given the amount of voluntary work that I’ve already done; to get a job and hope to switch to a job with Redgrid down the track (this would be the least risky); or to work on another happ (like for funding new energy projects) or project, do freelance consulting, etc.
The least capital intensive option of the above ideas may be just an app for allowing electric vehicle owners
Other background reading includes:
- discussion and resources in https://chat.holochain.org/appsup/channels/commoning and https://chat.holochain.org/appsup/channels/commons-engine-org
- Redgrid, e.g.: https://ioe-book.herokuapp.com
- an archived, asset-backed, mutual credit cryptocurrency implementation prior to the Go implementation of Holochain: https://github.com/Holochain/transactor
- https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalable-cryptocurrencies-1eb7aebac6ae (written before Holochain, replace the word Ceptr with Holochain and it will read better)
Here are some similar posts by myself: