Small Solar and the Changing Grid

We usually think of solar in terms of panels, flat sheets of polysilicon that are connected to the electric grid, and laid on top of homes or businesses at the cost of thousands of dollars.

As a result, financing games like that of 1 Block off the Grid get big write-ups.

But that's now how it's going to go. 

There are a host of “small solar” technologies, using plastic, and printing techniques, in the process of coming out of labs, all seeking funding. We don't pay much attention to it because the industry on which it's based, flexible electronics, is itself brand new.

But this is the real revolution of our time. This is the computer chip of the early 21^st century. It's where Always-On meets the power industry.

I've been writing about what I call Always-On, what others have dubbed “the Internet of Things,” since 2003. The idea is that remote sensors and motes, single-chip devices with built-in wireless communications, could live on us, and among us, tracking what we have and our condition.

I underestimated.

Because once you can print this stuff, and once you integrate power technology into it, you have something completely different. An athlete can measure their heart rate and respiration, in real time, with the shirt on their back, and it never needs to be recharged. Once Always-On devices can gather their own power, with a few added circuits, they don't need batteries, and they don't need the grid.

This idea of printing-and-sticking power onto what already exists is easily expanded. The number of things no longer connected to the grid, or to battery technology, starts growing exponentially. And it keeps growing.

Instead of having panels on your house, in five years you'll buy something more like wallpaper, something that covers your walls and delivers power where it's needed. Street lights will no longer be connected to the electric grid, but to the information grid, and that can be a wired or wireless connection.

I have long felt that today's electric utilities are similar to the phone utilities of the early 1970s. They didn't know their business was changing, either. They didn't see the Internet coming. They had no idea that their whole business model was becoming obsolete.

We're going to have the same problem of political capture, of futile resistance, and of non-cooperation from the electric utilities in the next generation we had from the Bells in the last. They only see their business as getting power from big plants and moving it into cities over long distances. They don't understand that they're going to be in the business of load-balancing, that collecting and distributing power, not generating and selling it, is going to be their business.

As with computing, this is going to happen quite suddenly. We're in the “plug-compatible” point of the evolution right now. Standards are going to bring us into the “mini-computer” part of the curve quite quickly, but the equivalent of a microchip evolution is right around the corner, and when that gets productized, anywhere from 3-5 years from now, watch out.

Electronics and power built into everything you buy, everything you touch, with the grid used mainly for balancing the load, buying as well as selling power from homes and offices, that future is a lot closer than anyone suspects.

And with it will come a new kind of prosperity. I just didn't realize until today how fast that world is coming. Now just within my kids' lifetimes, but within my own.