Hear me out. On Reddit, the #solarpunk channel is decidedly anti-blockchain. To me, this is totally surprising and against the actual ethos of Solarpunk - to integrate technology for a bright, clean future.
Granted, blockchains don’t have much reputation in alternative circles. And for a good reason. A lot is just linked to scams, get-rich-quick dudes, and speculation, apart from energy consumption arguments.
But blockchain at its core is just a distributed database. One that has no central authority, can not be tampered with, cannot be altered, nor taken down if parametrized accordingly.
This allows - as a potential - to democratize access and value creation. Renewable energy is also fundamentally decentralized. Everyone can participate!
Now, with the costs of renewable energy creation (notably solar) shrunk significantly, and the demand for energy consumption rising heavily, if we only think about the booming electric vehicles alone -
What if people could earn money by generating solar energy and selling directly to vehicles, instead of the grid? I believe this could actually boost renewable energy generation over the roof.
Generators would be rewarded with a blockchain token for the energy generated, while consumers would pay for the energy in those tokens. Therefore speculation would be curbed as the tokens are for a real thing, energy, which on top is a stable unit - kWh.
Of course there are a lot of hurdles here - mostly institutional. Usually, energy is controlled by local authorities. They don’t want to allow anyone access to this market.
Then there is the distribution issue. Energy must be transported to the points of consumption, the charging stations. But due to the decentralized nature, this could actually result surprisingly cheap, as instead of transporting large distances, more charging stations in neighborhoods could reduce those distances. But still, this would require upfront charging stations and distribution investments.
I am an engineer. A dreamer. More often than not, as many many others, the realities of markets and economies clash with such ideals, thrashing generally good ideas.
But I wonder if such a scheme could made be possible. Anyone having some good suggestions? I mean mainly from the economics side. How to design the scheme, how to make it so that it is interesting to everyone? There are already several solar energy blockchains, but they kinda failed to get traction.
For the more radicals - I also dream of a money-less Solarpunk future, but to date, it seems further away than ever, looking at the right wing surge everywhere. Maybe we can build bridges at least from the technological side. Thank you if you got so far. Happy to respond to critique and questions.
The most rosily optimistic estimates of proof of stake’s reduction in Ethereum’s energy costs (that I’ve seen) put it at a 2000x reduction. That means that in theory, if all of those gains were realised, and if we start with the numbers I previously cited, Ethereum might hit the same energy cost per transaction as a pretty inefficient traditional database setup.
Except that transaction rates are fixed in public ledger distributed blockchain systems (because every validator node has to have time to clock in with their results), so as the network scales up the cost per transaction also scales up. I’m actually doing Ethereum a favour by using old numbers there, because it’s final cost per transaction prior to the proof of stake switch was certainly much higher than it was at the time of that snapshot.
Traditional databases scale in a way where the economy of scale works for you rather than against you. The bigger you get, the lower your cost per transaction even as your total costs increase. Blockchains anti-scale; the cost per transaction goes up as the network gets bigger.