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.
So the primary reason I wrote this post was not to talk about something I am convinced of as a solution, but exactly for people to drill holes and fire everything they have at it. If I don’t have the answers, it would not work in real life. So first of all tI am grateful to everyone who is chiming in.
There is a fundamental aversion in Solarpunk circles towards blockchains. I don’t want to change that, nor argue against that. The crypto space has earned this aversion all by themselves. There is obvious abuse and misallocation through these concepts.
I am an engineer. I have fought all my life to get a balance between my affinity to tech and the harm we are doing to the planet. But - we can’t just all get back to be farmers, can we? I love Solarpunk because it inspires to get to that balance, where we don’t need all to go back to bare basics, but use technology for a harmonious life with our host planet.
Technology is a big word. Can we demonize technology in general? Is the Internet bad? Are EVs bad? Are solar panels bad (think of what it takes to create them!). I am sure that is not an issue here, or so I hope.
Blockchains. Again, blockchains are just data structures. Fundamentally, numbers linked to other numbers. Yes, they require energy, but so does the entire Internet. You wouldn’t blame the Internet as a whole just because it’s used for capitalist maximalization, much more than blockchains are being used for that? Should we stop using it because big corps make most of their money nowadays through the Internet?
Blockchains are also just tools. Yes, most stuff is anti-thetic to Solarpunk. Notwithstanding, I (and many others) believe it has potential to bring about some change. They are fundamentally a more democratic tool because they lower the barrier to entry. Everyone can participate, and nobody can take that away from you. We can argue about democracy too, as democracy per se is a very abstract concept as well, and there are no absolutes nor silver bullets. Every community of any scale has to work it out for themselves, but it’s blatantly obvious that what we call today Democracy is a farce.
Associating crypto-technology to “crypto-capitalist tech fetishism” exclusively, however, is, excuse my counter-pun here, which I also present without personal affront, not understanding the technology as such. There are donating platforms built with crypto. There are also dedicated crypto-leftist groups, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptoleftists/ or their discord channel. There are bioregional and regenerative finance projects who channel resources to people doing great (solarpunk) stuff on the ground. There are a lot of many more great ideas based on crypto. A lot of them fail to get attraction, a lot fail altogether as a project, a lot are too idealistic, a lot just fall under the radar, and a lot are useless. A lot could be done without blockchains, or not at all.
I was not trying to convince anyone that this solar crypto stuff IS Solarpunk, I only tried to get feedback to the question if it is a feasible project with some beneficial properties, these being for example to communally govern resources, and providing income to people (what if shanty-towns would have their solar roofs. A game changer for them) while further boosting solar energy generation. Frankly after reading some replies it doesn’t look like. I don’t mind if people say it is or not Solarpunk, or all the other (always welcomed) dismissing and rejecting critique. The aim was to try to identify if there is merit in even trying. And it looks there isn’t, purely based on practical and economical criteria, like some you did point out in your reply.
“Communal, shared infrastructure” is an abstract concept as well. There is a tension rarely talked about, and it is if this means we need to go back living in small village-like communities only. It often sounds like that. Is that really the end game? I am not sure. In that case yes, blockchains and a whole lot of other stuff are superfluous. However, I assume most people writing here live in cities, with a romanticized ideal of what it means to live in small close-knit communities, because they never actually had the chance to do that. I have. And I have lived in cities. The population share living in cities is constantly growing. Most city people want to continue living in cities. So what we do? Can “Communal, shared infrastructure without growth” as a concept be applied to all scales? Maybe it can, and blockchains could be a powerful tool to mediate the transition to that, due to their unique characteristics of accountability, transparency and decentralization.
Or maybe not. That’s totally fine.