Bringing energy production to your neighbourhood, we connect for a brighter tomorrow.
Energy production, storage, transportation and consumption can be decentralized. Neighbourhoods, buildings, and individual units can become energy self-sufficient through investment in energy infrastructure.
The ideal solution might look like this:
- Each household has an energy reserve to last a couple of days according to their energy consumption (big battery bank)
- Households are connected to a local neighbourhood energy grid node and receive power from a larger storage reserve when their reserve is deleted or their current draw exceeds the capacity of their reserve to deliver
- Each household that is capable of generating energy would deploy as much solar panel or wind turbine capacity as their space can support, preferring high-efficiency/high-density energy production sources
- Each household with generation capacity fills their own reserve, and then sends the surplus energy to the local node's reserve to be stored and distributed to those without generation capacity
- The local neighbourhood node would have it's own larger-scale energy generation capacity if possible, and would be connected to a backup energy source (fossil fuel generator, hydrogen fuel cell, or other means) to prevent blackouts. The local node would serve as a control point for the distribution of energy across it's connected members.
- The local node can be connected to nodes in other close neighbourhoods, or a regional or national grid to ensure a consistent source of energy, and to sell surplus generated energy to the regional or national grid if the storage reserve are completely filled. Ideally these neighbourhood nodes would work in lock-step to distribute the loads across the whole regional network in an autonomous and decentralized manner. If one node has a higher load than it can support, its neighbours would sent it some of their stored reserve or excess generated energy. This would prevent brown-outs by distributing the load evenly across the network. This is similar to how trees collaborative take care of one another. When one tree is sick or injured, its neighbours send it food through their root network.
We call this design a Distributed Energy Network Transfer (DENT) system.
Energy must be harvested by some means. This can be through the installation and maintenance of solar arrays, wind turbines, or some other means of energy production, such as tidal, gravitational, or geothermal production.
Once produced, energy must be stored for later use. This will ideally be in a medium as energy-dense as possible to save on space requirements. Ideally (at the time of writing), this would be in the form of a Tesla Power Wall or some similar high-volume and high-density storage mechanism.
Once the energy has been produced and stored, it must be transported to the site of consumption. This may be achieved using either fixed or mobile means.
This would be achieved by setting up a local fixed connection between energy producers and energy consumers. Physical electric lines would have to be established between the energy storage device and the consumer connection.
This would be achieved by transferring energy stored in a larger immobile storage device at the production site to a smaller, higher-density storage device for transportation to the site of consumption. Energy expended to transport the energy capsule to the site of consumption would have to be factored in to the cost of the energy consumed. If an electric car could discharge its energy in reversed flow from the battery to its outlet, that mechanism could be used to transfer energy from one energy storage location to another.
In order to manage the whole ecosystem effectively and use the energy produced as prudently as possible, all participants in the grid would have to develop a better understanding of what their energy requirements are, and how they can reduce their consumption footprint. Each member would have to know how much energy they use per day, and how much energy each type of use consumes. For example, you might have heating, lighting, cooking, cleaning, and entertainment as consumption categories.