I think there's something to be said for stuff that doesn't require a
soldering gun to assemble.
While I was reading through "Hackers" [1] it dawned on me that I'd
never actually seen a photo of the Apple I before. We've all seen
hundreds of photos of the Apple II and IIe. But the Apple I? What did
that look like?
I laughed when I googled it but it fit with the story arc and the
prescient acknowledgement of Woz that he was transitioning from the
"pure" world of hacker-dom to the "tainted" world of wealth creation
when he left HP, joined Jobs, and created the Apple II.
The world of localized energy independence feels like this right now.
Solar setups tend to be one of two kinds:
1. A pile of leaky batteries and hideous, one-off hackerisms. "Why
would I buy a Tesla Powerwall when I can glue 4,480 expired laptop
batteries together instead?" :cran:
2. $60,000 of off-the-shelf Tesla hardware attached to a house that's
on the Bay Area grid anyway. :cran2:
## GoalZero
The GoalZero folks [2] have the right(-ish) idea, I think. All their
hardware has USB-C outputs. Given that USB-C demands a level of
precision much higher than your average solar setup could produce, this
says something about how hardware in this space is becoming
standardized... however slowly.
I think of the cluster of hardware that GoalZero represents like the
plug-and-play computer hardware of the late 1990s. It was still a good
idea if you had SOME idea what you were doing. You might have to change
some jumpers on the motherboard. But you didn't need to build
everything from scratch and, unless you forgot the thermal paste or
caused a short, you were pretty unlikely to actually do any damage.
I know it has its issues, but USB-C makes me pretty happy, overall.
"Here's the cable. It does data, I/O, and a lot of power. It is
literally impossible to connect it incorrectly. Go."
It will still be a while before we see USB-C everywhere and all the
(really awful) bugs are fleshed out. And, of course, by the time we can
happily rely on USB-C for almost all our household and travel needs,
we'll need USB-D or whatever. But! It's a nice watermark for meaningful
power draw and stability across household electronics.
I'm not sure if there's a GoalZero (or even Powerwall) equivalent at
the village or neighbourhood scale?
## A Business Model
Without making any strong assumptions about what people would want to
do in the Village, it feels like this space is on the verge of some
significant expansion. If the same folks who are playing with these
systems were to build the off-the-shelf stuff, it's likely those folks
would build them in a simple, modular, easy-to-use way that fit a
number of scales (portable, household, neighbourhood, city-wide).
An open network will emerge which will replace Uber but there's no harm
in letting Uber do all the hard work of getting people comfortable with
using an app for transportation.
Similarly, Tesla is likely to break a lot of ground in making this
stuff "comfortable" for the average consumer and building up battery
tech that actually matches society's needs. After that, this will be
commodity technology.
Just an idea.
-steven
[1]
[2]
Steven Deobald