Generating and Selling Clean, Green, Electrical Energy

Your local energy company is probably trying to find solutions to three problems. You can help.

First, conflicting regulations and "not in my back yard" (NIMBY) attitudes make expansion of their facilities difficult. Second, they are under pressure to find and implement more green energy technologies. Finally, they need an inexpensive way to bridge peak demand periods without adding expensive new generation sources.

Provide the answer with a solar panel or windmill that you build, and the electrical grid is more secure, more green, and more flexible.

Even those that disagree with militant green agendas have an appreciation of our planet - at heart we are all environmentalists. Both extremes flail about using exaggerated differences and heated arguments, refusing to listen and think. Marketing to the uninformed. If a position can be summed in a word, picture, or phrase; it is not intelligent debate, but only another attempt at manipulation. Massaged "facts" are widely distributed as emotional screeds of false talking points and sound bites - raising money for more shouting and anger, solving nothing.

An informed debate is also taking place, considering realistic time frames for when specific environmental problems will become intractable, and how best to apply resources to the most urgent needs. We all can agree however that affordable, green, renewable resources such as solar and wind power, are preferable to devouring irreplaceable and eventually limited resources.


Small scale energy generation from locally renewable resources is a cost effective and efficient way to help our shared environment. Some at either extreme will never be pleased. They relish their positions as spokespeople more than progress toward a solution. You do not need to be limited by their belligerence.

History demonstrates it is innovative individuals and small teams that create solutions, not bureaucracies. You can benefit yourself, and by extension society at large, by developing a personal energy policy. Hack your own energy installation, and work at connecting it to the grid as a natural enterprise.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead

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Attacks on brick and mortar and virtual infrastructure are increasing as stateless groups use technology to re-create the world in their idealistic image. Add to this natural enterprise that wants to avail itself of technology to bypass bureaucratic roadblocks and improve lives. A final element is bureaucracies themselves that keep expanding trying to cover all contingencies and still protect the special interests of bureaucrats.

The result is good centralization ideas of just a few decades ago, such as a connected and supportive energy network, are now vulnerable at both nodes and pathways. There is no way to protect these extensive networks; central response is too slow, local bureaucratic representation is stretched too thin to have needed strength. The proposed solution is to have dispersed teams that are "good enough" to handle challenges instead of waiting for an eventual, too late, central response.

The internet was conceived as a decentralized network where missing nodes and pathways would be automatically bypassed by distributed resources. The strategy: since you can't protect the entire network, create ways to bypass damaged sections.

Technology is developing a better way, abhorrent to those that worship their closely held bureaucratic power.

Protect those you love from energy disruptions and earn credits or money selling your excess electrical energy. Small decentralized sources of energy with the ability to operate separately "off the grid" do not offer suitably large targets to opportunistic groups seeking to disrupt major sections of a society.


Dispersed systems are robust and self-repairing.

Shut down one pirate distributor of software, music, books, or videos and little disruption occurs. The content is on the individual computers of users dispersed around the world. Millions of sovereign hackers distribute information about hacker sites that were closed. Localized mirror sites, new technologies, and their constantly morphing improvements are immediately brought online.

If this is all a bit dense, read my short story prequel to the online novel, Complicit Simplicity - hactivism end game.


How does this apply to energy?

Local, decentralized solutions are the most dependable.

When you and your neighbors have installed critical infrastructure into your own homes and businesses, they will be too small to justify attack or appropriation. Able to operate off the grid they are stable energy sources. Contributing to the grid they are inexpensive additions to central schemes, that can offer financial rewards to you.

I'm sure you have noticed that huge bureaucracies are failing, thrashing about dangerously in their death throes, but still failing. Don't stand in their way as they fall. Prepare alternatives to dependence on their systems.

An inexpensive first step is assuring your own energy supply. As with most innovations, helping yourself will also help others.

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100% of direct income from my lenses goes to micro-finance solutions for world poverty provided by the Grameen Foundation. The Grameen Foundation is creating a rising tide of positive influence upon our world. Help decrease poverty, by enabling the poor to support themselves.




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