Balance III.

The Bazaar and the Cathedral

A few weeks ago an acquaintance told me about his grid-independent PV and battery setup for his second home in a small village in a solar-rich country where there are regular power outages. He told me about a time when there was a power outage in the run-up to a local festival. His household system saved the day for the community. Meat and other perishable items were stored in freezers in his courtyard powered by his home power-plant. He’s now a local legend.

Last week we noted that the tension in our electricity grid reflects or is related to tensions across different views as to how we should organise ourselves. Hayek believes in the self-organising potential of individuals, Keynes sees a greater role for the state than Hayek does.

Modern technology (and a bit of flexibility in adapting our habits) allows us all to become more or less independent of the central grid. Granted it helps to have a balcony, but fundamentally the point holds: household grid-independence is within reach.

There’s a clash of cultures in the energy system and the dynamics are comparable to the development of the open-source software movement challenging traditional centralised ‘ivory tower’ software development.