Solar Just Makes Sense

In the last year I've started to get more interested in power banks and solar energy, both to reduce my usage since starting work-from-home in March, and to have energy ready to charge my phone and stuff in case I lose power here at home. This interest got more acute in the last couple of weeks, when Texas's power grid failed spectacularly.

I already had a collection of power banks acquired from conferences in my old job, and two of those were at least nominally solar-powered. I then decided to buy another one at Christmas, from a name-brand power bank manufacturer, but while it has a lot of capacity it turns out to be pretty bad as a solar charger (it's from Anker, incidentally, but I intend this to discourage you from getting the solar versions of these power banks, rather than that brand).

So instead I went on Wirecutter and found a rundown of portable solar panels, and bought one to see how it worked. I got the X-Dragon, their second choice, because the Big Blue was more expensive than what Wirecutter had (prices change).

Since then, I've set up the panel in my office window every morning, and connected up or two devices. Usually I'm filling up one of the power banks (primarily that solar Anker), and sometimes I'm charging the iPhone or AirPods or something. But usually it's the power banks, since filling those up lets me charge other devices when the sun isn't out.

I'd thought I might have trouble keeping all of the power banks charged, but between charging my iPad and iPhone every day, I'm actually running a surplus of power for those (which means I can connect a USB-connected desk fan my sweetie gave me last year). Unfortunately I can't connect the solar panel to my laptop, or to anything that connects to it, so any reductions in energy I'm using are relatively small, though consistent.

But this leaves me with the sense that we need to build out much more solar capacity, at least in parts of the world where sunshine is easy to count on. With technology like Tesla Power Walls, we'd be able to store up a lot of capacity for when the sun isn't shining, and by pairing with other renewables, like wind (properly winterized, of course), hydroelectric and geothermal, we should be able to generate enough electricity in any sort of weather.

The other thing that occurs to me is that everyone having their own home electrical battery - let's say supplied by their building or homeowners' association or even their city - would completely change the nature of electrical utilities, if not do away with them.

You can argue that the function of a PG&E or a Con Edison is to maintain the physical infrastructure of the power network, including the cables and wires that bring the centrally generated power to each home. But if each house has their own decentralized way of generating that power - most likely to be solar or geothermal, since wind and hydro are harder to generate at that scale - what is the utility company's function?

Because solar is unreliable, and geothermal is expensive and not available everywhere, the utility probably needs to continue to act as a central storehouse of energy. Though again, if the individual home's storage is designed well enough (and with enough capacity), the central power grid becomes redundant, doesn't it?

This is all spitballing, because I'm not an electrical engineer or an architect of power grids. But the question becomes relevant - if a common carrier service like electricity generation actually should be run by a private corporation with a profit motive that doesn't necessarily align with the needs of its customers.

That's not to say that profit is by its definition wrong - but the quarterly driven thinking of basically all companies nowadays means that an energy provider's focus is on increasing its profit at the end of the quarter, rather than on providing the best amount of energy to its customers.

As I said, all spitballing. But again, my experience with solar in the last week or so is showing me that we're missing a huge opportunity to generate clean and reliable energy, for free, from a completely renewable resource. It's great that I can charge my iPhone, iPad, iPod and AirPods (and as I discovered today, my Apple TV remote) completely from solar energy collected on my Anker power bank. But those are a drop in the bucket compared to my TV, personal laptop, work laptop (and monitor), lights and appliances.

It'd be good to figure out this question sooner rather than later.