The project aims to construct the framework of equitable cost sharing that will underlie a business method outlined in the provisional patent.

Through solarNetwork.net, solar photo-voltaic energy is collected, consumed, measured and recorded locally at sites around the globe, called solarNodes. Data from each solarNode is aggregated at a central database of solar energy information.

SolarNetwork.net members, in theory, would not share electricity with each other; but they do share the savings that their local-energy generation delivers.”

“solarNetwork.net is being studied as part of a Masters thesis in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the School of Engineering at the University of Auckland, to be completed December 2008.

Until fairly recently solar energy has been sidelined as an unrealistic form of energy generation for the home.

In reality a large amount of solar energy falls on people’s roofs each day - maybe not enough to power your house, but at least enough to take note of.

Let’s say you live in San Diego, have a couple of 80 Watt solar panels, some motorboat batteries, and an inexpensive inverter. You set up the panels on your roof to fill the batteries under sitting your house during the day, so you can use the electricity in the evening. On a really sunny day you might be able to store a few Amp Hours in a battery which you could use later - maybe a few hours of a desk lamp’s light.

Clearly, it’s not a lot of energy, but we’d all agree: it’s not absolutely nothing. And if you actually used this system on that sunny day, maybe a few cents were shaved off your bill.

Now imagine that you had 2 houses with this solarNode setup: one in San Diego, and one in Sydney, and you kept track of the energy collected, using a very-low-power computer, and a charge controller. It might be a sunny day in SD, and an overcast day in Sydney, so that only one house (the SD house) would report full batteries to power that San Diego desklamp that evening. However, if there were a cooperative agreement between the two houses, that 12 cents of savings from solar electricity generated in San Diego could conceivably be shared between the two houses.

That’s right: 6 cents each. And maybe the next day, Sydney was beautifully sunny, and San Diego was grey. Or maybe, they both had sunny days - it’s just weather and we can’t control it. But, we’re pretty sure that it will follow the model of a Markov Chain, according with the predictable seasonal variances (i.e. Summer: hot, direct sunlight, Winter: colder, indirect sunlight) based on the hemisphere of the earth you live on. That helps a little.

Gathering the data streams from these small-sized generators is an interesting project, and crucial to the rollout of the software and network. But a few desklamps aren’t going make a difference to the power consumption and energy policy of a significant number of people, let alone the planet’s population. However, because we can extrapolate from this data set fairly well, we should have a very powerful bunch of “What-If” scenarios to run.”

The basic SolarNode client consists of a low-power computer attached to a charge controller. On a periodic basis, the SolarNode queries the controller to take a snapshot of the power being generated, and reports it to the SolarServer.

I would suggest checking this out, if you want to or are willing to contribute.