Controlling Your Home Solar
Meet Art & Mary, a retired couple living off-grid using power mostly from a large array of solar panels. I’ll link you six minutes into their story where Art describes how his solar panels would fill his batteries by noon in the summer and then the rest of the energy was wasted, and how he solved the problem…
Kudos to Art for figuring out how to use that excess power to heat his water. But, holy shit, what a complicated system, both logically and physically. And he has to remember to set the timer to re-route the energy, and probably only on sunny days in the summer. I have to wonder if Art is a former engineer given how comfortable he is with that utility room.
When I research how others control their solar systems it’s easier to find the geeky folks, although one Redditor, when asked “What apps do you use to monitor your solar?” honestly responded,
I don't, I just let it run.
What I really want it something that will notify me when one panel is "bad", or when I don't appear to be generating electricity at all. That's never been a problem for me, but that's what I would want to know.
I suspect that’s the case with the majority of people accustomed to flipping a switch and the lights magically turning on. “Just tell me when there’s a problem” sounds like a reasonable desire.
When I ask an LLM such as Claude what the future of energy control will be, I get an educated but rather generic description[1]: AI? Check. Intuitive user interface? Check. But research on LLM’s responses on climate issues reveal they “contain consistent sources of bias” and “…mainly offer quantitative information produced by disproportionately male scientists in industrialized societies…“ Although to Claude’s credit it included a solution to Art’s problem:
Smart appliances will automatically adjust their energy consumption based on available supply.
If you’ve tried the current generation of “smart” home appliances, you know that smart essentially means connected. But I’ll set my skepticism aside for a moment and imagine a the future where the system will be smart enough to, say, check the weather report and automatically route the solar panel output to the water heater until it is full, then charge the car until the car battery is full, and finally to charge the house batteries. It doesn’t sound like rocket science. We just need to get everything talking to each other and a bit of logic.
And yet, one obstacle for the computer is knowing what we want it to do, of knowing our intent. We may be going on vacation for a while and want all the energy produced to be sold back to the utility. Perhaps we will need to tell the system (using speech or another “intuitive UI”), or perhaps it will be intelligent enough to ask us.
Or perhaps the intuitive UI will just be a switch.
When a friend of mine read my last newsletter and Arash Aazami‘s comparison of producing your own energy to growing our own food, she said,
The comparison with growing your own food is cool, it gives you the idea that it could be fun (something so totally not fun like energy)
In addition to over-designing the intuitive user interfaces, I suspect most companies will neglect to even try to make the whole thing fun. But we can! More on that next time.
[1] Claude: Let me explore how home energy control might evolve over the next decade, based on current trends and emerging technologies.
1. Integrated Energy Sources
- Homes will likely combine multiple energy sources: solar, wind, battery storage, and grid power
- Smart systems will automatically optimize between these sources based on availability and cost
- Real-time monitoring will show exactly how much energy is coming from each source
2. AI-Driven Optimization
- AI will predict energy needs based on weather forecasts, historical usage, and daily routines
- Automated systems will schedule high-energy activities (like EV charging) during optimal times
- Predictive algorithms will manage battery charging/discharging to minimize grid dependency
3. Dynamic Load Management
- Smart appliances will automatically adjust their energy consumption based on available supply
- Home systems will learn occupant preferences and optimize comfort vs. energy use
- Grid integration will allow homes to participate in demand response programs
4. Enhanced User Control
- Intuitive interfaces will give homeowners clear visibility into their energy usage and generation
- Mobile apps will provide remote monitoring and control capabilities
- Automated systems will still allow manual override when needed
5. Grid Independence
- Many homes will be capable of operating semi-independently from the grid
- Battery storage will become more affordable and efficient
- Microgrids may allow neighborhoods to share and trade excess energy