A friend of mine, Carlton Gibson recently asked me for some links, people to follow, and leads in general to look up for a developers taking a new interest in solar technology.
@mrchrisadams hiya — happy new year!
Can I ask, if I asked if you had any good leads on accounts/blogs to follow on the topic of “solar”, what might you say?
link to original toot / post thing
Rather than make a throwaway thread, I figured it might be more helpful to have a slightly jucier post that I can come back to, and maybe even update as I find better resources.
Off we go…
Books
Jenny Chase Solar – Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon
If you’re interested in solar, then Jenny Chase is probably the first person you should follow, is one of the world’s experts in the subject, and is active on Mastodon and Twitter. The book listed above sounds dry, but it’s funny, extremely informative, and not too long. Totally worth the read. Also, you should be following Jenny on social media. Honestly, you could probably stop at just following her. I learn loads from following her accounts on social media.
Art projects
Tega Brain and Alex built a distributed system of solar powered raspbeery pi computers which are networked together, and the website is served from which ever site has the most energy, by changing the DNS records. The source code is on github and a lot of the logic is python. There’s also an academic paper submitted to the LIMITS conference about the thinking behind it the project.
Low tech magazine – Kris De Decker
“This website is a solar-powered, self-hosted version of Low-tech Magazine. It has been designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.” The low tech magazine was one of the earlier sites doing interesting stuff with solar and tech. And (as is a bit of a theme, there’s a LIMITs conference paper too)
Blog posts
Scott Web and his solar hosting.
Scott Web has been blogging about creating solar and battery Raspberry Pis, and using various orchestration tools to manage his websites. He provides useful writeups to help understand how he has been building them for himself, and for others to follow.
Tsung Xu – A guide to the energy transition
I can’t tell is this is a report, or a monster blog post, but it’s absolutely full of useful factoids and background information for folks interested in the energy transition – particularly the impact that cheap solar is likely to have. There are many, many good diagrams too, which really hit home the scale of the changes facing us.
Me – We need a fossil-free internet by 2030
My blog post explaining the relevance of the energy transition in the context of people building stuff online. I talk about Moore’s Law, how it’s related to an older, and more general law called Wright’s Law, and make a justice based argument for a internet powered primarily by solar, and stored energy (other renewables show up too, but solar, followed by wind is projected to the majority of the work decarbonising our electricity system).
Reports
GOGLAS Off-Grid Solar Market Trends Report 2022
This report comes out every two years, coming out in two parts – it provides a look back at key trends, in the off-grid solar sector over the past two years, including business models, technologies, competitive landscape and funding, and also provides an outlook into the future describing different likely scenarios.
OK, that’s it for now – I’ll add more later this week, as I know inspiration will strike.