Introducing The Solarity Tracker
I've been messing around with Google Charts and javascript to try put the concept of approaching The Solarity in some kind of visual form.
(For anyone unfamiliar with the term, The Solarity is what happens when the lowest auction price of solar PV in $ is matched by the $ price of SolarCoin. I tried to get my head round the idea here.
I thought it might be interesting to display "solarity factor" values per country on a chart, where solarity factor = $SLR/$auction_price. When 1SLR = auction price in a certain country, then that country has reached The Solarity - free energy, love, peace and happiness breaks out and....
Anyway, my first efforts can be seen at the Solarity Tracker. Moving the slider allows you to modify the price of SLR (I wish!) and in turn the map will update to show the effect the modified price would have on each country's march towards The Solarity. Red indicates the country has a low solarity factor and is far away from reaching The Solarity:
Yellow means it is mid-way:
Bright green means the country is very close:
Click on a country and an alert message will tell you in %-age terms how far along the chosen country is from (or past!) The Solarity. You'll get the idea.
When the whole planet is lit up in green then our work is done.
(Apologies to all the javascript heads out there, this is my first venture into web-dev css things so please be gentle.)
Please note: the data currently displayed are either 1) mostly from 2016 or 2) totally made up by me for testing purposes.
Unfortunately finding a list of the lowest auction bid prices by country by year is a bit of a pain. IRENA publish a selection of winning auction bids in some of their publications but global data from 2017 seems to be closely guarded. The tracker chart, however, will only be of real interest if it shows up-to-date information.
So that's where I could do with some help. Would anyone like to help me scour the web, publications or other sources for news items announcing winning auction bid prices in $/MWh (example) on a semi regular, say, monthly basis? A 'crowd effort' would be much more powerful than a single person on their own.
If you're up for helping, please use the form on the right-hand side of the website to submit any low auction price bids for solar PV generation and I will use the data to update the site. I will make sure the submitted data are freely available to the community for use in your own projects and endeavours.
At the end of each month I will update the chart with the submitted data and as an extra incentive there will be a small prize for the tracker who has submitted the most entries for the month.
So, please head over to http://www.solaritytracker.org/ and have a play. It is still very much a work in progress so any suggestions, bug reports, advice or criticism will be very much welcomed.
Get tracking!
(If you would like to support the future development of http://www.solaritytracker.org/ at no cost to yourself please consider using my referral address 8RNBSM4HrUkYSMfRSjNdDwjWcWGs1JpH6J when registering a solar PV system with SolarCoin. Thank you.)
Excellent idea.
Dude, this is awesome in a few different ways. First, it is just great initiative to develop a practical tool that will help people peer into a possible future, which is quite powerful. Second, it’s a great example of not being afraid to look like a noob and taking on a project for the sake of learning something new — we need more of that. I think this here steemit world might actually subtly promote that sort of action. It is public enough that it influences your attempt to post quality, but anonymous enough that you can openly expose your own naïveté or that you don’t know it all yet. This is the kind of shizzle that really excites a teacher :). Rock on.
Awwww, thanks mate. I kind of wanted to do the #agile thing and get the first usable piece of functionality out in front of users as soon as possibe. Refinements can come next.
One thing that is glaringly obvious will be to add a submission form on the site for users to send in auction bid prices directly. That'll be added in the next iteration, along with some tidying up and usability mods.
Thank you again for your support, really appreciate it :)
Great - it's a good concept. I wonder whether there's data from people looking at a similar idea - usually called 'grid parity'. look for data on which countries are approaching grid parity (grid parity is when the cost of solar per kwh is the same price as grid electricity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity. One J Leggett may have an idea - I discussed this with him a few years back.
Thanks Will - interesting section on pricing solar on that wiki page, v. interesting. Cheers mate.
Aha - https://cleantechnica.com/2016/03/30/grid-parity-what-is-it-why-does-it-matter/
Good piece, thanks.
Totally agree that hitting grid parity for solar will make it a no-brainer for widespread adoption. Claiming for SolarCoin in addition will push it past the crossover point and accelerate the uptake even further :)