Renewables Keep Getting Better (& so do the cryptos that support them)
Lots of big news on renewable energy has come out recently. For example, did you know that in many regions building and using new renewables (like solar and wind) is now cheaper than just running old coal and nuclear plants?
According to the highly cited and respected financial firm Lazard, "the full-lifecycle costs of building and operating renewables-based projects have dropped below the operating costs alone of conventional generation technologies such as coal or nuclear".
With that in mind, perhaps it should come as no surprise that a new study by the Lappeenranta University of Technology and the Energy Watch Group shows "a global electricity system fully based on renewable energy is feasible at every hour throughout the year and is more cost effective than the existing system, which is largely based on fossil fuels and nuclear energy".
With the costs of wind, solar, and storage (and wind and solar with storage) all plummeting, it is clear that renewables are the future and that the transition to 100% carbon-neutral energy is going to happen faster than many people expect.
I'm hoping places like the United States won't be left behind, but given recent shifts in federal energy priorities I'm not very optimistic; especially given the fact that China likely just installed more solar in 2017 than the US has total (meaning cumulative, ever).
At the same time, cryptocurrenices like SolarCoin and PowerLedger, which support renewable energy production, are doing very well. SolarCoin is up about 4,000% over just the last year or so. By incentivizing production of renewable energy, these cryptocurrencies are helping catalyze the transition to cleaner (and cheaper) energy.
https://medium.com/adventures-in-volunteer-computing/cryptocurrencies-that-benefit-scientific-research-and-the-environment-f18a840336fb
I have 8 solar coin from the panels on my roof... but power ledger is new to me.
The key to getting a large scale energy token working is to involve District Network Operators (DNOs) in your system. Power Ledger have two trials with DNOs atm; they're miles ahead of the competition. LO3 also have trials running, but at at smaller scale, for ex on the Broklyn micro grid. Their ICO - they're calling their coin Exergy - is due in the next few months.
Envion - www.envion.org - just ICO'd too - basically containers full of batteries and processors to do crypto mining, greening up the energy needed to mine and theoretically making solar farms more viable as they don't need a grid to export into anymore. I keep meaning to look through the ICO list of www.icobench.com to look for green-minded ICOs coming up, but haven't got round to it yet.