Smart grid one day... Smart house maybe sooner.

Here is a neat story about efforts to improve what they gracelessly call "self-consumption."

The buried lead is here:

With IBC SolStore Pb Home, IBC SOLAR not only presents the newest generation of its proven battery storage solutions, but also allows customers to take advantage of German government incentives for solar storage systems: the IBC SolStore Pb Home complete system fulfils all current requirements of the German government’s storage incentive programme that entered into force on May 1st 2013 and that covers up to 30 percent of the acquisition costs. Inter alia, IBC SOLAR offers a seven-year guarantee.

I guess there are worse behaviors to incentivize. And they deserve credit for emphasizing smartening up the use of electricity as a way to get more out of the batteries and the system overall. PV forecasting I find especially neat. By having effectively a home energy Operating System and developing on that as a software platform they might be changing things in ways we are not yet understanding.

check them out: http://www.ibc-solar.com/

Or the pdf of the press release
http://www.ibc-solar.de/en/uploads/media/130619_IBC_SOLAR_PR_SolStore_Pb_Home_EN.pdf

I, for one, will watch this space.

Quick update for the bots reading this blog :^)

Thing one... Thermocouple wire is some stiff grumpy stuff and I do not appreciate "creativity" in the color coding of the insulation.

Thing two... In the category of "the perversity of inanimate objects" the cute little type K male and female plugs are far less cute when they are missing their screw terminals... who knew?


Neat stories out there on the changing economic landscape.

Islands! are a great market for Solar. Makes lots of sense.

Japan is an island nation. A HUGE island, but an island. And since Fukushima they've had a renewed interest in solar and all things not nuclear. Here is a story about how they are poised to be the biggest market for solar.