What can we (citizens) do to promote green energy? I sometimes think about this. There are of course many ways. Today I will introduce one of the methods using sharing economy.
The sharing economy is a type of economy that people share the goods and services. People share: code for open source, auction places with eBay, cars with Uber, rooms with Airbnb and CouchSurfing, and so on. Sometimes it is over the range of sharing and cause troubles, but, this sharing economy is popular these days.
Can we use the idea of sharing economy for green energy? I live in an apartment. I don’t have a roof for solar panels. I don’t have a garden to put a small wind turbine. However, now we have the Internet. Can someone connect between who has a roof and who wants to invest solar panels?
Yeloha [1] is an U.S. start-up company for solar sharing network, founded April 2015. For example, anyone can borrow one solar panel per year for US $64. The generated electricity will be sold to the market and some percentage will be return to the investors. Was it a good investment? Well, it is not sure as the usual investment. However, I would like to invest the future of the green energy as a citizen and definitely this helps green energy industry. Yeloha has developed a special software, that can estimate how much electricity can be generated in a year depends on the location and the building[2].
I like this idea and business. I hope the similar sharing with wind turbine, bio-gas, and other green energies. I am looking forward to
seeing this kind of activity or company in Japan and Germany, too.
Today (2016-1-23(Sat)), we see the oil price is low. Some people think that “this is good, we can use oil.” But now is the time to invest to green energy since we can use lower price energy today to prepare for our future. The green energy is local and distributed, so its price can be stable and not global like the oil price. I believe oil price will raise one day, I don’t know when, but, I believe it definitely will. To prepare that day, I would like to invest to green energy now.
References
- Yeloha, http://www.yeloha.com/
- Lauren J. Young, Startup Profile: Yeloha Brings Solar Into the
Sharing Economy,
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/start-ups/startup-profile-yeloha-brings-solar-into-the-sharing-economy,
IEEE Spectrum, Nov. 2015