Like many people, I’ve been brooding on my domestic energy use and wondering what to do about it. I’m fascinated by what Peter Armstrong has been doing to reduce the carbon footprint of his family (and keep warm while saving money). Likewise, I’m intrigued by the potential of small wind turbines (and if I lived in Ireland I would certainly have one already). But this post by Tim O’Reilly suggests another way of looking at home generation.

In a conversation the other day, Ed Kummer of Disney made a really thought-provoking observation: the spread of solar energy units to homes and businesses is an analog to other forms of user-generated content, and the overall trend towards a two-way network. While it’s possible to set up a solar system completely off the grid, most of the new customers feed power into the grid during sunlight hours, and draw from it when the daylight wanes. If we move to a solar power economy, it will be much more distributed and cooperative than the current one-way model…