Residential Distributed Generation in Ontario, a Progress Report of 2015

With 2016 just beginning, the world is already ready to bid adieu to last year and move on to better things. We have literally witnessed a lot of great things in 2015 especially in the technology front: from 3D printing and autonomous driving to new game consoles with virtual reality. However, among all of this it's no surprise that we are still lagging behind in terms of harnessing renewable sources of energy cost effectively at the residential level, such as solar energy for example. 

But even though we haven't seen any progress in terms of our efficiency in utilizing the solar energy given to us every day, it looks like vendors are preparing to introduce us to an integrated concept that will least let us store the solar energy received instead of relying on only being able to use this source of renewable energy during daytime when the sun is out.

This is very useful if taken in the long term as all of the users will be able to save money spent on energy bills which can be quite expensive and even more so when the amount of electricity was being used during peak consumption times, which aren't peak times to generate.

The technologies like the "wall battery" are in essence a intelligent device that can store the solar energy received during the day. For example, when the solar panels are installed on a house, the wall battery will charge the battery and also allow a planned amount of power to be used in the house. When the sun is down and you have to rely exclusively on other sources of energy, the wall battery shows its real use when the power stored during the day can be accessed to power most, if not all of the electrical appliances in the house, thus saving consumers costs on the power front and also giving us a real sustainable source of clean and reliable energy.

What's more, is that the manufacturer of the wall battery has allowed other manufacturers to make use of the concept without the risk of copyright infringement as long as the motive is not to take advantage of customers. This will perhaps be the next big thing of 2016 along with virtualizing this solution into net metered community cooperatives.

While it's well understood that the improvements in harnessing renewable sources of energy will be part of the solution to global warming in industrialized parts of the world due to reduced carbon emission from power production, we can all hope this technology to be used globally as a measure to make the Earth a much greener and cleaner place.