Technology

You very much gloss over the whole "distribution" part. That is one of the main three segments of an electric grid (generation, transmission, distribution). Practical Engineering has some great content about how the grid works and addresses some of the problems renewables face in certain aspects iirc. I recommend giving it a watch or at least a background listen. His first video that is a good place to start, and the "which power plant does my electricity come from" with the lake analogy is also a good intro.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTZM4MrZKfW-ftqKGSbO-DwDiOGqNmq53

Having a DER system is great and all because the transmission system doesn't have to be as highly loaded (thus increasing the total load a system can withstand), but you still need to be pretty connected for something like this to work - and like others have pointed out, that's going to mean building a parallel grid (which the energy regulators won't like if you get too big) or hooking into the existing grid (which probably already has DER management baked into the system if you contact your local power company).

The grid works because it's big. That's a feature, not a bug. And because we have AC not DC on the wire, any energized and connected generator has to be in dead lockstep with the grid frequency or else your hardware is going to become a load, make expensive noises, emit magic smoke, or some combination thereof.

One major edge case you have is night charging of EVs. Let's say I'm a 9-5 office worker with a standard parking lot at my workplace. I'm just a keyboard monkey doing whatever, so I'm not a decision maker as to what goes in the parking lot infrastructure wise, so I'm at the mercy of whatever Facilities is doing, and gods know what that is. But I have a nice brand new EV, and I want to charge it. When I drive home after DST ends, it's dark outside. There's no solar to charge my car. Some renewables (like wind and hydro) work at night, but solar doesn't. I'd need to charge an auxillary power storage system during the day, and then transfer that to my EV battery at night. That's more complexity.

Power storage of any kind of generation is a huge issue with many different solutions, and not all of them are batteries. And nothing is a perfect system, so there's energy losses whenever we convert from type A to type B of whatever.

Or.... I could just hook my EV up to the grid where the cost of my bill per kilowatt hour includes systems and people to manage keeping the system on voltage and on frequency, 24/7/365.25.

Any power produced during that day for a solar system that doesn't get immediately used needs to be stored (because it HAS to get put somewhere or you literally break the grid or waste it). That energy storage - along with the voltage converters - is going to take up extra cubic footage in your system that won't be small, and requires regular monitoring and maintenance to stay online. The system you're proposing is going to create many fragments of the grid in the form of these pop up neighborhood charging stations entirely dependent on what resources are available in less than a mile radius.

Even if you assume that you don't have to frequency synchronize with the main grid and you're fully isolated, you run into another big problem: local generation isn't always perfect. Solar especially is very susceptible to the giant orb in the sky being around, so your local energy storage needs to account for being able to hold enough power for a certain percentage above your worst case cloudy day while maintaining the necessary output to sustain the local EVs depending on it. If you get a 2- or 3- day storm, I hope you have enough energy storage to have low daytime charge rates for 4- to 5- days. In the playlist, there's also a video talking about using hydroelectric generators in reverse to store energy as physical potential energy in a reservoir as one example of how a grid might store excess energy.

This is one thing the major grids are quite literally engineered and regulated to accomplish: because they are in fact so large, they can just import energy via the market system from somewhere with better weather or is slightly off-peak demand. And when one type of energy becomes less viable for a given weather condition (like solar on a cloudy day) they have a diversified generation portfolio of other sources: renewables like wind and hydro, nuclear energy for big orders, and even grid-scale energy storage system such as flywheels (fast stabilization), pumped water storage, and even giant batteries, and if all those fail, well yes we do still have dinosaurs to burn. (The world's not perfect yet and we should by all means go for progress, but it will be a long road). And all these sources are already working together to keep the grids on voltage and on frequency, and have physical and managerial infrastructure to keep everything connected and synchronized such that supply and demand are balanced.

But blockchain at its core is just a distributed database. One that has no central authority, can not be tampered with, cannot be altered, nor taken down if parametrized accordingly.

Which is completely useless if the data that goes into that blockchain isn't guaranteed to be correct. And if there's money in it you can bet your ass that someone will try to game the system.

You're also glossing over the existing grid that needs money to be maintained while complaining that energy companies want money. Yes, there's a general problem where society allowed (and partly encouraged) sociopaths to be unrestrained greedy assholes that needs some kind of solution, but not all companies are useless leeches, it's "just" an all-pervading corruption that needs to be dealt with - and as long as that hasn't happened, every idealistic solution faces the threat of being corrupted itself.

What if people could earn money by generating solar energy and selling directly to vehicles, instead of the grid? I believe this could actually boost renewable energy generation over the roof.

If you're cutting out the grid, how do you propose getting electricity generated by solar to the EV? In your system do they have to come to my house and plug into my solar array when its sunny to collect their purchase? Or are you expecting the grid to deliver it, but not expect any compensation for grid capacity consumption, transmission and distribution of the electricity?

Generators would be rewarded with a blockchain token for the energy generated, while consumers would pay for the energy in those tokens. Therefore speculation would be curbed as the tokens are for a real thing, energy, which on top is a stable unit - kWh.

I'm a generator. Why would I want a token to buy electricity I already have a surplus of for my EV? How do non-solar EV owners get tokens? Does your system propose non-solar owners buy tokens on the open market with real money (dollars/euros) from solar generators? If I'm spending dollars/euros to buy tokens, why don't I just use my dollars/euros to buy electricity for my EV instead?

This still feels like it's not answering the fundamental question for any blockchain project: why is this a blockchain instead of just a database with well configured permissions, and why are the advantages of the blockchain relevant to the problem it's trying to solve? Traditional databases can be configured to be append only, accept new data from users without needing a central authority to approve each new user, be queried by any random person, etc far more efficiently than a blockchain could and without requiring every solar panel owner to download multiple terabytes of historical transaction data just to run their panel.

As for the coins, they don't really add democratic control over a system so much as they empower whoever is best able to maximize coin generation. In a democratic system, 100 small solar panel owners would have more of a say in the governance of solar panels than 1 really wealthy South African billionaire, because they would represent more votes than the billionaire. In the coin economy, if the billionaire has at least twice as many solar panels as the rest of the small owners put together, the billionaire would have sole control over the governance of solar panels because they would be generating twice as many coins.

I admit I'm skeptic to see anything blockchain or coin related, but I've yet to see a problem that either technology are solving for other than "I want to be able to do financial transactions over the internet without using a bank or bank-like institution" and "I want an extremely volatile asset to speculate on"

A blockchain that uses proof-of-work would waste far more energy than it would save, just on doing the accounting. What blockchain do you propose using that would have a minimal transaction cost, in watts and in coin?

If we're talking about local charging of EVs, I guess that would be a little like putting a gas pump in my front yard for my neighbors to use. Probably going to hit zoning issues if you open that up to general commercial use.

How does a 'solar energy blockchain' know where the electricity used to run it comes from? There's no difference between 120v ac coming from a generator or coming from the grid, or coming from a solar array.

Would it be possible for a bad actor to connect a gas powered generator and get more tokens?

Wasn't this tried years ago? I forget the name of the coin/chain.

Because crypto is a scam.

Solarpunk is embedded in leftist thought, and the endgame would include becoming a moneyless society. There's various debates on how to get there from here.

Does crypto help with the transition? I would say no. It requires hooking up more renewable energy just for the sake of money.