Solar, Eight Years Later: The Grid Doesn't Want My Sunshine

Eight years ago I fulfilled a childhood dream and put 35 panels on my roof. I was giddy about it. I wrote a whole post, full of playback GIFs and REPL snippets, about the stuff I learned. The panels still work great. Everything around them got weird. This is the follow-up, and it is less giddy, because what I learned this time is how the whole system, from my basement to the state capitol, is quietly arranged against the simple act of making free energy and sharing it. The cloud died, so I took it back In that first post I raved about the Curb Home Energy Monitor. Eight hundred dollars of hardware, CT clamps on every breaker, beautiful realtime dashboards. The catch I did not think about at the time: the dashboards lived in "the cloud." Then the company walked away. The cloud went dark. And just like that, $800 of hardware bolted to my own breaker panel turned into a brick, because a server somewhere stopped answering the phone. This is the oldest lesson I keep having to relearn. If…