Sounds like an illusion, but it’s already real. Power from the socket in abundance. Where to put it? If private individuals produce their electricity on their own roof or in the domestic cogeneration plant – decentralised – more people can be supplied with electricity. Some are already doing so and producing more electricity than they consume. You deliver this surplus directly to the consumer – without the energy giant in between. Electricity production is thus democratised.

So far, private individuals who have produced electricity have fed the excess energy into the grid and received a fixed price from the grid operator. For about two years now, however, private electricity producers have been able to sell their electricity directly to consumers via Internet platforms – past the electricity companies.

One such platform is the company Enyway. The managing director of Enyway Heiko von Tschischwitz told Der Spiegel: “The next stage of the energy transition could be a kind of AirBnB for electricity”. Instead of consumers buying their electricity from energy giants such as E.ON or RWE, they choose their own supplier. Other companies such as Beegy or Buzzn are also working on similar models.

Electricity can be produced, for example, by a school with a photovoltaic system on the roof or by the homeowner with a cogeneration plant in the basement. The owner of an orchard near Hamburg has had wind turbines built on his plantation. Between Hamburg and Bremen, for example, according to Der Spiegel, the owner of an old mill produces and sells his electricity. A small river drives the mill wheel, which in turn drives two generators that convert the power into electricity. For example, the mill, which previously had nothing to do with energy generation but ground grain, generates around 100,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. About 25 four-person households can be supplied with it for one year.

If one household could supply four households with electricity, one quarter of all German households could theoretically supply all German households with electricity. In the future, it could go something like this: Households – both producing and consuming – are connected via modern communication technology. Intelligent electricity meters measure in real time how much electricity a household currently needs and how much other households are currently producing. The private electricity producer uses an app to control what should happen to his electricity – whether it should be stored, consumed by himself or fed into the grid. The consumer, in turn, decides from which supplier he wants to obtain energy. There are no longer any notice periods. It can be changed in seconds. Because everything is connected, everything can be balanced among each other. If it rains at one producer, another, where the sun shines, can supply him with his surplus electricity.

Experts expect that electricity will be produced in abundance in the future and only the management of electricity will cost money, but the electricity itself will no longer cost anything. This is already the case in Texas, USA. Huge wind farms produce about ten percent of the electricity there. Especially at night, when consumption is low, energy is abundant. The first companies have already started to give away their electricity between 9 pm and 6 am. The odds are there. Time to use it.

Fotos: © TomasSereda