this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
148 points (99.3% liked)
Solarpunk
8984 readers
66 users here now
The space to discuss Solarpunk itself and Solarpunk related stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere.
Join our chat: Movim or XMPP client.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I truly want to find someone I can do at the home scale with electricity, which isn't buttcoin, to take advantage of overproduction.
Look into hydrogen production from water electrolysis, if you're really producing a significant surplus.
There is no meaningful way I can do something with hydrogen outside of as a feedstock into another process.
Things I've considered that would help me, running a gravel crusher, or if there was some scaled down hauber Bausch machine. I use a significant amount of gravel and I am always in need of fertilizer.
You can run an ICE on hydrogen, with some minor modifications. If you have enough space you can store the produced hydrogen at near atmospheric pressure in a gas holder/gasometer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder
As to nitrogen fertilizer, there have been recent improvements in air nitrogen fixation by way of an electric arc/plasma: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=nitrogen+fixation+electric+arc&ia=web e.g. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/ra/d1ra01357b
Yeah I've seen the plasma arc thing. I'm vaguely associated with some in the agrovoltaics research community and have considered reaching out. It's not available to retail consumers yet
sell energy buy gravel, we invented money for this very reason.
I know on a small garden scale, clover is a very good companion plant because it affixes nitrogen to the soil. It also acts as a ground cover to reduce moisture loss and suppress weeds, and on top of all of that it attracts bees.
Yeah but I can't turn electricity into clover
Oh hello! You posted on /r Technology and latelly /r Collapse before it all went to shit! I'm a big fan of you!
Oh, hi. Glad you liked my posts. The latest /c/collapse incarnation on Lemmy (we've had to move twice) is on https://lemmy.zip/c/collapse btw.
It may not be a direct benefit to you, but if you have some spare compute, you could donate the compute to a project with BOINC.
Are you talking about computing power?
I've been pondering about this because and feel the need. I don't have any solar, but I'd like to play around with local AI a bit. I don't even have the hardware at the moment because driver support isn't ready on my laptop.
I'd even like to try a coding agent to find out if there are any useful cases. I don't want to do it in the cloud though. So I thought it'd be cool if someone with cheap or excess electricity could provide their hardware. I think it's quite a challenge to do that, though.
Right now I'm thinking, maybe running a decentralized Libre Translate service or something similar could be a nice project. Mastodon uses this for post translation and self hosted instances could use it as a translation service. Somewhere, the sun is always shining on someone's roof with solar, cheap energy and a spare GPU, I assume. I don't think it makes a difference if a post is being translated in Australia when I browse my timeline at night in Germany.
Peer Tube video encoding could also be done like this.
If anyone has links to ideas about decentralized data centers or whatever that would be, I'd be very interested. I think it would also help with protest against data centers being built, because it's nice to be able to have examples for alternatives. A way of using what's already there without building a grid only big tech and the fossil fuel industry need.
Without relying on the internet, people could offer to back up BluRays for friends or the community. Or optimize the hell out of HomeAssistant to run Jellyfin tasks and stuff when there's lots of solar.