olkswagen car engines purr in the basement of German green power company Lichtblick’s test site in a church across the street from Berlin’s Jewish Museum.
The VW motors sit inside metal boxes adorned with meters, including one reading “how much CO2 you’ve not released by using this unit.”
It’s not the VW engines that are special – but the software that manipulates them from afar.
Lichtblick controls each of its 1,500 Volkswagen “home power plants” from its Hamburg headquarters. The utility – which says it wants to become “the Google of electricity” – has created an algorithm that automatically starts and stops each VW engine connected to the network based on the usage data it collects.
Via Steve Crandall.