Can anyone tell me how much green coin I will get if I participate as a solar energy generator?
I have a 3000W panel setup and assuming I will get 5hrs of this 3000W.
In my calculation it generates less than a dollar per month worth of Green Coin, right?
This is a great question and I'll walk you through all of the aspects that get you to an answer of absolute value per day.
There are multitude of variables that go into the calculation.
1) The first question is, how much does your system produce?
In your case you have a 3 kW system. So the answer is: it depends. As you indicated you are assuming 15 kWh/day (3 kW * 5 hr = 15 kWh). I don't know where you are located but I am located in Seattle and have a similarly sized system as you do and right now I'm producing about 2-7 kWh per day. If you were in AZ it would be much higher. However, you stipulated 15 kWh per day in your question and I will use this value as it is very reasonable.
2) How many kg CO2 are calculated by my production?
PV solar is rated at 46 gCO2 per kWh. This figure represents all of the CO2 intensiveness of producing, shipping, installing, servicing and disposal of the system amortized it over it's expected lifetime. Therefore it is a calculated number. Governments and especially the US Gov't are VERY GOOD at writing reports and coming up with these numbers (and equally as bad at actually doing something to solve the problem). So these figures are very reliable. The global average for committing 1 kWh of electrical energy to the grid is 527 g CO2. So your system receives a credit for the difference of these two values. So for your example of 15 kWh * (0.527 kg - 0.046 kg) = 15 * 0.481 kg CO2 = 7.215 kg CO2. This is the number GreenCoin uses to calculate your GreenCoin award for that day's distribution.
3) How many coins are produced by the ecosystem?
This figure is related to how all cryptocurrencies "traditionally" work. Miners solve for blocks and receive coin awards. GreenCoin is unique in that 50% of the award goes directly to the GreenCoin Foundation (for distribution to producers). However, the normal variability experienced by variable mining hashing power working on the coin, difficulty changes, and luck all still apply. The algo is set to supply an average of 1 block every 63 seconds, or 1,369 blocks per day [looking at the
block explorer we have produced a block every 63.69 seconds through block 180,236]. The current block award is 1,000 coins each for the miners and the Foundation which yields, on average 1,369,000 coins per day. The Foundation distributes all of the coins it receives every day.
4) How many other producers are there?
This is one of the largest variables. You receive coins as a ratio of your carbon offset calculation versus the day's total. Right now we have 13 producers. You can see a recent total of how many producers were paid, how many total coins were issued, and how much CO2 was offset on our
network page. You will notice some variability here as some folks report their meter readings intermittently combined with the fact that folks have variable system absolute outputs. Having said that GreenCoin is currently quite young and small, and you would receive quite a bit of coins now versus what you might receive if you signed up later when the system was larger. The increased award size is an incentive for being an early adopter. Let's take the Oct 14th payout as an example of what you would have received as it falls into about an average daily payout: There was production calculated at 121.517 kg CO2 reported for that day and 1,415,000 coins to distribute. Each producer would therefore receive 11,644.46 GreenCoins per kg CO2 they were responsible for. If you had been part of the system for that day, the total CO2 would have been increased to 128.732 kg (121.517 + your 7.215 kg). Therefore the coin award would have dropped to 10,991.83 coins per kg CO2 to accommodate for the increased production for which you would have received 79,306.04 coins (7.215 * 10,991.83). The production award side works on the same principal as the mining side: there are more people working for the same amount of coins, but the value putatively is also increased. In the sense of GreenCoin Producers, more producers sequester more CO2 but split up the same number of daily coins, which can serve to increase the value of the coin in this same mechanism as miners.
5) What is the value of GreenCoin?
The final piece is the absolute value of the coin for which we have no control. The GreenCoin Foundation reports the CO2 calculations and totals on the website (currently over 12,000 kg CO2) but it's the open market that decides the price. We currently trade on
Allcoin. The last price was 12 satoshis and bitcoin is at $390. The value of 79,306 GreenCoins at this price is $3.71. You would've made 24.7 cents per kWh. This of course comes with the caveats of any open market system in that your attempt to sell may have influenced the market price and all of that, but for the calculation, those are the numbers.
GreenCoin is ultimately designed to be a privately held, open-market incentive credit for renewable producers in energy, fuel and other carbon intensive areas. Very few, if any, open market carbon credit systems exist that are highly scalable, have no participation production
de minimis, and operate free from any government law or mandate. The fact is, your system and others like you provides a usefulness (a net carbon reduction for an equal amount of energy provided) that is not being paid for by society. GreenCoin represents a mechanism to provide for this payment. When other people buy your coins and hold them they own a capital asset that represents global carbon reduction by incentivizing people like you to do more of what you are doing: putting renewable solar online and replacing carbon intensive production processes.
We need to reduce emissions 6.2% a year to hit the 2 C (3.6 F) end-of-century target. We won't get there doing what we are doing now. I hope this system helps us change that. Putting an added incentive of 24.7 cents on every kWh produced by PV solar makes it much more financially competitive with more carbon intensive natural gas and coal electrical production, without penalizing the latter two for existing. It is simply an additional, socially derived revenue added to the production that is determined by an open market price based on the collective trading of individual market players (i.e., the definition of capitalism). When the market decides this useful carbon reduced production should be worth more, the price goes up, when they don't, it goes down.
So sign up with us and have some fun.
After all, receiving coins is free so certainly you have nothing to lose, even if you only get a few bucks a month, right?
