Forgive me, but Devrim was intentionally misleading here. He's weaselly tried to give the impression of Mercury being an open communication protocol akin to Bluetooth.
But if you look closer at the material by Kraken, it isn't that. "Mercury Consortium" also seems to be a clever mislabeling.
Mercury doesn't define how devices talk to each other. Instead, it only appears to be a certification that the device talks to a Mercury box in your home. "Mercury-certified" just means that Kraken implemented the manufacturer's API for that device to talk to their box.
The Mercury box is not under control of the home owner, but of the grid operator. And the grid operator may have very different priorities than the home owner!
While the home owner may have access to services around this box, such as an EV charging schedule or a grid-optimized heat pump operation, the home owner does not have control of the box, the smart devices it controls or the massive telemetry data that the box sends from the home to the grid operator.
There doesn't appear to be any competing implementation of the box. It's just the box made by Kraken.
This makes the box the natural entry point for enshittification or rent-seeking towards the home user, e.g. by making core functionality subscription only. Or by selling telemetry data to third parties.
It can also enshittify towards the device manufacturers. The box can be a gatekeeper to keep new innovative products out of a market if Kraken decides not to support it.
There is imho no substance to the promise to "prevent your smart devices from becoming expensive paperweights", as Kraken can unilaterally decide to drop support for an old device that still works in some homes but where its integration to Mercury is considered too costly to maintain, leaving the few home owners with no option but to replace their devices.
So, colour me sceptical here.
The "Consortium" is also a misleading PR label.
He mentioned technology partners - or as he called them - "founding members" in Mercury. However, it seems that AWS cloud and Oracle's MySQL database are only part of the technology stack that the Kraken software is running on. I strongly suspect that Oracle and AWS are not actually implementing Mercury itself. (This feels like buying Powerbooks for your employees and then talking about Apple being your company's product partner in PR interviews.)
It's also funny to mention startups with proprietary technology going out of business as a cautionary tale and as a good reason to go Mercury.
You know what's also a startup? Kraken. And what's running on non-open-source technology? Afaict, the Mercury box and the Kraken software platform it speaks to.
If Kraken goes belly-up or decides to drop the Mercury project, the home owner has no say in that decision or its consequences and simply loses the services provided by Mercury.
The slow progress of VPP, V2G, etc. is slowing the Transition, IMO. Here is an area that makes owning a battery a potential money maker. I think that has broad appeal.
For example, IIRC, when Green Mountain Power announced their program, I believe somebody estimated they could make $4000 a year from their Nissan Leaf. A friggin' Leaf!
New in my feed, last week: "Nuvve wins $400 million V2G, EV charging contract in New Mexico". So far, I'm just seeing the press release for this (haven't really dug for more). It's for state fleet vehicles. Many of these vehicles, I assume, are parked at 4:00pm or earlier, getting a quick charge, and then, servicing the evening peak load, and then getting their full charge, off peak. Most school buses are free to charge from 10:00am-2:00pm, perfect! Have I mentioned PNM runs on 95+% renewables pretty much whenever the sun is shining? But, so far, no mention of how this *lowers* the cost of having an electric fleet, just the $400 million price tag for the general public to groan over.
The other thing I don't hear much about is the potential for a VPP managed at a very granular level to provide ancillary grid services at a higher quality and a lower price.
Oh, and please let us keep time-of-use rates and other options for those with relatively dumb batteries.
Forgive me, but Devrim was intentionally misleading here. He's weaselly tried to give the impression of Mercury being an open communication protocol akin to Bluetooth.
But if you look closer at the material by Kraken, it isn't that. "Mercury Consortium" also seems to be a clever mislabeling.
Mercury doesn't define how devices talk to each other. Instead, it only appears to be a certification that the device talks to a Mercury box in your home. "Mercury-certified" just means that Kraken implemented the manufacturer's API for that device to talk to their box.
The Mercury box is not under control of the home owner, but of the grid operator. And the grid operator may have very different priorities than the home owner!
While the home owner may have access to services around this box, such as an EV charging schedule or a grid-optimized heat pump operation, the home owner does not have control of the box, the smart devices it controls or the massive telemetry data that the box sends from the home to the grid operator.
There doesn't appear to be any competing implementation of the box. It's just the box made by Kraken.
This makes the box the natural entry point for enshittification or rent-seeking towards the home user, e.g. by making core functionality subscription only. Or by selling telemetry data to third parties.
It can also enshittify towards the device manufacturers. The box can be a gatekeeper to keep new innovative products out of a market if Kraken decides not to support it.
There is imho no substance to the promise to "prevent your smart devices from becoming expensive paperweights", as Kraken can unilaterally decide to drop support for an old device that still works in some homes but where its integration to Mercury is considered too costly to maintain, leaving the few home owners with no option but to replace their devices.
So, colour me sceptical here.
The "Consortium" is also a misleading PR label.
He mentioned technology partners - or as he called them - "founding members" in Mercury. However, it seems that AWS cloud and Oracle's MySQL database are only part of the technology stack that the Kraken software is running on. I strongly suspect that Oracle and AWS are not actually implementing Mercury itself. (This feels like buying Powerbooks for your employees and then talking about Apple being your company's product partner in PR interviews.)
It's also funny to mention startups with proprietary technology going out of business as a cautionary tale and as a good reason to go Mercury.
You know what's also a startup? Kraken. And what's running on non-open-source technology? Afaict, the Mercury box and the Kraken software platform it speaks to.
If Kraken goes belly-up or decides to drop the Mercury project, the home owner has no say in that decision or its consequences and simply loses the services provided by Mercury.
The Mercury box would... turn into a paperweight.
The slow progress of VPP, V2G, etc. is slowing the Transition, IMO. Here is an area that makes owning a battery a potential money maker. I think that has broad appeal.
For example, IIRC, when Green Mountain Power announced their program, I believe somebody estimated they could make $4000 a year from their Nissan Leaf. A friggin' Leaf!
New in my feed, last week: "Nuvve wins $400 million V2G, EV charging contract in New Mexico". So far, I'm just seeing the press release for this (haven't really dug for more). It's for state fleet vehicles. Many of these vehicles, I assume, are parked at 4:00pm or earlier, getting a quick charge, and then, servicing the evening peak load, and then getting their full charge, off peak. Most school buses are free to charge from 10:00am-2:00pm, perfect! Have I mentioned PNM runs on 95+% renewables pretty much whenever the sun is shining? But, so far, no mention of how this *lowers* the cost of having an electric fleet, just the $400 million price tag for the general public to groan over.
The other thing I don't hear much about is the potential for a VPP managed at a very granular level to provide ancillary grid services at a higher quality and a lower price.
Oh, and please let us keep time-of-use rates and other options for those with relatively dumb batteries.