Crazy Wisdom
Episode #537: Free From the Grid, Connected to the World
- AI & Agents
- Solar energy
- perovskite cells
- battery storage
- off-grid living
- solarpunk
- cyberpunk
- Starlink
- IoT devices
About this episode
Timestamps
- 00:00Introduction to Tom Fay and his work
- 01:03Understanding Solar Punk: Utopian Tech and Culture
- 02:15Current State of Solar Technology and Storage
- 03:45Living Off-Grid: Solar, Batteries, and Remote Work
- 06:11Solar Energy in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities
- 12:21Powering Communities with Mobile Solar Solutions
- 16:50The Vision of Solar Punk: Self-Sufficient Communities
- 22:54Existing Examples: Great Barrier Island and Others
- 26:06Overfishing, Environmental Challenges, and Technological Solutions
- 28:34Using Technology to Address Second-Order Environmental Problems
- 36:35Data, AI, and the Future of Energy Management
- 43:13Carbon Credits, Blockchain, and ESG Reporting
- 45:27The Geopolitics of Green Energy and Resource Control
- 46:53How to Connect with Tom Fay and Future Projects
Key Insights
- Solarpunk represents a genuine near-future possibility, not just an aesthetic. As solar panels and lithium batteries become cheaper and more efficient, the vision of abundant, decentralized clean energy is becoming a practical reality rather than a utopian fantasy.
- Perovskite solar cells are pushing efficiency roughly 22% beyond conventional panels, and the bigger revolution happening right now is on the storage side — cheaper, higher-capacity batteries are what will truly unlock solar's potential at scale.
- Africa may leapfrog the West on solar adoption, just as it leapfrogged landlines with mobile phones. People in energy-scarce countries viscerally understand the value of clean power in a way that people in the West, accustomed to reliable grids, simply don't.
- Portable solar container units — self-contained, deployable systems — already exist and are making off-grid energy viable for farms, mines, remote lodges, and even data centers, with a roughly five-to-one solar-to-load footprint required.
- Carbon credits generated from verified solar output, tracked via IoT smart meters and stamped on blockchain, represent a long-term business opportunity that survives political shifts because institutional investors and banks operate on independent ESG mandates.
- AI training data is a present and real economic opportunity, but a shrinking one. The window for humans — especially lawyers, scientists, and specialists — to get paid for their expertise is closing fast as labs pivot toward synthetic data generation.
- True self-reliance comes down to four things: food, water, power, and transportation. With solar and Starlink, the gap between remote wilderness and connected civilization has essentially collapsed — something unimaginable even a generation ago.
Episode transcript
Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcasts.
Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Tom Fay here. He is an experimenter, author, recently published a book on business automation called the 90 Day Client Acquisition Code. He's the founder and CEO of Carbon Credits Marketplace, which is introducing smart meters which are IoT based, basically a digital measurement reporting IoT, and for verification of solar energy. Welcome to the show.
Many people have heard of it. Most people have never read the books because there's cyberpunk books, which got really popular in the 90s and the 2000s. I started reading those in the 2010 era and a little bit more dystopian. And then there's solarpunk, but there's no books in the solar punk genre, except for one really, really weird book in the 1970s about a post apocalyptic world where there's a lot of solar panels and people could fly. A really weird book. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to the audience. And then other than that, it's just a Burning man aesthetic, but it feels like solarpunk is basically the utopian version of cyberpunk, which is what happens if all of our material problems get solved by technology with solar panels and nuclear power and all these crazy things that are arising right now. We still have the existential, you know, common human nature problems, but we don't have the just, you know, more dystopian problems because cyberpunk is all about what happens if we create new technology and that new technology creates more problems and nothing ever just gets solved because that's the whole idea is technology solved problems. Right? So, yeah, so solar is really interesting because I've been paying attention to solar, of course, and the solar panels are getting really cheap and the batteries which will power solar are getting cheaper and have more capacity. So it feels like, you know, Pretty soon I used to have a van where I had solar panels on the top and that fit all of my energy needs for like a week or two weeks at a time. And that was five years ago now. So it must be getting better, right? Is it?
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