This story is what the future of energy is all about:

The company stuck solar panels on UCSF’s Genentech Hall as well as a nearby parking garage. MMA owns the panels and sells the power to the school, under a contract that locks in electricity prices for the next 20 years. The rates are lower than Pacific Gas & Electric’s, and the school didn’t have to pay for the panels up front.

“It’s very simple – we got someone else to take on the headaches, and we get the power,” said Maric Munn, the school’s director of facilities management.

In other words, generation of energy needs to become more localized and democratized in the same way that PCs changed the information generation model from mainframe and slaves to networked peers.

The advantage of diesel in this model is that it has many more options than most power generators — the input can come from virtually anywhere. Thus if the output is standardized, the market for micro-generation could explode.

Excellent story.