Surplus only, never the grid

If Genie could keep just this rule and no other, it would still be Genie. Surplus only, never the grid. Every other property of the appliance, from its quiet days to its privacy to the way it is paid, follows from holding to this line without exceptions.

The rule in plain words

A home with panels on the roof makes power during the day. Some of that power the home uses as it is made. The rest is surplus. Genie draws only on the surplus. It watches the home's energy flow and takes power only while the panels are making more than the home is using. The moment the home needs the power back, Genie steps aside, automatically, every time.

Genie does not draw from the grid, ever, for any reason, including to finish a job. Genie does not send power to the grid, ever, because it is not a generator or a battery and has nothing to send. The home is served first, always.

Why the grid is off limits in both directions

Drawing from the grid would make Genie an ordinary appliance that costs the household money to run, and would make its work something other than a use of surplus. The whole case for Genie is that the power it uses would otherwise have gone unused by the home. Take grid power and that case collapses, along with the household's ability to say truthfully that Genie never adds to the bill.

Sending to the grid is ruled out for a different reason. Genie is not in the business of selling electricity, and it does not want to be in the business of managing a household's export arrangement with a utility. It converts surplus into computing work on the spot, and the work, not the power, is what gets sold. Keeping the grid out of it in both directions keeps Genie an appliance rather than an energy project.

Enforced in the machine, not in fine print

It would be easy to write this rule into a document and ask households to trust that the software honors it. Element 31 has chosen instead to build the rule into the appliance so that it is not a setting, a default, or a promise, but a property of the machine. Genie cannot be configured to top up from the grid on a dull afternoon, because the capability is not there to configure.

This is the reason the rule can be stated so flatly on this page, on the principles page, and in the app. A rule that lives in the machine does not need qualifying.

What the rule costs, and what it buys

The cost is plain. Genie's work follows the sun and the household. A cloud, a kettle, or an evening takes the surplus away and Genie goes quiet. On a grey week it does very little, and the app shows energy used, work performed, work sold, and money owed as the small figures they are. Genie earns when, and only when, the computing it performs is sold, and it can only perform that computing when there is surplus. Element 31 will never promise yields or returns, and the surplus-only rule is a large part of why.

What the rule buys is a machine that can live in a home without argument. It never competes with the household for power. It never touches the grid bill. It never needs to be explained to a utility. It does something useful with power that would otherwise have gone unused, and it does nothing at all the rest of the time. Genie is in development; measured results from real homes, including the low ones, will be published before the first Genie ships.

For what the rule looks like from inside the house, see What happens when the sun goes in and How Genie knows the home has surplus.