What happens when the sun goes in

Solar power is weather. A clear morning becomes a hazy noon, a front moves through, the days shorten. Genie lives inside that weather by design, and the honest way to describe the appliance is to describe what it does when the light is not there.

A cloud crosses

Panels respond to a passing cloud within moments, and the home's surplus can fall from comfortable to nothing while you watch. Genie follows the surplus down. The instant the panels stop making more than the home is using, Genie stops drawing. It does not borrow from the grid to finish the task it was on.

Work in progress pauses. Because the jobs Genie runs are batch work that does not mind waiting for the sun, pausing is an ordinary event rather than a failure. When the cloud moves on and the margin reopens, the work picks up again. Clouds come and go all afternoon and Genie starts and stops with them.

The sun sets

Evening is the same event stretched out. As production falls away the surplus goes first, because the home is still using power while the roof is making less of it. Genie steps aside well before the panels go dark, and then it waits.

Overnight Genie does no work and earns nothing. It is not a battery, so it has nothing put by from the afternoon to spend after dark. It does not pull from the grid to keep going, because it never draws from the grid under any circumstances. It sits quietly with an outbound connection open, ready for the morning, and that is all.

A grey week

Some stretches of weather leave a home with little or no surplus day after day. Genie's answer is the same answer at a longer scale: it waits. The app shows energy used, work performed, work sold, and money owed, and on a grey week all of those are small, and the app shows them small.

This is deliberate. Element 31 will not describe Genie as something that earns regardless of weather, because it does not. Genie earns when, and only when, the computing it performs is actually sold to a paying customer, and it can only perform that computing when there is surplus to run on. Quiet weather means quiet work, and quiet work means quiet earnings.

Why pausing is the design, not a flaw

It would be possible to build an appliance that smooths all of this out by storing power or by topping up from the grid. That appliance would be a different product with a different set of promises, and it would break the promise Genie is built around: surplus only, never the grid.

Keeping to surplus means accepting the sun's schedule. In return the household gets a machine that can never add to the household's grid bill, never competes with the home for power, and never has to be explained to a neighbor as anything other than what it is. The quiet day is part of that bargain, and the app shows it as a quiet day.

Genie is in development, and measured results from real homes, including the low ones, will be published before the first Genie ships. For the related rule on how Genie decides there is surplus at all, see How Genie knows the home has surplus. The glossary entry for a quiet day is short.