Spot on, @Caleb Rust. You are pointing straight at the central tension: whoever owns the physical switching hardware dictates the energy flow and extracts the local data. But we shouldn't let the currently high price of silicon carbide transistors convince us these modules will remain exclusive luxury assets.
Just like solar photovoltaics and lithium-iron-phosphate cells, the manufacturing cost of solid-state power electronics will relentlessly crash as production scales. Moving terawatt-hours of clean electricity physically requires deploying millions of these nodes. The immediate threat isn't that the wealthy will simply hoard them in private compounds; it’s that investor-owned utility monopolies will install them across our public rights-of-way, locking the firmware behind proprietary algorithms to surveil our usage and throttle local cooperative generation.
That is exactly why treating the grid as a democratized public commons is non-negotiable. If municipalities and worker cooperatives own their local microgrids, the data stays private and the infrastructure serves human needs, not shareholder dividends. We have to demand open-source protocols today, before centralized monopolies turn a thermodynamic necessity into a digital cage.