ICAP Patent Brokerage put a patent portfolio up for sale, suggesting crucial ways to monitor and manage LPPUs.

Ask any homeowner – the prices that big power companies like PECO (News - Alert) charge are quickly approaching the realm of "intolerable." Ask any homeowner from California during the brownouts of the 1990s – the power that the mainstream grids provide, despite the outrageous price tag (News - Alert), isn’t even reliable.

The reaction in our culture makes perfect sense: Concepts like "self-sufficiency" and "going off the grid" are no longer the sole purvey of gold-hoarding libertarians and trust-funded-anarcho-punk-Kambucha junkies and their respective political fringes.

Nowadays, if you have 2,500 hamsters running on wheels in your basement powering a toaster oven to heat your morning bagel, most people would still call PETA on you. They would also, however, have a term for your contraption: a hamster-based local power production unit (LPPU).

Solar panels on a roof also qualify as LPPUs. As residence and business-based LPPUs proliferate, individuals secure for themselves a more comfortable station in public consciousness, so follows the refrain of venture capitalism: "How do we sell it?"

In keeping with the high-concept metaphors, if you have an LPPU at your home or business, your home or business becomes a virtual power plant (VPP).

Pike Research (News - Alert) recently published a study that foresees the total output of VPPs increasing by more than 200 percent between 2011 and 2017. In Pike's assessment, VPPs will be making a total of $5.3 billion, and putting out over 91.7 GW of power per-year before 2020.

Since 2001, ICAP Patent Brokerage has been quietly buying accumulating patents on ideas pertinent to the recording and quantification of the energies LPPUs produce, in addition to how you can efficiently turn it into something that people and companies can buy and sell on the free market since. They currently sell a ton of ideas accumulated as a single product.