  Despite its popularity, the nature of solar energy is highly uncertain and
weather dependent, affecting the business viability and investment of solar
energy generation, especially for household users. To stabilize the income from
solar energy generation, there have been limited traditional options, such as
using energy storage to pool excessive solar energy in off-peak periods or
financial derivatives from future markets to hedge energy prices. In this
paper, we explore a novel idea of "parametric solar energy insurance", by which
solar panel owners can insure their solar energy generation based on a
verifiable geographically specific index (surface solar irradiation).
Parametric solar energy insurance offers opportunities of financial subsidies
for insufficient solar energy generation and amortizes the fluctuations of
renewable energy generation geographically. Furthermore, we propose to leverage
blockchain and remote sensing (satellite imagery) to provide a publicly
verifiable platform for solar energy insurance, which not only automates the
underwriting and claims of a solar energy insurance policy, but also improves
its accountability and transparency. We utilize the state-of-the-art succinct
zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARK) to realize privacy-preserving blockchain-based
solar energy insurance on real-world permissionless blockchain platform
Ethereum.
