There is an interesting debate ongoing on the Gristmill blog about whether the future of electrical generation lies primarily with big centralized power plants, like today, or with distributed systems.
Naturally, there are many factors that influence which is more attractive, many of which are regulatory rather than inherent to the physics or economics. I suspect the key dynamics will be the relative efficiency of differently sized facilities, the rate at which low-loss high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission emerges, and the rate at which financing options for small facilities proliferate. Other important considerations will be the rate of improvement in the economics of solar photovoltaic systems, as well as the development and deployment of demand management and energy storage options for the grid.
In any event, it is doubtful whether one approach or the other will ever truly dominate. In all probability, a low-carbon society will incorporate both approaches in keeping with the strengths of different technologies and the needs of different areas.
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There is something intuitively appealing about generating power locally: within a city, neighbourhood, or even building.
At the same time, if we want to use a lot more renewables, we will need the diversity provided by a national grid linking many seperate facilities.
Small is ugly if it means we keep burning coal
Big is beautiful if it breaks our dead-dinosaur addiction
Posted by Gar Lipow (Guest Contributor) at 10:59 AM on 10 Feb 2009
“While I think there may be real conflict between this and what radical decentralists say, I also think this conflict can be exaggerated. This is not an argument that the majority of power has to travel long distances. I think a lot power can be generated locally, depending on what you define as locally. Only a minority of power will have to travel long distances, and only a minority of that will need to travel more than a few hundred miles.
Saying that we will need transmission to convert to a mostly renewable society is not the same as saying that most of the power lines proposed by current utilities are justified. Carol Overland, in her recent Gristmill post made the point that most (perhaps all) such proposals are about merchant power to buy and sell more conventional generation, mostly coal and nuclear power.”
British engineers slam home wind turbines as ‘eco-bling’
LONDON—Installing wind turbines and solar panels in people’s homes is “eco-bling” that will not help meet Britain’s targets on cutting carbon emissions, engineers warned Wednesday.
In a new report by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), Professor Doug King said it was better to adapt buildings to make them more energy efficient than try to offset energy use with “on-site renewable energy generation.”
The leader of Britain’s main opposition Conservative party, David Cameron, is among those who have installed wind turbines, fixing one onto the roof of his home in the plush west London district of Notting Hill.
“Eco-bling is a term I coined to describe unnecessary renewable energy visibly attached to the outside of poorly designed buildings,” King told the Daily Mail newspaper ahead of the report’s publication.
“On July 27th, as part of its new “annual energy statement”, the Department of Energy and Climate Change put some numbers to this effect. Green policies will raise domestic gas prices in 2020 by 18% and electricity prices by 33%, it said. For nondomestic users the impact will be greater—24% and 43% respectively—and other estimates put the figures higher still.
For residential consumers, the department says, this will matter little. Since government policies to improve domestic energy efficiency, set up smart meters and so on will reduce demand, bills should end up more or less the same—if, that is, the money-saving policies work perfectly and lots of people go in for them.
But even if energy-saving were to balance out the domestic costs of greener environmental policies, the costs themselves may not be justified, especially if there are simpler ways of achieving the same end. An analysis published this week by Policy Exchange, a think-tank, looks at the price of carbon implicit in a range of policies. It found the price implied by the renewables obligation was almost ten times as great as the price of carbon in the European emissions-trading scheme (see chart). Subsidising microgeneration at home costs even more. Assessing such policies in terms of how much carbon reduction they achieve for each pound spent, these high figures are hard to justify.“
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