What is Distributed Power?
Distributed power is a term used to describe emerging renewable energy enterprises that sees economic, social and political advantages in decentralized grid tied systems.
What is the Problem with Conventional Sources of Energy?
Conventional grid based power is produced usually in hundreds of megawatts (MW) (500 MW is about enough to power a small city of a 150,000) at nuclear, natural gas, coal fired and hydro-electric power plants, usually far away from cities. These power facilities require centralized grid systems that includes a complex network of power lines to distribute the power for local use.
High voltage is required to transport electricity over the long distances between power plants and where it is actually used. Yet this voltage is too high for most end-use applications. Transformers thus are needed to "step down" the high voltage electrical load that over making it suitable for household and commercial use. This happens at several levels at the District Sub-Station, the Neighborhood Sub-Station and local street level transformers. What we have come to realize is that over the long term with an economy that incentivizes programmed obsolesence that this centralized grid system is not only expensive to maintain, by wasteful of resources as well.
Possible Advantages to Distributed Power over Conventional Grid Systems
There are three major reasons why distributed power when combined with renewables has long term economic advantages in reducing infrastructure and municipal operational costs:
Power plants have an efficiency range of between 30-60% (natural gas co-generation plants are in the higher range while coal power plants are in the lower range) and so the wasted energy goes out the smokestack or through the coolant pipe and into the cooling pond.
It is estimated that around 10-30% percent is lost in distribution via power lines
Transformers have to be used to step down the power at the district level so it can be used by the end-user.
Over the last ten years since this article was originally researched, there has been some evolution in the distributed power movement. One of the challenges is to mate the more grassroots radical appropriate technology idealism that was initiated by people like EF Schumacher with a pragmatic approach that lead to the mainstream of this technology and approach.
Various technologies could emerge as the significant renewable energy sources replacing conventional fossil fuel based energy systems. "We are at a critical point in the industrial age, as the technology to power electric fuel cells is now available for commercial use," says Juniper Elk in the September 2000 Auto-Free Times. "The harmful effects of civilization may be combated by new technology rather than perpetuated by it," That comes with a big IF - if we are able to be wiser and smarter in how we use technology to empower people locally to develop the necessary technologies to help themselves and reduce dependency on complex centralized corporate systems of management and production. This means an intensive design-engineering process that considers both how something looks and feels as well as how it performs as part of an integrated and systemic approach to technology in our lives.
Arcosanti, Arcology and Distributed Power
There is a natural fit between the founding principles of Arcosanti and Distributed Power. This includes the realization that current patterns of urban development are not sustainable and have led to extremely high costs for infrastructure. Rapid suburban development has required a huge outlay of capital that is sapping the economic output of the country. Investing in denser forms of development along the lines of what is put forward at Arcosanti could help to reduce infrastructure costs while developing more localized energy strategies within these densifying nodes.
Logistically the key components pointing to the need for reversing the trends of Suburbanism and more recently the Exurbanism relate to the way in which these areas lead to inefficient energy use patterns:
33% of all electrical energy is lost in production and transmission and the radiating out of suburban development from the central city means more power losses
Additional costs associated with lines and supporting infrastructure to support rapid suburban development
Encouragement of a high consumption lifestyle modeled on the lives and rich and famous leads to more power loads many of which are unnecessary or frivolous
Consider the Fuel Cell Model
One thing to note about Distributed Power is that it is not purely a grassroots movement of people concentrated in ecovillages and intentional communities or isolationists putting solar panels in their back yard in an attempt to get off the grid. The Fuel Cell Energy sector has been a leader in the development of distributed power solutions, because certain fuel cells are well suited for developing reliable power systems especially when we are faced with the possible that increasing neglect of infrastructure will lead to rising power costs including losses due to decreasing grid reliability.
Fuel Cells are interesting because several aspects of their design is synergistic or allows for the development of more synergy within interconnect subsystems in a human habitat and/or industrial ecology. Regardless of how well and quickly the approach takes off its clear that an effective long term energy strategy that is reducing unsustainable environment impacts is one that has to include Distributed Power. And fuel companies like Fuel Cell Energy and Seimens are leading the way developing systems that can be deployed in the field as turn key units that offer solutions to congested and overloaded power grid.
Whats more is that there is with the rise of more green thinking in business, design and engineering of the need for more holistic systems design of infrastructure and the built environment.
With the case of the recent install in 2011 of the Fuel Cell at the Whole Foods in Fairfield CT, we see a typical combined heat and power install that includes the recycling of waste heat to heat and cool the store. Deepening that thinking is a movement towards a district energy management configuration that includes aspects of an Industrial Ecology. Key components of a synergistic approach involving fuel cells or similar power systems within an industrial ecology might include:
Recycling of waste heat in a combined heat and power or cogeneration system that produces heat for heating and cooling buildings.
Recycling of exhaust gas for use in heating and creating an enriched growing environment in a greenhouse
Recycling of bio-waste streams to produce biogas via anaerobic digestion as fuelstock for fuel cells
Carbon sequestration/credits that allows methane gas to be sequestered and locked into agricultural biomass production via greenhouse enrich of fuel cell exhaust gas
However it is important to note that there are many variations of the Distributed Power theme. For example Gasification work done by All Power Labs in Berkeley is potentially a revolutionary model that can possibly offer a real low cost distributed power model for the grassroots. For example their 20kw gasifier costs about $25k and could provide about half of the power needs of a aspiring ecovillage like Arcosanti for about $50k. This is considerably less than the estimated $300k cost of building a solar PV facility at or near Arcosanti as part of a Power Purchase Agreement that was proposed in 2011 for Arcosanti.
Financing Distributed Power
Distributed Power involves adding adding power production capacity close to the point of use. Savings can be achieved through minimization of additional more expensive centralized infrastructure and also reducing power losses from transporting that power from a distant location within the national power grid. The clever systems are designed so that the additional costs of the renewable systems are offset by savings from additional grid investments. However these costs are often hidden and take some time to accrue. Thus if we can see the wisdom of complex financial mechanisms as part of a pragmatic approach, it would be in these emerging market of distributed power. What's need is a comprehensive government program to retool the economy towards one that is less corporate and more community oriented. Really this is not that far out from many of changes that Tea Party activists are wanting. The key though is to leverage existing government influence on investments and incentives that build local economic self-reliance and in that process enable the movement away from big government as well as big corporate solutions.
Political Considerations
Decentralized grid-tied renewable energy systems are well suited for powering sustainable communities and projects such as what Arcosanti aspires to be. Yet
there is a debate about whether alternative energy in order to truly be an alternative to existing energy systems must decentralized and grass roots orientated. Daniel and Berman and John O'Connor write in Who Owns the Sun "democracy is a false promise if it does not include the power to steer the energy economy. Today, the resurgence of solar technologies is strictly managed by the same energy corporations who undermined solar hot-water heating in the 1970s and 1980s.
One of the predicaments that might ironically provide an opening for distributed power is that the increasing resistance to spending on national infrastructure by the political right might be seen as opportunity to pitch more localized power solution that can be better monitored by local citizens to ensure its effective management. National power grids by their nature require more bureaucrats to manage them.
Solar power without a grassroots solar movement will be merely another form of business as usual." Jeremy Rifkin writing in The Hydrogen Economy concurs saying that the hydrogen revolution has the potential to transform the economy and empower the sustainable socially conscious communities of people towards increased self-reliance and to reverse existing trends of modernization where power is becoming concentrated in the hands of a relative few super-powerful people.
Many cite evidence of how corporate interests conspired to monopolize the transport system, by stifling technological innovations in mass transit and alternative fuels. Many of these companies have been caught in bind, because their attempts to hold innovation back are being challenged by a growing group of interests in society as well as technological developments and the destructive health and environmental impacts of fossil fuel energy systems and petroleum-based chemicals. The fear is that despite all the impediments put in place by policy makers and corporate elites alike, alternative energy development is happening quicker than these members of the establishment would have liked. While the idea of an hydrogen based energy system model based around solar panels, biomass, wind generators and fuel cells represents a potential technology that might allow us to circumvent a vast multitude of corporate interests that are involved in the fossil fuel industry, it threatens to eventually put these companies out of business.
One example of the problem with continued domination of large corporations in the economy is that as corporations like Texaco and Shell are becoming involved in
renewable energy, more resources are being invested in technologies that (reformers) convert fossil fuels into Hydrogen rather than in research towards the development of fuel cells that are directly fed hydrogen. One grassroots activist Jeff Clearwater says that "the political economy steers the technology in ways that science and ecology would not. It is a major move on their part and one that has gargantuan impacts. It is their move toward a fuel cell based sustainable energy system - but with a 20-50 year delay built in."
The rationalization of this position is based on the belief that there has to be a slow transition because there would be massive economic disruptions associated with a radical renewable energy development model that rapidly reduces fossil fuel use. Many people such as Jeff Clearwater feel this direction of the renewable energy industry is actually delaying our path to a sustainable energy future and thus" risks missing our real chance to avert the catastrophic effects of global warming."
During the Bush Administration there was a plan to secure America's energy independence. Lester R. Brown of Earth Policy Institute says the plan was "more
appropriate for the early twentieth century rather than the early twenty-first century."
Overlooked energy efficiency and potential savings in Conservation and more efficient energy systems.
Ignored enormous potential of wind power, which will add more to U.S. generating capacity over the next 20 years than coal. Wind is up nearly 400% in five years, a growth rate matched only by the computer industry. American Wind Energy Association projects a staggering 60 percent growth in wind-generating capacity this year.
Emphasized coal use. World coal use peaked in 1996 and has declined some 11 percent since then.
Encouraged Coal bed methane/natural gas production that is referred to as fracking.
The proliferation of Distributed Power systems have huge implications because energy policy is vital to the make-up of the energy sector and how it will be organized. President Bush's election and again with the Romney campaign we see a concerted effort on the part of old-guard business interests to reassert their dominance
on the political structure to ensure continued economic supremacy by reducing environmental regulations, further dismantling the social safety net and increase the regressive tax strategies that enable even great income inequality in the USA. It should be of no surprise that these highly concentrated centers of economic power would exert disproportionate influence on the Bush energy plan as well as current efforts to disregard the negative implications of a fossil fuel based economy as the Republican Party seeks to consolidate gains made in the 2010 election and install Romney as president.
Molly O'Meara, a researcher at the World Watch Institute notes that, "The people and businesses committed to current wasteful patterns of development constitute
a potent political constituency. She adds that "With better information, citizens can form a counterweight to powerful interest groups." The reality is that those who
control our economy have amassed a degree of economic power that is antithetical to the value of freedom, democracy, human rights and environmental responsibility and stewardship that modern Western civilization claims not only to cherish but to uphold through its governing ethic.
The drive towards a decentralized energy system while admirable cannot be seen in isolation. The way in which we obtain our energy and this
affects our political and economic and even social reality also relates to the way in which we get our food build and power our buildings, produce our products and transport and communicate as modern human beings.
Sources:
David Cromwell "The Climate Problem" Z Magazine 9/00 P10.