energytest

Energy Futures

During the beginning of Japan Nuclear crisis following the earthquake & tsunami that hit the region, as the horror of the reality of the un-stoppability of radiation pollution started dawning on many for the very first time, the reaction of hundreds of thousands of people around the world was to take to the streets & demand a ban nuclear power stations.

This struck me as deeply ironic, as only a few weeks before I had received one more of a series of chain emails that have been sent around now quite a while now, calling us all to switch off our electricity for so many minutes on a particular day, as a big act of citizen protest protest. And the protest is about rising prices of electricity. What we are supposed to achieve with these 'switching off campaigns' is to send a big clear message to whoever controls the power stations - and the message is "we are not going to put up with this"!

Ironically, when people took to the streets to protest about nuclear power stations (in great part the very same ones that a few weeks ago were protesting about energy prices), the message was exactly the same, only in the opposite direction: "You! Whoever it is that controls the nuclear policy of our country: We are not going to put up with this!"

And everyone goes home happy at having done a good day's protest, presumably, probably not giving a moment's thought to the fact that nuclear power stations are universally installed because of the lure of very cheap energy (primarily) - and so we've all effectively been shouting in the streets for a raise in electricity prices.

This got me thinking about what the hell is it that we think we're doing. Yet again. But especially (yet again) at why.

Why does it seem to be so popular to do these protest actions, yet when it comes to trying to get together a bunch of people to do something constructive, that would actually eliminate those same problems & more (like set up a local power station by & for the community - which would probably take, overall, the same amount of organizational skill & mobilising that the protests require), then we struggle with finding the 5 passionately motivated people that it would take to get that show on the road?

The Why is a little involved and includes going into the operating system of systems and I go into that further on, under Stocks, Flows & Feedbacks.

But the What & How, for those who would like to know of the something constructive we can all do is right here, because it really is quite simple, and every & any community can & should be doing it.

If you really want to have a say in how your energy is produced, to ensure the safety of the supply for the environment and down future generations, if you want to hand over a resource and not a bomb to your children (with some pride & real claim to have been instrumental in creating a better future for everyone) - then get together with your community & set up your own power-station.

Because now we can, and community-scale power is for many other reasons (apart from not having to wait on any government mammoths to move) the best direction to go anyhow. It is more than possible, indeed an increasing number of communities has gotten fed up with governments not doing anything about climate change & so have taken things in their own hands. Where it has already been done, it it is working very successfully: in Scotland for eg. there are several communities that have set up their own windmills & some now make a profit exporting energy to the grid - which they initially spent on making their homes more energy-efficient; in Spain there are urban neighbours communities (comunidades de vecinos) that organized their solar water heating together; in the US there are even companies now that help communities set up their own power stations & there are also 'solar shares' businesses, that make this possible even where you can't or don't want to do the big job of mobilizing the whole community.

There have even been government grants set up to encourage communities to do this, but please don't get stuck in the game of waiting for some huge mammoth organization like a government set up (even your local government!) to give you resources for this: it's really not necessary and, I would argue strongly, not even desirable. This can be about your community learning how much power it can have, in all directions! Don't get tempted by the pulls to claim some rights to dependency: its a drug we're wanting to cure ourselves from. Think 'local power'. But this is not just because it will multiply your community's social capital many times over (a good enough reason in itself).

It is useful if you think of your community power station as a savings bank: you make a lump deposit & then you take out money bit by bit as you need it - and in the bank your deposited money grows a little & is useful to others, in the meantime: everyone wins.

Or at least that would be the happy story about banks and now we're starting to realise quite some other things have been happening, with all the bank scandals & .

But in fact the original idea is very sound, it's the scaling-up in size that makes a lot of things go pear-shaped.

So as re-localising energy processing technologies is putting, quite literally, the means of production back in the communities hands, why not make it both the production of Joules & Euros? Because you can, and this is how it would work, step by step:

1) First you find some way of explaining all this to people - and that is the hardest part (hopefully this article will help)

2) You ask people to invest in the local power station. So people gather their savings (from banks we are geenrally trusting less & less, scattered far & wide, where their savings are usually being put to dubious use) and put them in a community account, destined to the building of the power station.

3) Gathering the funds will take some time, so in the mean-time you also investigate local contractors of renewable energies, perhaps run some courses & get everyone thinking about what the best solutions might be (solar? wind? combination of the two? etc.), get some quotes, etc.

4) You print some tokens which you give to the people who have made a deposit into the energy-fund. These will be your Local Money. This is where it starts to get even more exciting. Just with creating these Local Money tokens (LM tokens) you will have started to build a kind of money-turbine in your community, which will benefit everyone, longer-term.

5) All who make a deposit in the energy fund get the equivalent + 10% in value back, in LM tokens. Or you can decide on 5% or 20%, whatever encouragement or recompense you want to work into your plan: it can be higher for the first 20 investors, for example, in order to discourage the usual "lets' wait & see what others do" syndrome (which blocks so many great ideas from making their first step ). The depositors, or community investors, will be able to pay their electricity bills with their LM tokens.

6) In fact you specify from the start that the electricity bills from the new community power station can only be paid for in LM tokens. So it will make sense for a local cheese-maker, who maybe has no savings to invest in the community power-station, to sell one of her cheeses in TM tokens, to someone who has been able to invest in the power station.

you set up an incentive for everyone who needs to buy energy to turn Euros (which come in & out - & mostly out - of your community) into LM tokens, which are limited in circulation to your community.

& by doing that you turn make them work only in, & for, the community.

And LM tokens can be easily exchanged for Euros, with a small incentive charge (eg. you get 2% more in value when you exchange into LM tokens), but only changed back into Euros with a larger dis-incentive charge (eg. you loose 5% in value when you change back into Euros).

Stocks, Flows & Feedbacks

We mostly still think in linear ways in a world of systems - & this causes a lot of problems. The fact that the problems are now a lot more visible has a lot to do with our tendency to notice flows more than stocks in a system, and not quite understand the relationships between those.

Focusing on flows rather than stocks means for example, that we give most of our attention to the timber coming out of woodland & not so much on the woodland (as a resource that replenishes at a much slower rate & only if the right nutrient-rain-sun-flows balances are maintained);

we think in terms of exploiting oil wells & give very little thought - if any - to the ancient deposit as a very concentrated source of energy that only forms with the lentitude of eons;

we have no problem noticing & manipulating the flow of electricity out of a power-station, but often forget the work, embodied energy & indeed the danger that a power-station can represent in itself because of how that embodied energy is arranged (witness the Japanese nuclear disaster);

and, last but not least, it is fairly self-evident that we are quite obsessed with the flow of money, yet (all of our economic crises show) we have little or no understanding of what stocks, what resources those flows come from or go to create (but mostly, in fact, to deplete).

This is the goose of the golden egg story: and that story, like all popular stories, serves to remind us of something we have an unfortunate tendency to forget.

And the poignant message here, as with the story, is that we could really have it all, if only we could get our goose-care skills sharpened-up, instead of our knives.

Nature, our wonderful big mother-goose of the abundant golden eggs, is not quite dead right now, but definitely not healthy, and here in this short article I hope to suggest some useful & basic goose health-care.

I find it useful to think of the local economy as one key unit of health and to simplify it, structurally, as six basic inter-locked blocks, or sub-systems that fit together, much like puzzle-pieces.

Here are four of them and quite usefully represented in three dimension as it helps to illustrate another of several important blind-spots.

We tend to think of local economies (indeed, any economies) in terms of the blue piece that stands out at the back. That is the formal economy system, represented by the stocks & flows of scarce, government-backed inter-national money (euros, dollars, etc.) plus the banks & complex set of agreements that enable it all.

This is the part that stands out of current economic set-ups, indeed it's often the only part we see of it & it is a piece that is essential for businesses to work well - or indeed at all, if we wish to conserve the standards of quality (ensured by market competition, as well as much cooperation).

However we re-design the economy, some equivalent of this formal, international-agreement, scarce currency sub-system will need to exist.

So it is understandable & possibly also right it should stand out, as it is in some ways the height of abstraction & also of achievement of our advanced economies - it is the piece that makes possible the type of productive & international division of labour that supplies us with cars, computers, mobile phones & power stations of any kind.

So (unless you're happy to go back to a pre-industrial kind of lifestyle) you will agree that we damage or devalue this part of the system at our peril, but it is also a big error to forget that it is a sub-system & that it is built on, & totally dependent of other sub-systems which, although not as flashy, are actually more basic.

"Basic" meaning they can survive (however much changed) without this formal economy piece, but the formal economy system cannot survive without them.

The red puzzle piece represents the social fabric: it is the complex web of relationships, mostly held together by what we call the gift economy, that our basic social structures are made out of. It is the system that directly nurtures people's well-being, raises children, looks after the elderly, enables our learning & emotional as well as physical, cultural well-being.

Your mobile phone would be useless if you had nobody to ring & businesses can't thrive without a healthy community of people to buy & produce the goods, so the formal economy could simply not exist without the social fabric to support it, but on the other hand the formal economy can greatly support & enable social structures (although not always in a healthy way).

We tend to get even more confused when it comes to feedback loops.

The honey, where the 'real gold is'. ...