How To Do Decentralized Energy
Sustainability Sundays
As most readers probably recognized, we spend a lot of time talking about decentralized energy here. Topics like mixed generation, regional generation, microgeneration, smart grids, smart home energy monitors, even odd schemes for peer-to-peer energy sharing regularly grace our site. But while the benefits of decentralized energy seem pretty clear to us, it's always useful to have a comprehensive document talking about the technological options, political impacts, economic benefits, environmental results and leapfrog surprises related to energy decentralization. Better still if the piece spoke directly about the implications for a specific community, rather than in general about the concept. Oh, and the material should have lots of big, colorful pictures, to attract the eye and engage the imagination.
Cue Greenpeace.
Greenpeace UK, to be precise. The organization has just released a massive (~75 page) report entitled Decentralising Power: An Energy Revolution For The 21st Century, looking at what it would take to move the UK aggressively towards a distributed power network. The capsule argument, from the report, touches on arguments familiar to WorldChanging readers:
In a decentralised energy (DE) system, electricity would be generated close to or at the point of use. Buildings, instead of being passive consumers of energy, would become power stations, constituent parts of local energy networks. They would have solar photovoltaic panels, solar water heaters, micro wind turbines, heat pumps for extracting energy from the earth. They might also be linked to commercial or domestic operated combined heat and power systems. The massive expansion in renewable capacity that this would represent, and the fact that when fossil fuels were burnt the heat would be captured and used, would lead to dramatic reductions in overall carbon emissions – at least half of all emissions from the power sector, or 15% of total UK emissions.
That's the vision, at least, and the report does a good job of making the vision seem achievable and, perhaps more importantly, desirable.
One aspect of the report that I found amusing -- not because I disagreed, mind you, but because it seemed so outside the popular perception of Greenpeace -- was the recurring argument that decentralized power actually presented an opportunity for a much more "liberalised," deregulated market than would be possible with a small number of large-scale power suppliers. Not just more liberalised, but less corruptible: with so many more participants on the networks as providers, so many more options for consumers, and so many more alternative pathways for the energy to flow, gaming a "deregulated" system a la Enron becomes far more difficult.
There's a lot of material here; it's not a casual read, despite the big, colo(u)rful pictures. But it's impressive, especially as it spells out precisely what a transition to decentralization might look like.
The full document can be downloaded here (10mb PDF); a briefer summary can be found here (PDF). A printed version is available from Greenpeace UK, as well.
(Via Sustainablog -- good catch, Jeff!)
worldchanging.com |
