Well they did not mention PRTN by name so here is the article in print anyway.
Guests don't go to the glitzy Mohegan Sun casino and resort, in central Connecticut, to see the fuel-cell center that's housed in an old fire station on an access road. And they don't ooh and aah over the dozen hydrogen storage tanks on the fire station's roof.
But the fuel-cell center, which is designed to provide the casino with reliable, clean backup power, may be one of the most glamorous things going at Mohegan Sun. Eventually, on-site power generation and storage facilities like Mohegan Sun's could change the structure of the country's power grid. The concept is called "distributed generation" (or sometimes, "decentralized generation").
Today, the way that power is generated in the United States looks a lot like the old world of mainframe computers, says Chip Schroeder, CEO of Proton Energy, the Connecticut company installing the hydrogen system at Mohegan Sun. A few big, clunky plants are connected together in what's known as "the grid." In some ways, that system is efficient -- it's the cheapest way that we know to produce and distribute electricity -- but in other ways, it's terrible. Electricity is lost as it's transmitted over long distances. No one likes living next to a massive power plant. And the huge capital investments mean that old, expensive plants keep running long after cleaner, more efficient technology becomes available.
Schroeder says that the new power network will look a lot more like the Internet than the outmoded mainframe model. Smaller generating facilities -- some using solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies and others using scaled-down gas-fired turbines -- will be widely distributed and placed closer to where the power is actually being used. They will be more easily upgradeable. The power will be more reliable, because most outages are caused by distribution problems, like a downed line.
The installation at Mohegan Sun is one of only a few tentative steps toward this Internet-like power network. "But you need to prove that this can work before more people will adopt it," says Dan Reicher, a vice president at Northern Power, recently acquired by Proton. And other projects are popping up. Later this year, Northern Power will be starting a demonstration project in Vermont that will be the world's first "microgrid." This web of generating technologies will serve an industrial park and a few nearby residences, and even feed surplus power back to the main power grid. A similar microgrid is being built in downtown Detroit by DTE Energy, a subsidiary of Detroit Edison.
Ken |
