The Microgrid is Preferable to Large-Scale Renewable Projects. Commentary by Anya Kamenetz, Fast Company, July 1, 2009. "The evidence is growing that privately owned, consumer-driven, small-scale, geographically distributed renewables could deliver a 100% green-energy future faster and cheaper than big power projects alone... Amory Lovins, the green wise man of the Rocky Mountain Institute, is among the biggest and most influential fans of micropower; he's written a book, Small is Profitable, laying out 207 reasons why. Among them: 'Distributed generation' means a redundant, resilient, secure infrastructure -- that's why military bases and hospitals have their own power plants. Micropower can be more reliable, given that 98% of all blackouts originate in the grid. And it creates thousands of local jobs near population centers in design, installation, and maintenance. 'Micropower, as of three years ago -- the latest global data -- was a third of the world's new electricity and one-sixth of the world's total,' he tells Fast Company in his trademark pressure-wash style. 'Micropower growth is very rapid, and it's [currently] almost wholly financed by private capital. Distributed renewables in 2007 got $91 billion of new private investment... There are several quite distinct reasons for thinking that these stats I've just given you are the leading edge of a tsunami of change in the power sector.' Small Is Profitable concludes that because the scale lowers capital risk, the economic benefits of a dollar invested in distributed renewables can be an order of magnitude greater than the same dollar invested in conventional power plants... Wherever a little public funding has gotten the ball rolling, consumer appetite for micropower has been essentially bottomless. To see just how fast the microgrid can emerge, there's no better place to look than Germany, where the market has been blown open thanks to what's known as a feed-in tariff."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment