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| President’s Letter Power to the People By Justus Baird, CEC President If you thought that deregulation was the next big thing in the world of power generation, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Your kids’ power plant operators will most likely be themselves. In what was once just a dream of the 1970s renewable energy advocates, all power lines are now pointing to what some call micropower and others call distributed generation. Our current grid just can’t meet the electricity needs of the future. Here are a few reasons why. First, it’s unreliable. Those blinking VCR clocks may be just an annoyance to you, but a 15-minute outage at high-tech chip manufacturer can cost tens of millions. Second, it’s one-way and unintelligent. That is, power only flows from the plant to your house – you can’t give any back – and there is no place to store it once it is produced. Third, huge amounts of energy are lost in the production of electricity (as much as two-thirds for a conventional gas turbine) and in the distribution over a leaky grid. Fourth, it’s all AC (alternating current), and most modern equipment (computers, cell phones, etc.) runs on DC (direct current). Our electric future – according to experts like the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) – will consist of a much wider variety of power sources located closer to the consumer, and consumers could become electricity vendors. EPRI, a private think tank funded by the utilities (who produce 90 percent of the nation’s electricity), happens to be a widely respected source of impartial data. The institute is ‘pro-electricity’ – whether produced from solar cells or nuclear plants. EPRI’s recent “Electricity Technology Roadmap” sees our electric future consisting of small micro-generation technologies, with low or no emissions, in backyards and neighborhoods. The most promising of these is fuel cells, first developed by NASA for use in space. “I believe fuel cells will finally end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine,” declared Bill Ford, chair of the Ford Motor Company, last year. Other technologies in the microgen mix will include renewables (mostly wind and solar) and microturbines, which can burn a variety of fuels (natural gas, diesel, landfill gas, etc.) with lower emissions than conventional power plants. New storage technologies like reversible fuel cells, supercapacitors, and my personal favorite, flywheels (think heavily greased grindstone), will buffer supply and demand. It is likely that the increased sense of ownership (“power to the people”) message will drive this future more than environmental concerns. Not only will you have your own power plant next to the house (to the delight of the Home Improvement audience), but you can sell electricity to a power broker when you go on vacation. While the utilities consider their relevance in this new future, the Bush administration is cutting budgets for research on renewables (-33 percent) and conservation (-37 percent), as well as funding for Electric Energy Systems and Storage programs (distributed generation, grid controls, storage, superconductors, -35 percent). Do we really want to burn another decade worth of fossil fuels if we don’t have to? Distributed generation could dramatically alter the environmental landscape. Neighborhood-level and micro-generation will achieve dramatic efficiencies in both distribution and generation of electricity, leading to dramatic emission reductions. It will also lead to more locally sensitive approaches, like windmills in the Midwest and solar panels in Arizona. And perhaps most importantly for the gadget-conscious, distributed generation could once and for all get rid of those annoying, heavy black power adapters. Further reading: (recommended start) EPRI Electricity Technology Roadmap: Micropower: the Next Electrical Era: DOE report on barriers to distributed generation: UCS recommendations to Bush to encourage renewables: |
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