We need a 21st century electricity system to enable local clean energy
by John Farrell, reposted from Energy Self-Reliant States
In a New York Times SundayReview piece last week – Drawing the Line at Power Lines – Elisabeth Rosenthal suggested that our desire for clean energy will require significant tradeoffs:
There are pipelines, trains, trucks and high-voltage transmission lines. None of them are pretty, and all have environmental drawbacks. But if you want to drive your cars, heat your homes and watch TV, you will have to choose among these unpalatable options…
Perhaps the answer is simply that in an increasingly crowded powered-on world, we’re all going to have to accept that Governor Cuomo’s so-called energy highway is likely to traverse our backyard.
I disagree.
The future of American electricity policy is not about tradeoffs, but rather a chance to trade-in an obsolete, centralized paradigm for a local, clean energy future. Utilities would have us believe that new high-voltage transmission lines are necessary to get more wind and solar power. But the truth is that the American electricity industry refuses to embrace the fundamentally different nature of renewable energy: its ubiquity means that Americans can produce energy near where they use it, in an economically competitive manner, and at a community scale.
The 20th century electricity system was centrally controlled and centrally-owned, a necessary evil when coal, gas, and nuclear power plants had significant economies of scale and required enormous capital investments. The supply lines for these power plants were equally large, connecting far-off mines, oil and gas fields via rail and pipeline to these remote power plants, and big transmission lines in turn carried the electricity from these power plants to big urban centers.
An electricity system primarily powered by wind and solar is fundamentally different. Turbines and panels are always right at the fuel source, whether on a rural farm or an urban rooftop. And because their scale is substantially more amenable to community ownership, renewable energy can be built near to and provide economic benefits to the communities it powers.
The fundamental shift means Americans should trade-in an obsolete model of centralized energy generation for one that matches and builds support for the local energy opportunity.
Local ownership and its economic benefits should play a significant role. For example, researchers in Germany recently surveyed local support for expanding wind energy production, comparing two towns with nearby wind farms. When the local turbines were absentee-owned, 60 percent of residents were opposed to more local wind power. Opposition dropped by 45 percentage points when the wind farm was locally owned.
Article source: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/29/434440/clean-energy-trade-off-trade-in-obsolete-electric-grid/
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