Here I'll have to differ, speaking from experience a) having worked on a couple of household solar installations, and b) having worked on design engineering and business planning for wind farms of 49 MW and 250 MW rated capacity, and c) from knowledge gained from folks at the nation's oldest regional solar contractor, that has been a client of mine for the better part of a decade.
Decentralized power generation as compared with major power plants, is like desktop computers as compared with mainframes or server farms. The value of a desktop computer or a hand-held device is not only in what it can do by itself: the value of it increases radically when it's networked with other devices.
If you want to "cut the wires," be prepared to spend thousands of dollars for a battery bank at your home, to store the solar power from your roof. This represents not only large cost, but a large commitment of material resources used in an ecologically and economically wasteful manner.
But when your household solar is connected to the grid, you can "upload" power you don't need at the moment, and "download" power when you do. You can optionally have a small backup battery that's sufficient for night-time power for essentials (a couple of lights, telecoms, and fridge) if the grid goes down in an earthquake. Economically and ecologically it's a winner. "Grid-tied solar" is the business model that has been so successful that nationwide solar firms have sprouted to provide solar leasing to the public.
The same case applies to wind, and here, basic physics and arithmetic prove the point. The efficiency of a wind generator is proportional to the swept blade circle, based on the relationship between the diameter and the area of the circle. Home-sized wind generators are insufficient to power homes except in Class 4 and 5 (high wind) areas. Wind generators only begin to become efficient in the range of 250 KW and up; the largest ones today are in the 5 MW range.
Wind is subject to intermittency, so it requires either storage or integration with other power sources. The ideal case is to use water as the storage medium, for example by teaming up a new wind farm with an existing hydroelectric dam. New-design "micro reactors" or "nuclear batteries" using intrinsically safe fission technology are also viable in this role, and lastly, natural gas turbine "peaker plants" can be used (they are the cleanest carbon-based option and acceptable in conjunction with renewables).
It may be that at some point, a new type of solar, fission, fusion, or advanced-physics technology, becomes feasible for household use. But even then: interconnecting homes and other buildings, provides backup for times when you have to take your machine off-line for maintenance, or if it malfunctions and has to be replaced.
More about a better model, "the internet of electricity," in my next posting...
-G.
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On 13-03-26-Tue 3:41 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:
Production of alternative energy can be and for most reasons probably should be much less centralized, equivalently, smaller-scale, than production of energy mostly is now. (Off-grid, as you mention, but very literally.)Large-scale up front + large, complex distribution networks is revealed as an obsolete architecture; large scale distribution networks become relatively less important, so even if the answer to your question is no, which it probably isn't given crowdfunding and other disintermediated finance gaining momentum, it's moot, or at least of much less relative importance.Put another way, when the most important goal is maximum efficiency rather than maximum centralization, large upfront capital investment + large, complex distribution network is stupid; proper accounting of all costs and benefits in a global rather than piecewise local sense reveals this now for agriculture, manufacturing, energy, ...Even now, buffering between supply and demand is a constraint on grid architecture leading to great economic demand within the current paradigm for distributed storage / production of energy according to someone who came through sudo room whose name escapes me.This loosely-drafted email brought to you by the slogan, "localize production, virtualize everything else" and the acronym STEMI compression.
On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Romy Ilano <romy@snowyla.com> wrote:
Is it possible to create alternative energy distribution networks (biofuels/solar/ wind etc) that replace mainstream petrol and natural gas based energy without a large financial sector?
the vc system that funds these alternative energy start-ups piggy backs off the investment banks, etc. and big private equity and institutional investment funds. vcs are like a fly on the @ss of a financial hippo.
I haven't heard people discuss off-grid that much in the tech talks I've been to( which are excellent). Is there a conversation here that would show how off grid is a viable alternative, even if it's not a big money solution?
On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 1:56 PM, <hol@gaskill.com> wrote:
this talk about imports and exports always reminds me of energy flow
compare 2011
https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2012/Oct/images/25306_LLNLUSEnergy2011650.jpg
with 2002
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/us/images/us_energyflow2002.jpg
fascinating
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