Think Small Power

As some of my friends get set to make enemies in some quarters of the environmental movement by trying to stop wind power generators in our wild backcountry, we wonder how we are going to come up with an alternative vision for renewal energy on the planet. Never mind the fact that we are not energy experts, and the bad guys spend millions of our taxpayer dollars and use thousands of real experts to promote their vision; we are still supposed to have an alternative energy future in our rhetoric. Thank god I found one that makes a little sense in yeaterday's Guardian: now I can at least suggest something positive. The idea here is that small generation facilities, owned by the users, might take the place of giant profit/power plants.

From "Micro-Power Hailed as Cheap Safe Energy of Future"

Renewable power, particularly schemes where thousands of homes have their own microgenerators for heat and electricity, are a far cheaper way of meeting the UK's energy needs and combating climate change than nuclear stations, says a report out today.

This is an idea I have been kicking around in my head for awhile, and it's always pooh-poohed by people as impossible--impossible to break the stranglehold the big power company has on us and impossible to manage over an urban grid. I know that's not true. So do the guys at the New Economics Foundation:

The potential of getting energy from a decentralised system of very small-scale, micro-generation from renewable sources has been critically overlooked. In the UK, for example, one estimate suggests that if just around one third of electricity customers installed 2kW of micro-generation, using solar photovoltaic (PV) or wind systems it would match the capacity of the UK nuclear programme.

So there. I knew it.