King of the Grid
There was an excellent article from Fast Company last week about the battle for our country’s energy future, and it smacks of the classic David vs. Goliath.
Our current energy infrastructure is like an ailing heart patient: it was strong in its heyday, but now its been patched and prodded and if you give it too much excitement, the whole thing may collapse. Case in point:
“On Aug. 14, 2003, a lot of people in the northeastern U.S. learned that they couldn’t take reliable electricity service for granted anymore. A utility in Ohio failed to trim a few trees, causing a surprise outage that rolled across the region. Eventually, it left 50 million people without power for about a day. The risk of blackouts still exists in just about every region of the country.” -NPR
Besides reliability, there are also concerns about power quality, cost, and the ability to connect intermittent renewable energy like wind power. How will the grid handle those challenges, and importantly, whose vision of the future should we implement?
According to the Fast Company article, large utilities are working to ensure their place in the coming energy economy.
“But if many of us see this moment as a defining one, a key opportunity to reassess how we create and use energy across the country, the federal government seems content to leave the owners of the old energy world in charge of designing the new one. Big utilities are pushing hard to do what they do best — getting the government to subsidize construction of multi-billion-dollar, far-flung, supersize solar and wind farms covering millions of acres, all connected via outsize transmission lines.”
That’s the crucial question we face: should energy be large and central or small and distributed. The centrist argument claims higher efficiencies, point source pollution (and pollution control), and economies of scale. Distributed advocates describe the improved reliability of diffuse energy infrastructure, smaller distribution losses, and potentially lower costs for consumers.
And that’s where the debate really heats up:
“Because of its rate structure, Duke Energy has acted as the greatest impediment in the state to the rapid adoption of energy efficiency and renewables,” says Ivan Urlaub, the executive director of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, who has worked closely with the state utility commission and with Duke to draft policy.
“They’ve explained to us that net metering puts them at higher risk of losing revenue.”
There is a lot of money at stake in this battle, so you can be sure it will be a bloody one. Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments, or visit the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association website to learn more.
Jim Rogers, Duke Energy’s CEO, told Fast Company he’s a fan of putting solar panels on his customers’ homes and businesses — he just thinks Duke should own them. “I believe at the end of the day, we’ll be able to do it cheaper and better than everybody else.” But Urlaub says, “We know that’s not true,” pointing out that Duke recently submitted a public bid for a utility-owned 20-megawatt rooftop-solar program and came in higher than several independent, nonutility solar companies.
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