Imagine turning off a main road onto the quiet street of a new suburban housing neighborhood. Down the road waits tree-lined streets of energy efficient homes with their organic gardens and hybrids parked in the driveway, but no electric meter hanging on the wall. On the right you pass a building with few windows and judicious planting. Instead of a development “clubhouse” with a substandard weight room that no one uses and cabinets holding communal board games, the structure is actually an anaerobic power plant that takes the food waste of the neighborhood and turns it into the power for their homes. Throughout your trip you travel under no high tension wires. You dip under no telephone poles.
Impossible? Maybe not.
In choosing how to allocate our country’s round of stimulus cash, the President pointed to our aging utility infrastructure as a way to promote jobs towards something that needs to be refurbished and upgraded anyway—a sensible move. Around $10 billion will be directed at “Smart Grid” technology with nearly half targeting power grid innovations. While a more efficient grid may be the next logical step, what we should be pushing towards (especially in cities) are buildings that satisfy their own power loads and have no need for an omniscient grid system.
At first glance the goal may seem counter to Intercon’s focus—severing existing connections instead of highlighting and creating more—but distributed power connects back to society with numerous advantages. Aside from no longer paying a power bill, reliability of power is disconnected from the waxing and waning stress on our national grid. Regional blackouts would be a thing of the past. Towers of high tension wires currently transport large amounts of our nation’s power, but without the need for interstate energy distribution we could remove them and their respective utility right-of-ways. Tens of thousands of acres of land could be returned to its natural state or sold off to new property owners providing only more revenue for energy upgrades.
A key benefit is the net increase in efficiency. Right now, the grid is a bit clunky and kind of like a leaky pipe. For many power plants, pointedly the throng of aging coal plants in the US, as much as 66% of the energy produced can be lost right out of the stack in the form of heat. An additional 7-10% is lost in transmission so collectively three quarters of the energy we produce can be lost before it even gets used. The Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park, designed by Cook+Fox Architects, proves to be perhaps the best example to date of tapping into onsite generation. A 5-megawatt, natural gas-fired cogeneration plant provides two thirds of the buildings electrical demand and is expected to reach 77% efficiency (zero transmission.) This building may become the model for large, urban towers.
This is a well known shot from Richard Box, but it always merits being shown again. Lights lit with no wires, only radiation of power. Leaky pipe indeed.
A number of technologies are striving to attack the goal of small-scale power production. New solar companies trying to make photo-voltaics more affordable and efficient are popping up every month. Clarian is developing a consumer grade, vertical-axis wind turbine dubbed “The Jellyfish” claiming it will be able to generate up to 40 kWh per month and cost less than $400. Another budding possibility is anaerobic power that targets the decomposition of food and animal waste in oxygen-deprived chambers. As organisms break down the organic matter methane gas is created and can be burned to produce power—some landfills and farms have begun to tap into this process for excess power generation. Fuel cells are another promising innovation like those produced by FuelCell Energy Inc. that can continue their trek towards affordability.
So what are the barriers to a decentralized energy economy? Beyond cost effiectiveness, in the end we still need to surmount the important factors of reliability (a consistent baseload of power) and dispatchability (the ability to quickly respond to fluctuations in demand.) All of these techonology options are still only at the levels of reliability to serve as supplemental sources of energy. Unfortunately, coal power has a very high rate of dispatchability which adds to its popularity with energy providers. Conversely, on their own solar PVs are not dispatchable but are “must-run” systems (we can’t control sunlight in relation to demand.) While these things may make an immediate transition to fully distributed power impossible, the best way to reach this goal is continuing to fund research into these clean-tech power ventures to facilitate system advancement as well as make every effort to lower our regular power consumption.
Photo Credit: Richard Box
March 30, 2009 at 8:34 am
While efficiency is probably the most beneficial aspect of a decentralized grid power system, I would also suggest that “security” is right up there. The northeast corridor blackouts are a prime example of why – from a security viewpoint – having localized power would help. In the end, I think a primary decentralized system with the limited redundancy protection of our grid is where we might be heading. The power grid might end up looking more akin to the way our local streets, state routes, and federal highways interact.
March 30, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Tyler,
Could you speak just a bit more to what the current limits are, in available technology, for exercising power grid decentralization or in making the current infrastructure “smarter”? You did quote a few statistics that were edifying but as someone who has simply heard “we need to improve the grid” many times, I would wonder where the companies facilitating this transition are in their P/L interest in such projects and their technological preparedness and available tools.
I know that in many cities, the generation and distribution of power are separated functions (e.g. Con Edison in New York). Are the profit incentives for firms to do this, or to get involved with this project, clearer than I am understanding or is there a need for a major public/private sponsorship and collaboration to make this doable?
Also, as mentioned, if you could, please speak a little more to the technologies available. I understand your general points but what is the current, best, ready-to-deploy, infrastructure improvement, and what is, for example, the next and greatest five to ten years out, as best as you can anticipate? Are the technologies that you mentioned the best currently available or merely the ones you think are most likely to actually receive funding and undergo implementation?
Great post and, as always, thanks for helping a simple businessperson understand the world of energy better.
Sincerely,
K. Marx
March 30, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Mr. Marx,
I think that one of the first answers to your inquiries is that one of the problems is that a distributed grid system is not at all profitable for large distribution entities because it nullifies their existence. The Department of Energy estimates that net annual electric bill payments for the country are around $247 billion. Not only are you ultimately removing customers from their services, but you are phasing out a grid that they pay to maintain-a grid that they estimate a total asset value of over $800 billion with %40 of that in distribution and transmission facilities. Unless Con Ed is actually owning your small power source at the end of your street, distributed power cuts them out of the loop. The incentives of profit, no line congestion and theoretically cleaner energy fall, instead, to the consumer which would be investing his/her own capital in their own power production.
I would say this means that your point of public/private sponsorship may be a realistic avenue for the evolution of distributed power. I think more people could be a fan of subsidies for decentralized power generation because we are essentially paying tax money back to ourselves for long term assets rather than for upkeep of a behemoth grid system with an unbalanced return to individual consumers.
The short answer is that fully distributed power is not there yet. Solar panels rarely provide over 15% of a building load outside of single family homes. The most efficient panel made is between 34-36% and most consumer grade panels operate at only 14-18% efficiency. Solar thermal is much more efficient and effective but not capable of powering a home. Small scale Wind turbines are not reliable enough to be a building’s only source of power. Fuel cell technology is still very expensive and is most efficient when implemented as a co-generation system that utilizes their waste heat. Companies like FuelCell Inc claim that cogen configurations can raise the base efficiency of 47% to as much as 80% when properly designed. However, their per-kilowatt cost can be as much as 2.5 times wind power and 11 times that of a gas turbine. Naturally this makes it a hard sell. I think these are the front runners, but they are still a long way from a goal of full distributed energy.
All of these technologies still need the advantage of large scale implementations to help make them cost effective. As mentioned, one of the best chances of distributing power usage is meeting the technology halfway by continuing to cut our load demands through efficient usage.
March 31, 2009 at 8:56 am
Very interesting. It sadly seems that, as with many progressive changes in society, this alley of technological and energy reform will still need the major help of government mandates, standing as yet another example of what Nader called “a cost-losing essential”.
Breaking apart quasi-monopolies, especially in utilities, seems awfully tricky and stands as, seemingly, a state challenge rather than a federal one. I think of pushes in other realms, like health care, where we have seen that adventurous individual legislatures and citizens, such as those in California, New York and Massachusetts, tend to try out change well before Congress or the President can muster the social will for national reform.
Similarly, it would seem that the first steps in energy reform are to find states with looser quasi-monopolies and to try breaking those apart first. If a few rogue states can show promise and success in accomplishing improved power distribution, the nation might follow the trail of conservational gorp and breadcrumbs.
Let’s hope for it.
K. Marx