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The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity
Posted on Friday, January 07, 2005 @ 11:31:09 PST by vlad
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Highly centralized generation of electrical power is a paradigm that has outlived its usefulness. Decentralized generation could save $5 trillion in a capital investment, reduce power costs by 40 percent, reduce vulnerabilities, and cut greenhouse gas emissions in half, according to this article in The Skeptical Inquirer.
"Critical Thinking About Energy: The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity
Casten, Thomas R; Downes, Brennan
5,765 words
1 January 2005
Skeptical Inquirer
25
Volume 29; Issue 1; ISSN: 01946730
English
Copyright (c) 2005 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.
Highly centralized generation of electrical power is a paradigm that has outlived its usefulness. Decentralized generation could save $5 trillion in capital investment, reduce power costs by 40 percent, reduce vulnerabilities, and cut greenhouse gas emissions in half.
Electricity was originally generated at remote hydroelectric dams or by burning coal in the city centers, delivering electricity to nearby buildings and recycling the waste heat to make steam to heat the same buildings. Rural houses had no access to power. Over time, coal plants grew in size, facing pressure to locate far from population because of their pollution. Transmission wires carried the electricity many miles to users with a 10 to 15 percent loss, a difficult but tolerable situation. Because it is not practical to transmit waste heat over long distances, the heat was vented. There was no good technology available for clean, local generation, so the wasted heat was a tradeoff for cleaner air in the cities. Eventually a huge grid was developed and the power industry built all-new generation in remote areas, far from users. All plants were specially designed and built on site, creating economies of scale. It cost less per unit of generation to build large plants than to build smaller plants. These conditions prevailed from 1910 through 1960, and everyone in the power industry and government came to assume that remote, central generation was optimal, that it would deliver power at the lowest cost versus other alternatives.
However, technology has improved and natural gas distribution now blankets the country. By 1970, mass-produced engines and turbines cost less per unit of capacity than large plants, and the emissions have been steadily reduced. These smaller engines and gas turbines are good neighbors, and can be located next to users in the middle of population centers. Furthermore, the previously wasted heat can be recycled from these decentralized generation plants to displace boiler fuel and essentially cut the fuel for electric generation in half, compared to remote or central generation of the same power.
But the industry had ossified. Electric monopolies were allowed to charge rates to give a fair return on capital employed. To prevent excessive or monopoly profits, the utilities have long been required to pass 100 percent of any gain in efficiency to the users. This leaves utilities with no financial incentive to adopt new technologies and build decentralized generation that recycles heat. In fact, such local generation erodes the rationale for continued monopoly protection-if one can make cheap power at every factory or high rise apartment house, why should society limit competition? Figure 1. World installed electricity generation capacity..."
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The whole article is published in the "Skeptical Inquirer", Volume 29; Issue 1
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Re: The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity (Score: 1)
by baldy on Friday, January 07, 2005 @ 14:20:38 PST
(User Info | Send a Message) | | Your Skeptical Inquirer Vol 29 Issue does not go anywhere on the web. Could you be more specific on an address? |
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Re: The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity (Score: 1)
by kurt9 on Friday, January 07, 2005 @ 14:47:44 PST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.metatechnica.com | This sounds right. Gas turbines have a conversion efficiency around 50-60%, compared to the 35% carnot efficiency of large power plants. The cost of these turbines is still high, but is coming down.
The first market will be industrial, followed by new housing contruction, lastly retrofiting of existing houses.
Capstone is one company that makes these turbines. There are other companies.
These kind of point of use turbine generators are selling well in China and other developing countries of Asia, since the pre-existing electrical distribution system is not sufficent to meet the growing market for electricity. |
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Re: The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity (Score: 1)
by Rastahal on Friday, January 07, 2005 @ 15:11:42 PST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://truthbells.com | Yet another reason why it seems to be so hard to get from where we are, energy-wise, to where we need to go. Not only must we make the change from fossil fuels to clean alternative energy, but the distribution paradigm also needs to change as well.
How fast it will all happen is the big question. If we could get a solid, affordable, working device on the market, something that would power a home, I think that it might wake people up to the value of distributed energy generation. It sure makes sense to me, anyway. I'm thinking the day of the electric utility and centralized power has already begun to wane.
rh |
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Re: The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity (Score: 1)
by Rock_nj on Friday, January 07, 2005 @ 17:31:19 PST
(User Info | Send a Message) | There are more and more home power generation technologies coming on the market every year. You can even buy a home fuel cell these days to generate electricity. I came across this interesting technology out of New Zealand, which uses the old Sterling Engine technology revamped for the 21st Century to produce local heat, cooling and electricity. It's called the WhisperGen.
http://www.whispertech.co.nz/whispergen/
The WhisperGen is a co-generation (heat and power) system based on a small four cylinder Stirling engine. The WhisperGen, first released commercially in 1998, produces hot water suitable for water or space heating and electrical power through an innovative system known as the Wobble Yoke, which drives a generator.
The gas-fired WhisperGen is clean burning and fuel efficient, with specifications that meet exacting government and commercial environmental standards. By producing electricity that can be exported directly back into the powergrid, the WhisperGen is also a viable solution to ever-increasing energy and environmental demands.
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It's good to see skeptics talking optomistically for a change. They are dead on about producing decentralized electricity. The era of the internal combustion engine and centralized power is coming to a close. For decades a pipe dream of environmentalist and other new energy visionaries. Decentralized power is a viable concept in the early 21st Century. It will only become more viable as the decades roll on. Cheers to the skeptics for being out ahead on this important matter. |
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Re: The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity (Score: 1)
by ElectroDynaCat on Friday, January 07, 2005 @ 22:01:30 PST
(User Info | Send a Message) | What most people do not know is the enormous amount of power that's wasted in the modern transmission system.
Although step up high voltage transmission makes the system work, it does not make it efficent. Leakage and power factor mismatching are the main culprits. If utilities would address the problem, which is expensive but possible, I am sure the U.S. could meet its Kyoto CO2 targets without doing much else.
One problem with decentralised power is that people do not want the plants in their living space. |
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I Just Read The Case for Decentralized Generation (Score: 1)
by Rock_nj on Sunday, January 09, 2005 @ 04:24:23 PST
(User Info | Send a Message) | I picked up Skeptical Inquirer and read "The Case for Decentralized Generation...". Kudos to SI for publishing such a visionary article. All too often, skeptics are little more than cynics who dismiss change and defend the status quo. In this case the skeptics are actually acting as visionaries.
One criticism of the article is that it doesn't focus on modern decentralized power generation techniques. This point is driven home by the fact that they rely on the model of decentralized power generation that was used in early 20th Century. They fail to even mention modern mainstream decentralized power generation options that are in use in the real world today, such as: fuel cells, solar/wind, tidal, biomass, landfill gas, etc. They don't even touch more futuristic and unproven decentralized power generation schemes such as Zero Point Energy, Cold Fusion, etc.
Overall I'd give them high marks for raising and framing the issue of the benefits of decentralized power generation. But, their conservative approach is typical of skeptics. I don't understand why they didn't mention modern mainstream decentralized power generation options that are actually being used to generate electricity, and rather relied on the old coal, oil, fossil fuel paradigm. Even their model of using waste heat to heat homes (as was done in the early years of electrical generation) is outdated, when the waste heat could be run through a secondary cycle to vastly increase electrical output and efficiency. I believe they mentioned that option in a roundabout way, but didn't give it the weight it deserved. |
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Re: The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity (Score: 1)
by harold33 on Friday, April 02, 2010 @ 12:22:52 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | First of all thanks a lot for the detailed and informative post. I have to admit that it was quite interesting to read this your post about the case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity. Reading this entry I have found many interesting facts about it which I have not known before. Some parts of the article was a little bit difficult for me to understand but when I read it twice everything has became clear for me. Thanks a lot one more time and keep up publishing these great posts in the future. Regards, Harold W. from payday loans [applyngo.com] website
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