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The Global Warming Cause
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Imagine generating solar, wind, or geothermal power for your home and selling the excess to your neighbors. In the future, will you be the power company? If we are serious about renewable energy, the answer could be yes.
In many other countries, they have successfully put in place feed-in tariffs to accelerate this. Unlike “net metering” which allows cleanly generated electricity to be fed into the grid to offset electric bills, feed-in tariffs basically require utilities to pay a premium price for renewable energy they purchase from homeowners and businesses that install wind turbines, solar panels, or other clean-energy generating devices on their properties. Many see this as a faster way to get to more renewables, while creating green jobs and avoiding the barriers that have slowed the changeover here in the US. Germany in particular has used this model very successfully.
What’s the alternative? California has a 33% renewable energy target for the year 2020. Unfortunately, using large scale solar and wind projects to meet this goal (mostly in remote areas) creates the need for an estimated $12-15 billion for transmission lines alone, a figure that will no doubt go well beyond $20 billion if and when they actually build them. T. Boone Pickens’ project to install hundreds of massive turbines in the Texas panhandle was abandoned due to similar transmission line issues, and a fight is brewing over who should pay for a $12 billion project to connect wind from the plains to the large cities in the Midwest.
Centralized power generation could be a thing of the past. Fast Company described the renewables push in the United States as “big, expensive, slow, and spectacularly uncertain.” Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute compares the push for “big renewables” as similar to proposing more hardwired telephone exchanges and mainframe computers in a world that has moved on to internet telephony and laptops. The large power generators have some interesting technologies on the horizon, but creating a vibrant decentralized industry where individual energy customers can compete with the utilities is likely to create more change and a better long-term outcome. A variety of bills are moving through state legislatures and and congress…keep your eyes open!
Read more: global warming
Photo copyright mjmonty at flickr.com.
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+ add your ownI'm all for local communities taking care of themselves.
If they had listened to us in the 70's, I don't think would have this problem now.
There is no way the utility companies can or will on their own. For them it's overwhelming(put yourselves in their shoes for a second). The only way to quickly and efficiently change a system as large as ours is to work from both sides and meet in the middle. Homeowners and volunteers are going to have to get residential and big business is going to have to get together with the utility companies and that is all there is to it. We will all have to lend a hand.
It's not a matter of one or the other. All solutions to climate change and dirty energy need to be tabled and adopted ASAP. We will always need base load power or industry will collapse. But the majority of houses should be self-powered. And more than that, energy efficiency is the quickest and cheapest way to reduce emissions.
Hi Dave,
Hey Dave you post here really a very nice informative article, i read your whole article & after read this i come to know what is Youtilities, according to me In economics, utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of goods and services. Given this measure, one may speak of increasing or decreasing utility using the World Wide Web, and thereby explain social behavior in terms of attempts to increase one’s Youtility.
disque dur externe
Raise gas to $10 a gallon, this will increase
public transit
local grown food
more insulation
more efficient and careful use of energy
This is almost what it is in Europe and they do all those things.
I would love to go natual if anyone has ideas, but I live in the city- but closing down coal mines all at once will put millions of people out of work and destroy total economies. One mine in my small town in Kingwood, WV closed down, putting 150 miners out of work, This did not include, the people in the office, the truck drivers and the other support personell. As a result, other business' in the county have had to shut down, due to the loss of wages. The county has lost revenue. We do not have the monies to support our schools, our hospital, our food banks, our library and any number of other things that this mine helped support. So before you talk about SHUTTING DOWN, the POLUTERS, think about WHO you ARE PUTTING OUT OF WORK, and WHAT you are doing to the economy. ARE you willing to pay higher taxes?
Let's make them clean up their act, make them OBEY THE LAWS,, that have been passed. Not put people out of work.
Decentralized power generation -- that is, power produced precisely where it is used -- is the only real answer in the near and long term, in my opinion. The loss of electricity (conversion to heat) during the ride in transmission lines from generation to end user is above 7%. 7%! That's a lot of coal, oil, and natural gas and their dirty, deadly waste just to throw away for the sake of getting the electricity to where it's needed.
Recent technological improvements, such as paintable, bendable, photovoltaic (PV) material, efficient roofing shingles with PV built in and the like, can now allow people to generate their own electricity at home. And soon, to allow electric cars to extend their battery range by PV generation of electricity from the sun while driving or parked. And those homes and cars so equipped (with a PV generation and battery storage system) will use a watt less of dirty energy for every watt they produce on their own. I can see subdivisions whose big selling point is that homeowners can sell electricity, rather than buy it... and electric cars that actually sell electricity back to a (smaller?) grid for other uses. dramatically less continuing pollution, lots of the convenience that we've come to expect.
I would loe to sit down an talk 2 someone about this.I would love to convert to self reliance We all need it. Drop a note if anyone is interested in helping me to peruse this goal Thanks 4 Reading BILL
This makes sense, and I am glad to get the reminder.
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