After Gutenberg

Micropower resources “provide ways to reduce carbon emissions, improve energy efficiency, and ease the strain on stressed grids by providing supplemental power during periods of peak use.”

In “Anatomy of a Distributed Grid” Enviropundit notes when micro power production is local “there would be no need for electricity to be produced at higher voltages, resulting in no step-down losses and low line loses.” Facilities close enough to the end users “would be linked together in a circle so that areas of high demand and high production balance out.” She characterizes the concept of a distributed grid as a decentralized network of facilities that generate electric power “from a few hundred kilowatts to roughly fifty megawatts.”

Some examples of micro power generation include:

• Biomass (i.e., microturbines)
• Cogeneration, a.k.a., Combined Heat and Power, to include Micro CHP
• Hydrogen (i.e., fuel cells, H2ICE)
• Solar
• Water
• Wave
• Wind

This is more than a few off-grid granola-munchers. Cogeneration systems in the commercial and industrial sectors already are producing 135 billion kilowatt-hours for their own use, which amounts to approximately 3.6 percent of U.S. generation. Participating in such future distributed generation could be farms using biogas powered generators, solar photovoltaic systems on residential rooftops, and combined heat and power (CHP) systems (also known as cogeneration) in industrial plants and on university campuses. In fact, a Congressional Budget Office document, “Prospects for Distributed Electricity Generation” (September 2003) notes that micropower could pose a possible conflict between local utility companies and organizations that are retail utility customers and have acquired generators to become producers of electricity. Michael Giberson notes that Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has proposed revisions to those regulations that govern what is a “Qualifying Facility?€?. Qualifying facilities “are small renewable energy generators or cogeneration facilities that, under the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, gained the right to sell power to public utilities.”

In an earlier article about Smart Energy Grids, Alex Steffen comments after reading a discourse by Pat Mazza on “smart energy”:

This all rocks pretty hard, but it gets downright seismic when you start to consider the implications for the developing world, where there is often no grid worth speaking of to replace. There, if we can get the price down enough, distributed energy and smart grids could do for power what cellphones have done for communications – leapfrog entire regions right over the 20th Century and into the 21st.

Micropower and micro CHP can raise the quality of life in developing countries without relying on huge power plants or expensive, difficult-to-obtain fossil fuels. Micropower technologies are enabling those historically left in the dark to leapfrog the hub-and-spoke grids altogether. There is a growing global market to supply products to micro power generators. States Steve Silberman in a July 2001 Wired article, “The EnergyWeb“:

Green resources such as photovoltaic arrays and wind turbines fall into the micropower category, as do reciprocating engines, fuel cells, Stirling engines, and gas-fired microturbines. Micropower is surging in world markets, both in industrialized countries and in regions with no electricity, where distributed generation offers rural communities and local entrepreneurs access to power without waiting for the costly grid extensions promised long ago by national utilities.

In his comprehensive white paper, “Micropower: The Next Electrical Era“, Seth Dunn offers a roster of thriving solar and wind power markets. And, in a recent World Changing article, Joel Makower, notes that his company, Clean Edge, published a report, “Clean Energy Trends 2003“, that suggested “optimizing the grid” would attract investment and further innovation.