Decentralising Electricity Supply January 29, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Camden, Environment, Green in the City, London , trackbackIt is truly frightening and very sad, all these years after the big campaigns of the seventies and eighties, to see nuclear power being discussed as almost inevitable. How can we contemplate the immorality of foisting our pollution on our children to the 70th and 700th generation? And if the point is to secure the supply against the unreliability of gas supplied from Russia, how can we contemplate centralising supply into a small number of stations vulnerable to terrorist or military attack with consequences which are beyond contemplation?
Unless our quality of life is to reduce drastically, we will continue to use a lot of power for the foreseeable future, and there is no question that the crisis of North Sea gas production and fossil fuel usage is upon us. Camden is contemplating raising it’s heating prices to tenants in communally heated buildings by 58% this year, and no doubt more later. Private consumers are seeing price rises of 40-50% in this year. Some relief then to read in the Guardian yesterday about the idea of microgeneration and decentralising electricity supply. Philobiblion has also picked up on this theme, in the context of a more widely sustainable London.
The full report from Greenpeace, endorsed by Ken Livingstone, makes interesting reading. Essentially, it is proposing the creation of a regulatory environment which promotes the use of microgeneration technologies, owned by households and communities keeping generation close to demand. This has a number of benefits, particularly in reducing the loss of energy in transmission and securing supply by ensuring that a failure of a generator would affect only a small area, perhaps a single house. One of the biggest obstacles is the difficulty in selling locally generated electricity to the suppliers, and a regulation change is needed.
The technologies needed are already in use, and include small wind turbines on the roof, solar panels and, perhaps less sustainably, co-generation with gas boilers. This last makes use of the excess heat created by a boiler to power a stirling engine, which in turn powers a generator. Electricity is used within the house or sold back to the grid at an agreed price, thus using the grid as a type of giant battery. Although, at least at the moment, fossil fuels would be used to power the boiler there is no reason why this could not be powered using biodiesel.
Thinking to my own situation then, what could I do? I live in a building with six other flats, where the freehold is held by Camden Council. There is not much roof space, although a small turbine is certainly a possibility if I could get the neighbours and the council to agree. I could replace my boiler with a combined heat and power unit, though a quick google suggests that most of the commercially available units are intended for rather larger buildings than my flat. It’s a technology worth keeping an eye on though, as with investment prices and capacities may come down. One drawback for me is that I don’t actually have the boiler on very much, and prefer to just put on another jumper.
Possible industrial applications are also interesting. I am currently dealing with the installation of a number of computers into a large datacentre, and we need to make sure that the heat dissipation capacity of the area we’ll be in is enough to handle the large heat output of these servers. Could that heat somehow be harnessed for generation? If so, there are hundreds of co-location centres all over London which may find they’re sitting on an easy way to reduce their power bills.
There is no one answer to the coming fuel crisis and the very present emissions crisis. There are many possibilities, including reducing usage, making usage more efficient, large scale renewables and small scale microgeneration which would hand back control, and indeed security, to households, businesses and communities.
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