Empower The People: Energy Production For Everyone

Fast Company magazine covers the latest best and “next” practices in the business world. In their July 2009 article “Beyond The Grid,” Pulitzer Prize-nominee Anya Kamanetz writes, “The evidence is growing that privately owned, consumer-driven, small-scale, geographically distributed renewables could deliver a 100% green-energy future faster and cheaper than big power projects alone.” Looks like small, locally made energy can be quite a mouthful.

Kamanetz goes on to report, ”Companies like GE and IBM are talking in terms of up to half of American homes generating their own electricity, renewably, within a decade.” Are the predictions of these corporate giants just a bit far-fetched?

The New Energy Paradigm

The fossil fuel business may indeed be headed ironically towards extinction. Though thousands of huge coal and nuclear plants around the world still produce and transmit the majority of power on the planet, these toxin-spewing dinosaurs may just be facing a massive unforeseen shift in technology.
Renewable energy infrastructure is increasing in functionality while decreasing in cost. Efficient micro-turbines, mass produced solar panels, and advanced energy storage like iCEL Systems, are being paired with extensive renewable energy rebates from the government to finally make accessible to the masses all the necessary hardware for energy production.

Vanguard IT companies like Google and Cisco are jumping on board the energy train, jockeying to be the lead innovators in metering and communications for the rapidly approaching Smart Grid.

Public and private utilities may begin to lease their infrastructure and focus on managing the exchange of energy between individuals, rather than the distribution of energy from centralized power plants. A massive network of individual energy producers could generate and exchange power instantly with friends, neighbors, and business associates.

A Familiar Tale

Only a few decades ago, the word “computer” conjured up images of massive mainframes the size of an entire room. These analog behemoths sold for several million dollars and were solely owned by universities, governments, and other wealthy organizations. Operating these mainframe computers required a group of highly specialized professionals, and even with a trained staff to expedite the process, the delivery of information was slow and inefficient. Finally, with the advent of the transistor and eventually the integrated circuit, the computer finally reduced in size and cost.

Since that time, millions of people have taken part in a distributed and individually owned network of computers to generate digital information and exchange it through the Internet. Once you consider the massive and unpredicted explosion of the Internet, a microgrid of “privately owned, consumer-driven, small-scale, geographically distributed renewables” doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all.