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peristaltorI've left this final discussion of distributed generation until now simply because I was struggling for a way to describe the dynamic method of electric utility pricing that wouldn't repeat my description from years ago. A dynamic system is one with a near infinite range of price variation, an irreducible continuum of cost, not just the three Peak, Shoulder and Off-Peak rates of Part II. It's a system that allows for more than just simple energy arbitrage, though that would be a key dynamic element of the system.
It turns out anyone who understands dynamic markets can envision this electricity market which prices needed power on the fly electronically. That's not the real element to discuss, I've decided. The truly important and revolutionary promise of distributed generation is not found in its pieces and parts but in the transformative promise the dynamic interaction of small parts can make: By spreading the responsibility for providing power to as many participants as possible, the entire grid can function with increasingly smaller elements and, by extension, with increasingly simpler organizations overseeing those elements.
In essence, a distributed system is a democratized system. By "democratized," I am not referring to a system where everyone gets a vote on our progress (though that might emerge as an ancillary result). I mean more simply that more and more people participate in the electrical system; by that participation, more and more people become aware of just what it means to use and supply electricity. There is no better teacher than experience.
As more and more learn the nitty gritty details about how our power consumption works, more and more of us can use that knowledge to perhaps keep the lights on. You see, we might very well be at the end of a long path of economic expansion, one that has allowed us to build the grid that excites our lights. I apologize if the following gets less technical and far more philosophical, but that's how I'm feeling lately.
Before we get too deep into detail, it might be good to think about what distributed generation replaces. In Part I, I mentioned nuclear power. By its nature, nuclear power in general is something that should probably not be in the hands of many small owners. Why? The expertise needed to avoid catastrophic failure, for one, depends upon a support network of colleges and governments to train the operating personnel (most nuke plant operators learn the ropes while serving in on naval nuke-powered ships and submarines). Even assuming one could replicate that knowledge base, how would one police a smattering of small plants to assure not one of them decided to refine their fuel into weapons grade stock? Just a glance at current weapons arguments or even the possibility thereof should nip this tiny-nuke future idea in its bud.
Even assuming we could make small nukes safe, how would we fuel them? After all, turning mined uranium into fuel requires a vast amount of non-electrical energy to mine the yellow cake, move it to a processing plant, and refine it to the rods used by the plants. Once the rods are formed, yes, that fuel proves quite long-lasting, especially if you reprocess it later; getting into the rod form from the mine, though, will depend upon lots of diesel trucks and trains and scoops and tractors. Without abundant diesel, nuclear would not be an option. This same limitation applies also to the highly specialized equipment a nuke plant needs; without a technological base, the factories that provide (for example) replacement turbines, dynamos, sensors, control switches, et cetera, would not be able to run. That reliance on motive fuel — which is now, let's remember, in decline — would make these parts increasingly expensive, a cost that would trickle to the consumer.
Nukes only became possible, I am stating, because of former technological progress in many economic areas besides nuclear science. To quote Kevin Kelly:
And it was the rapid escalation of natural and later fossil fuel extraction and consumption that gave us the literal power to assign progress to ourselves. We essentially mastered the art of using technology to relieve us of some of the work necessary to keep ourselves alive, which gave us more time to improve the technology. Without wind filling the sails of 16th century ships, exploitation of the New Worlds would not have allowed the economic expansion out of the Middle Ages; without burning coal and later petroleum, the Industrial Revolution would never have happened; and without the industry built in that revolution, we never would have been able to experiment with uranium and later build nuclear power plants.
And none of this experimentation would have been possible without money.
Let's get to the present day. I found this article concerning the current Occupy Wall Street protests insightful:
Money funded the exploration by ship of the New World and the continued exploitation thereof. Money funds the building of power plants, nuclear or otherwise, in exactly the same manner; the promise of profit from the funding is the only thing that keeps future funding flowing.
The essay continues to note that, with a concentrated power elite, little can be done to fight the money system except a refusal to participate in it. This refusal begins with a simple act: Planting gardens.
The author calls this localization of food production a form of local control called bricolage, saying "it often implies cooperation with others as much as competition with others."
The Grid he mentions has a physical counterpart that delivers electricity, the small-g power grid. I see distributed generation as a vast patchwork of power gardens, as stark a contrast to industrial monoculture farming as the sum total of everyone's backyard patch of greens, seeds and spuds. Just as every meal gathered from the farmer's market or backyard or window sill means a meal not bought from the chain store and grown thousands of miles away, every dollar spent feeding the distributed grid is a dollar not spent on nuclear, natural gas or coal power, a dollar not diverted to highly concentrated and highly leveraged base load plants. Furthermore, every dollar spent on distributed generation encourages a dollar of distributed generation investment, just as every dollar thus not spent on massive scale nuke plants deprives a plant builder of potential future revenue and any ability to leverage future construction. Both employ bricolage in its dictionary form, "construction or creation from a diverse range of available things."
Again, it's not the nuclear energy that makes me uncomfortable. It's the scale of the construction necessary to make a nuke plant possible. You see, in a time of dwindling resources, we could all learn from the Maginot Line. From the wiki:
It's not that building a wall against invasion was the key to the Line's failure. Reading further into the article, we learn:
A nuclear plant, like the Maginot Line, not only proves too costly to keep, but also drains financial resources from other, perhaps more promising technologies. By underfunding distributed generation, we are (IMHO) putting too much faith in costly base load operations and losing the agility that a market-driven distribution would be able to manage.
What would have worked for France in the Great War failed them in the war to come. What worked for a growing industrial society might well fail us in the future to come. In fact, the monetary system that built this industrial society might be done.
I'm unsurprisingly squeamish when it comes to uttering the C word, Capitalism. Why? It proves too slippery a concept. If you quizzed a hundred people about the actual elements necessary to defining a capitalist economy, I doubt you would find much agreement as what those elements are. Most do, though, agree that the capitalist period started about 1500 (something I've noted before). In that linked entry, I suspected that the capitalist period had less to do with philosophical revolution than it did with the expansion of productivity brought about by (as noted above) taming the winds, fossil fuels, and other natural sources of energy that can do work . . . like uranium.
As the garden guy mentioned above, "Money is designed to commodify, that is, to make everything into a thing for sale." Money is, in fact, created when banks lend. The process that allows for this creation finds its roots in double-entry bookkeeping, something that dates back at least to just before the rise of capitalism:
The value behind money created through lending only exists if the value commodified by the loan can produce wealth for the borrower beyond the amount of the loan (or if the loan proves small enough relative to the borrower's income that its repayment is a small concern). If one can take out a loan to buy a machine that makes one's business more productive, for example, the added productivity will pay for the loan . . . provided the fuel powering the machine is available. A shortage of fuel, therefore, is more than just a threat to established technology. It might prove a threat to our economy, as M. King Hubbert, it turns out, predicted:
That "cultural so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth" goes by another word: capitalism itself.
Though the author focuses not on energy depletion but on global climate change as the driver behind capitalism's demise, the two prove intrinsically intertwined. After all, burning the energy of fossil fuel caused the current anthropogenic crisis. Sparking his muse was a Naomi Klein article in Nation magazine, “Capitalism vs. the Climate”:
The Klein article has some dire conclusions about the future which include famine, wars started simply to fuel future armies, and general complete instability. There is, though, some hope:
An enormous base load coal, hydro or nuke plant is the ultimate hierarchical structure, one that simply delivers power and expects the consumers down the wire to simply pay what they are charged. These massive structures require massive infrastructure to maintain and fuel. They require equally daunting financing simply to construct. They are the emblematic symbols of an expansionist culture. Should a breakdown in the culture affect the infrastructure or a shortage of fuel affect their continuing operation, they may very well prove the Maginot Lines of our power grid.
By contrast, a distributed generation system requires a system that fosters cooperation between the various electricity producers, consumers and (unique to DG) consumer/producers. Smaller micro-hydro, rooftop solar photovoltaic and wind turbines, combined with battery banks providing arbitrage require a mere fraction each to finance and install than the big plants. Though those big plants produce more power per dollar, the smaller installations are scalable, capable of being built according the amount of money available today without financing. Such a system can thus be funded incrementally and expanded without an egregious debt burden. They may be less electrically productive per dollar invested; but if one includes the compounded interest charged on the large projects compared to the financing on the small, they may indeed prove a better per-person investment per watt produced.
And such a system may stave off a crisis in our capitalist system more effectively than a Maginot bulwark against electrical shortages easily bypassed by chronic fuel shortages.
What started as a simple introduction proved a massive word dump littered with paradigm-changing rhetoric and doomer porn. For that, I should apologize. I don't think I will. Writing these is less for you, Dear Reader, than it is for me. This is how I process the random reading I do, by sitting down and collecting it and my thoughts. I find the connections and discard the distractions. This is my therapy, and anyone who knows me personally knows well that I need it.
That doesn't mean that any talk of money doesn't relate to our energy needs, as I hope the rambling above demonstrates. This is all interconnected to an almost ridiculously incestuous degree like a family tree that doesn't branch. Bottom line: Until we exploit the excess capacity in our existing power grid infrastructure, there is no need to build expensive new generating capacity. And until we exploit that excess capacity through distributed generation, energy arbitrage and the like, we'll never be able to retire those aging coal plants that continue to spew their carbon. Doing any of this must be preceded by policies and financial incentives that put investment power in the hands of all electrical consumers, allowing us to exploit our own excess income and turn it into future income potential, rather than continuing to enslave us as mere rate payers doomed to cough up or go without.
We can take our electrical future into our hands. The means to do this is called distributed generation.
It turns out anyone who understands dynamic markets can envision this electricity market which prices needed power on the fly electronically. That's not the real element to discuss, I've decided. The truly important and revolutionary promise of distributed generation is not found in its pieces and parts but in the transformative promise the dynamic interaction of small parts can make: By spreading the responsibility for providing power to as many participants as possible, the entire grid can function with increasingly smaller elements and, by extension, with increasingly simpler organizations overseeing those elements.
In essence, a distributed system is a democratized system. By "democratized," I am not referring to a system where everyone gets a vote on our progress (though that might emerge as an ancillary result). I mean more simply that more and more people participate in the electrical system; by that participation, more and more people become aware of just what it means to use and supply electricity. There is no better teacher than experience.
As more and more learn the nitty gritty details about how our power consumption works, more and more of us can use that knowledge to perhaps keep the lights on. You see, we might very well be at the end of a long path of economic expansion, one that has allowed us to build the grid that excites our lights. I apologize if the following gets less technical and far more philosophical, but that's how I'm feeling lately.
Before we get too deep into detail, it might be good to think about what distributed generation replaces. In Part I, I mentioned nuclear power. By its nature, nuclear power in general is something that should probably not be in the hands of many small owners. Why? The expertise needed to avoid catastrophic failure, for one, depends upon a support network of colleges and governments to train the operating personnel (most nuke plant operators learn the ropes while serving in on naval nuke-powered ships and submarines). Even assuming one could replicate that knowledge base, how would one police a smattering of small plants to assure not one of them decided to refine their fuel into weapons grade stock? Just a glance at current weapons arguments or even the possibility thereof should nip this tiny-nuke future idea in its bud.
Even assuming we could make small nukes safe, how would we fuel them? After all, turning mined uranium into fuel requires a vast amount of non-electrical energy to mine the yellow cake, move it to a processing plant, and refine it to the rods used by the plants. Once the rods are formed, yes, that fuel proves quite long-lasting, especially if you reprocess it later; getting into the rod form from the mine, though, will depend upon lots of diesel trucks and trains and scoops and tractors. Without abundant diesel, nuclear would not be an option. This same limitation applies also to the highly specialized equipment a nuke plant needs; without a technological base, the factories that provide (for example) replacement turbines, dynamos, sensors, control switches, et cetera, would not be able to run. That reliance on motive fuel — which is now, let's remember, in decline — would make these parts increasingly expensive, a cost that would trickle to the consumer.
Nukes only became possible, I am stating, because of former technological progress in many economic areas besides nuclear science. To quote Kevin Kelly:
In all cultures prior to the 17th century or so, the quiet, incremental drift of progress was attributed to the gods, or to the one God. It wasn't until progress was liberated from the divine and assigned to ourselves that it began to feed upon itself. Sanitation made us healthier, so we could work longer. Farm tools made more food for less work. Gadgets made our homes more comfortable for tinkering with new ideas. The more inventions, the better. There was a tight feedback loop as increased knowledge enabled us to discover and manufacture more tools, and these tools allowed us to discover and learn more knowledge, and both the tools and the knowledge made our lives easier and longer. The general enlargement of knowledge and comfort and choices — and the sense of well-being — was called progress.
(Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, Penguin Group, 2010, pp. 89-90.)
And it was the rapid escalation of natural and later fossil fuel extraction and consumption that gave us the literal power to assign progress to ourselves. We essentially mastered the art of using technology to relieve us of some of the work necessary to keep ourselves alive, which gave us more time to improve the technology. Without wind filling the sails of 16th century ships, exploitation of the New Worlds would not have allowed the economic expansion out of the Middle Ages; without burning coal and later petroleum, the Industrial Revolution would never have happened; and without the industry built in that revolution, we never would have been able to experiment with uranium and later build nuclear power plants.
And none of this experimentation would have been possible without money.
Let's get to the present day. I found this article concerning the current Occupy Wall Street protests insightful:
One nub of the whole situation at the end of 2011 is a longstanding fact. People have been captured by their dependency upon a vast, technocratic apparatus that has de-skilled them and rendered them 100% (not 99%) dependent on money. The technocratic apparatus makes all our stuff, controls our climate, fixes our boo-boos, educates us, feeds us, moves us around, lights our homes, and puts us to work – all inside our most excellent technocratic life support system – and the only thing that makes the system respond… is money. As it is in 2011. As it was in 2010, 2000, 1990, 1980… it just got worse with time.
Money is generated by banks and printed by the government. It is designed to work a certain way to benefit governments and banks, which are run by the rich. Governments and banks are never going to be the ally of any movement like OWS, so there is little likelihood that activism will change the nature of money any time soon. Money is designed to transfer power; and it does it very well. Money is not a morally-neutral sign any more than a gun is a morally-neutral tool. Each is designed for a purpose. Guns are designed to kill. Money is designed to commodify, that is, to make everything into a thing for sale. Including you.
The anthropologist Alf Hornborg said that money dissolves cultural and natural systems in an ecosemiotic process. “Viewed from outer space,” says Hornborg, “money is an ecosemiotic phenomenon that has very tangible effects on ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. If it were not for money, nobody would be able to trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola.”
Money funded the exploration by ship of the New World and the continued exploitation thereof. Money funds the building of power plants, nuclear or otherwise, in exactly the same manner; the promise of profit from the funding is the only thing that keeps future funding flowing.
The essay continues to note that, with a concentrated power elite, little can be done to fight the money system except a refusal to participate in it. This refusal begins with a simple act: Planting gardens.
What can be done, and without any strategies involved, is a straightforward and strenuous effort by 99% of the 99% who are at home to make food. If there are 500,000 OWS protestors, then there need to be 1,000,000 more people who are making food in their yards, their neighborhoods, their churches, temples and synagogues, their workplaces, their schools, their land trust plots, their fallow fields, their empty lots, their apartment decks, their patios and their kitchen windows.
Even when the demonstrations end – and they will end – we are not left with nothing to do to continue dissolving that power. Every square yard of land recovered for food is a material victory in the face of little resistance, and that same square yard is a square yard of independence from the Grid.
Do not pit your weakness against their strength. Exercise your strengths where they are weakest, where you live. The system is falling apart, and nothing will stop that. More and more niches will appear.
The author calls this localization of food production a form of local control called bricolage, saying "it often implies cooperation with others as much as competition with others."
While the masters of the financial universe at Wall Street protect their guarded walls and ensure the system keeps paying the imperial tribute, we are making do. We do things that they can’t control or fully account for. We barter, clip coupons, work under the table, trade labor, share tasks and expenses with friends… all those little cheats to bypass the more disadvantageous routes along the Grid. Making do. Bricolage.
The Grid he mentions has a physical counterpart that delivers electricity, the small-g power grid. I see distributed generation as a vast patchwork of power gardens, as stark a contrast to industrial monoculture farming as the sum total of everyone's backyard patch of greens, seeds and spuds. Just as every meal gathered from the farmer's market or backyard or window sill means a meal not bought from the chain store and grown thousands of miles away, every dollar spent feeding the distributed grid is a dollar not spent on nuclear, natural gas or coal power, a dollar not diverted to highly concentrated and highly leveraged base load plants. Furthermore, every dollar spent on distributed generation encourages a dollar of distributed generation investment, just as every dollar thus not spent on massive scale nuke plants deprives a plant builder of potential future revenue and any ability to leverage future construction. Both employ bricolage in its dictionary form, "construction or creation from a diverse range of available things."
Again, it's not the nuclear energy that makes me uncomfortable. It's the scale of the construction necessary to make a nuke plant possible. You see, in a time of dwindling resources, we could all learn from the Maginot Line. From the wiki:
The Maginot Line . . . was a line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery casemates, machine gun posts, and other defences, which France constructed along its borders with Germany and Italy, in light of its experience in World War I, and in the run-up to World War II. . . .
The French established the fortification to provide time for their army to mobilize in the event of attack, allowing French forces to move into Belgium for a decisive confrontation with German forces. . . . The fortification system successfully dissuaded a direct attack. It was strategically ineffective, as the Germans indeed invaded Belgium, defeated the French army, flanked the Maginot Line, through the Ardennes forest and via the Low countries, completely sweeping by the line and conquering France in days. As such, the Maginot Line has come to mean a strategy or object that people put hope into but fails miserably.
(I emphasized.)
It's not that building a wall against invasion was the key to the Line's failure. Reading further into the article, we learn:
The Maginot Line was impervious to most forms of attack, and had state-of-the-art living conditions for garrisoned troops, including air conditioning, comfortable eating areas and underground railways. However, it proved costly to keep, consumed a vast amount of money and subsequently led to other parts of the French Armed Forces being underfunded.
A nuclear plant, like the Maginot Line, not only proves too costly to keep, but also drains financial resources from other, perhaps more promising technologies. By underfunding distributed generation, we are (IMHO) putting too much faith in costly base load operations and losing the agility that a market-driven distribution would be able to manage.
What would have worked for France in the Great War failed them in the war to come. What worked for a growing industrial society might well fail us in the future to come. In fact, the monetary system that built this industrial society might be done.
I'm unsurprisingly squeamish when it comes to uttering the C word, Capitalism. Why? It proves too slippery a concept. If you quizzed a hundred people about the actual elements necessary to defining a capitalist economy, I doubt you would find much agreement as what those elements are. Most do, though, agree that the capitalist period started about 1500 (something I've noted before). In that linked entry, I suspected that the capitalist period had less to do with philosophical revolution than it did with the expansion of productivity brought about by (as noted above) taming the winds, fossil fuels, and other natural sources of energy that can do work . . . like uranium.
As the garden guy mentioned above, "Money is designed to commodify, that is, to make everything into a thing for sale." Money is, in fact, created when banks lend. The process that allows for this creation finds its roots in double-entry bookkeeping, something that dates back at least to just before the rise of capitalism:
Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar and collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci, first codified the system in a mathematics textbook of 1494. Pacioli is often called the "father of accounting" because he was the first to publish a detailed description of the double-entry system, thus enabling others to study and use it.
The value behind money created through lending only exists if the value commodified by the loan can produce wealth for the borrower beyond the amount of the loan (or if the loan proves small enough relative to the borrower's income that its repayment is a small concern). If one can take out a loan to buy a machine that makes one's business more productive, for example, the added productivity will pay for the loan . . . provided the fuel powering the machine is available. A shortage of fuel, therefore, is more than just a threat to established technology. It might prove a threat to our economy, as M. King Hubbert, it turns out, predicted:
Hubbert said, "The third curve (on the left) is simply the mathematical curve for exponential growth. No physical quantity can follow this curve for more than a brief period of time. However, a sum of money, being of a nonphysical nature and growing according to the rules of compound interest at a fixed interest rate, can follow that curve indefinitely...Our principle constraints are cultural...we have evolved a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth...it behooves us...to begin a serious examination of the...cultural adjustments necessary...before unmanageable crises arise..."
That "cultural so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth" goes by another word: capitalism itself.
The “arc” of capitalism, according to [the World Systems Analysis school], is about 600 years long, from 1500 to 2100. It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital—money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency—in the twentieth and twenty-first.
Though the author focuses not on energy depletion but on global climate change as the driver behind capitalism's demise, the two prove intrinsically intertwined. After all, burning the energy of fossil fuel caused the current anthropogenic crisis. Sparking his muse was a Naomi Klein article in Nation magazine, “Capitalism vs. the Climate”:
In what appears to be something of a radical shift for her, she chastises the Left for not understanding what the Right does correctly perceive: that the whole climate change debate is a serious threat to capitalism. The Left, she says, wants to soft-pedal the implications; it wants to say that environmental protection is compatible with economic growth, that it is not a threat to capital or labor. It wants to get everyone to buy a hybrid car, for example (which I have personally compared to diet cheesecake), or use more efficient light bulbs, or recycle, as if these things were adequate to the crisis at hand. But the Right is not fooled: it sees Green as a Trojan horse for Red, the attempt “to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism.” It believes—correctly—that the politics of global warming is inevitably an attack on the American Dream, on the whole capitalist structure. . . .
Naomi writes:
“The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits....These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress. . . . Real climate solutions,” she continues, “are ones that steer [government] interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.”
(Again, I emboldened.)
The Klein article has some dire conclusions about the future which include famine, wars started simply to fuel future armies, and general complete instability. There is, though, some hope:
“The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.”
(I yet again made with the bold.)
An enormous base load coal, hydro or nuke plant is the ultimate hierarchical structure, one that simply delivers power and expects the consumers down the wire to simply pay what they are charged. These massive structures require massive infrastructure to maintain and fuel. They require equally daunting financing simply to construct. They are the emblematic symbols of an expansionist culture. Should a breakdown in the culture affect the infrastructure or a shortage of fuel affect their continuing operation, they may very well prove the Maginot Lines of our power grid.
By contrast, a distributed generation system requires a system that fosters cooperation between the various electricity producers, consumers and (unique to DG) consumer/producers. Smaller micro-hydro, rooftop solar photovoltaic and wind turbines, combined with battery banks providing arbitrage require a mere fraction each to finance and install than the big plants. Though those big plants produce more power per dollar, the smaller installations are scalable, capable of being built according the amount of money available today without financing. Such a system can thus be funded incrementally and expanded without an egregious debt burden. They may be less electrically productive per dollar invested; but if one includes the compounded interest charged on the large projects compared to the financing on the small, they may indeed prove a better per-person investment per watt produced.
And such a system may stave off a crisis in our capitalist system more effectively than a Maginot bulwark against electrical shortages easily bypassed by chronic fuel shortages.
What started as a simple introduction proved a massive word dump littered with paradigm-changing rhetoric and doomer porn. For that, I should apologize. I don't think I will. Writing these is less for you, Dear Reader, than it is for me. This is how I process the random reading I do, by sitting down and collecting it and my thoughts. I find the connections and discard the distractions. This is my therapy, and anyone who knows me personally knows well that I need it.
That doesn't mean that any talk of money doesn't relate to our energy needs, as I hope the rambling above demonstrates. This is all interconnected to an almost ridiculously incestuous degree like a family tree that doesn't branch. Bottom line: Until we exploit the excess capacity in our existing power grid infrastructure, there is no need to build expensive new generating capacity. And until we exploit that excess capacity through distributed generation, energy arbitrage and the like, we'll never be able to retire those aging coal plants that continue to spew their carbon. Doing any of this must be preceded by policies and financial incentives that put investment power in the hands of all electrical consumers, allowing us to exploit our own excess income and turn it into future income potential, rather than continuing to enslave us as mere rate payers doomed to cough up or go without.
We can take our electrical future into our hands. The means to do this is called distributed generation.
Link to Berman article via ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
nebris.