Posted by
Gary Schiltz-5 on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Score-one-for-small-scale-distributed-power-tp518737p518740.html
Belinda, I was thinking of commenting, but I'm not as knowledgeable as
you about power
generation - I'm just a tree hugging eco-radical who thinks that large
scale power plants
are a bad idea. I would suspect that the generation part would be pretty
efficient, but
even at the high voltages at which power is transmitted over long
distances, I'd think
the loss must be tremendous. My gut feeling is that the large scale
power production
industry is successful because of its powerful lobbying rather than any
inherent
technological advantages.
// Gary
-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Belinda Wong-Swanson
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 5:07 PM
To: The Friday Morning Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Score one for small-scale distributed power
Economies of scale is really not much an issue if you use small
generation systems and use the power locally. Most small cities in the
US have sufficient population size and activities to make this viable;
it is not because the utility industry prevents it from doing so.
-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]]On
Behalf Of Robert Holmes
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 4:43 PM
To:
[hidden email]; 'The Friday Morning Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Score one for small-scale distributed power
Small-scale distributed power is OK but has issues of economies of scale
(namely it doesn't have them).
For complexity people like us, the real opportunity lies in distributed
(agent-based) control as a way of identifying cascading outages and
self-repairing them. I know that EPRI were researching this and I
believe they are now (through www.e2i.org) putting together pilot
projects.
Robert