Score one for small-scale distributed power

Posted by Bruce Sawhill on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Score-one-for-small-scale-distributed-power-tp518737p518744.html

There's a local angle:

Thinning of "noneconomical" (small diameter) timber from National
Forests could be made economical by burning it on-site with small,
efficient wood fired power plants. (hundreds of kW) Imagine them in
places like Truchas, etc.  all throughout the intermountain West.  
Provide local work, too.  And save the large diameter timber.

Cheers,

Bruce Sawhill


On Thursday, August 14, 2003, at 04:32 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:

> 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
>
>
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