FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- please forward to appropriate media
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
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MIT Technology Review: Mismatch Boosts Solar Efficiency
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/rnb_042704.asp?trk=nl
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The time for an inverter program and fast track electricity generating contracts to individuals has come says an energy research partnership in small town Ontario.
Solar developments have been known about for some time, but until now an article that concisely explained it other than in research abstracts hasn't been seen reviewed by a technical journal.
Our inverter program will serve decentralization very well in conjunction with federal and provincial efficiency incentives and fast track contract agreements.
These efforts, however, are largely undermined by concentrated ownership models that create a bureaucracy inhibiting individual partnership in the energy economy.
"Go big or go home does not apply in the 100 year charette proposals the federal government and sustainability experts have been trying to put forward," said Mr. Pozza, principal researcher with the Energy Transition Partnership, a small energy research brain trust in small town Ontario.
"We see the future of power as simple as paying a network fee to both produce and access power," said Mr. Pozza.
He went on to say his organization had identified key areas that could help communities retain their rural economies and keep urban sprawl from gobbling up arable land.
"Part of it has to do with the distribution of dependency," he said. "In the large scale model central ownership can reach only so far to the margins with an infrastructure that spokes out from a generating station. It gets pretty complex, but it really boils down to the degree of separation you have to where power is produced. Something I like to call 'energy convergence close to the margins'."
Mr. Pozza said under a decentralized model medium sized electricity generators and distribution managers (depending on the local mix of ownership) also become hubs that store energy on site from intermittent generating sources by network connected customer/generators.
"When generation reaches a saturation point of about 30 per cent of all buildings in a community we see the beginning to an end of an energy
economy that spawns a multitude of subscription agreements while energy convergence continues into mobility fuels," he said.
Mr. Pozza said he wanted to make it clear that energy convergence with respect to mobility fuels would follow the same history as the mobile phone and cable television markets.
"As mobility fuels increase their electrical potential," he said, "it will be concentrated ownership that will begin a regulatory wrangle intended to break a deadlock. And it will be consumers that will have to pay the price for it in feature rich energy services that don't serve the core principals of a public utility."
"In decentralized ethanol and direct current production we see urban sprawl halted, saving arable land by making local people locally dependent," he said.
With appropriate crops to make ethanol and stimulating local economies these efforts a widespread decentralization will avoid many of the difficulties associated with thinking locally and acting globally," Mr. Pozza said. This global approach to local agriculture and energy production creates a concentration of another kind," he said. "On pesticides, herbicides and, increasingly, on fertilizers to prevent soil depletion there can be no more dangerous effort than to bind food and fuel so centrally.
We believe that the sliding scale of energy input to energy output where the relationship between fertilization and crop quality is concerned is where the rubber meets the road.
Mr. Pozza joked that next his research firm would be making recommendations that would see building code altered all across Canada to invoke sustainability within a renewable energy economy model.
"Yeah," he said. "Next, I'm going to tell every provincial government official I can get my hands on that municipal bylaws should prohibit grid style developments because the roof alignment of homes in such development doesn't promote energy efficiency. I haven't got a hope in hell."
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For more information please contact Tim Pozza of The Energy Transition Partnership.
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tim
Sustainability Northumberland
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ecoNorth/
http://www.ontario-sea.org/
Northumberland County Freecycle Network
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/northumberlandFreecycle/
-- see also --
http://www.freecycle.org/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OttawaFreecycle/
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