Over on the Blah Blah Technology site, tech writer Wayne Smallman is waxing lyrical about the democratization of energy.
The production and distribution of energy is about to change for ever. Why? Because in the coming years, we will be the ones producing and distributing the energy. And for those utilities companies who’ve sat at the very heart of the energy infrastructure for so long, they will struggle to survive…
I hope he’s right. But, I think it’s going to take a lot more than cheap solar panels, home biomass generators, and domestic wind turbines to democratize the energy industry, even with the possibility of a personal profit.
These devices are still very much at the low efficiency stage for most realistic applications for all but the richest with plenty of windy land or plenty of waste. Moreover, such devices don’t last forever, have to be maintained, can get easily damaged. They are also still intrinsically of low efficiency and that’s a particular problem on cold, dark, cloudy and windless days in Scotland for instance.
Twenty years ago I sat through a symposium that promised us the idea that we’d have domestic fuel cells that turned a gas stream (natural or from biomass) into electricity. The same system would burn that intake for heat and cooking. At the time, leading experts told me we’d have those domestic fuel cells by the end of the century…well that was almost a decade ago and I’m still waiting.
Things are changing…but….very, very….slowly.
Those who can already afford to may become early adopters of alternative energy sources, but I don’t see my neighbours rushing out to cover their roofs with photovoltaics or even installing solar-heating for hot water. More to the point, so long as the companies are pumping oil and gas from the ground and making billions of dollars doing so, we are unlikely to see any serious democratization of energy.
The portfolio of energy sources is already far more diverse than just solar panels and biomass reduction.
In fact, solar panels will most likely be out of date in a few years time, as embedded photovoltaic technology comes into its own — as a paint additive, as well as being infused into metals and composite materials.
Once you consider that the entire surface area of a building could be one continuous solar cell, you begin to see the energy potential.
But these are just a few concepts, of which there are so many, I couldn’t commit them all to just one article.
Hello, I’m a mechanical engineer from California who would love to get in the alternative energy industry but I’m not sure how to do that. With you experience in this field do you have any suggestions?
Billy Lost