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Punctuating this lesson from the power outage (which the Rocky Mountain Institute, among others, has pointed out was “entirely foreseeable” ) have been energy and climate-related stories from around the globe: A heat wave that killed thousands and prompted considerable political upheaval in Europe; Gas prices that have gone as high as $4 in the Southwest, and nearly $2 here at my own local gas station; Concern over the increasing costs of home heating oil in the Northeast; Ongoing violence, conflict, turmoil in the oil-rich and politically contentious Middle East; And more and more headlines like the following…
While this kind of reading is, in and of itself, enough to make one as uneasy, irritable and even depressed as the long lines, delays, and lack of available refrigerated beverages made me and my fellow home-hungry travelers on that afternoon in August, it is only half of the picture. The other half is the answering scenario, the rebuttal, the reason for hope—and it is growing.
It can be seen in the attitudes of businesses like Verizon, Timberland, Shaw’s Supermarkets, and Aveda, who are recognizing the value to their companies in pursuing energy efficiency, renewable power sources, carbon offsets, and consumer environmental education and marketing. You can witness it in the actions of premier higher education institutions like Tufts University, Middlebury College, the University of New Hampshire and countless others who are undertaking greenhouse gas inventories, emissions reductions measures, and community and institution-wide outreach about global warming (not to mention, providing valuable research on both the science and technological solutions to this issue). It shines through in the work of progressive towns and cities like Burlington, Vermont; Hamden, Connecticut; Cambridge, Massachusetts and others, who are demonstrating that the best places to live are the ones that plan and develop sustainably.
This opportunity is attested to powerfully in some of the post-blackout analysis and news, including the following:
- From Reuters, “Alternative Energy Stocks Post Gains” in the aftermath of the blackout
- From the New York Times, “Wind Power’s New Current” about a growing number of wind-power projects
- September 2, NYT editorial calling for an energy policy that incorporates energy efficiency and renewables
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Call it the bright side of the blackout, but when 50 million Americans in the U. S. and Canada found themselves without elevators, subways, cell phones, refrigerators, cash registers, TVs and gas pumps, the value of renewable energy went up.
It was measured, the day after Black(out) Thursday, by gains in stocks of companies producing fuel cells and other technologies related to “distributed generation,” in which smaller electricity-producing plants supply power to smaller areas.
Most such small-power producers use – or can use more easily – renewable sources like wind, water, hydrogen, or biomass fuels like vegetable oil and wood, which is a plus for the environment. It is also, not incidentally, a plus for reliability and, quite possibly, for the pocketbook.
The reliability issue is simple: if you supply power to a smaller area, you have less to worry about in transmission and distribution failures, and power loss or fluctuations. The pocketbook issue is more complex, having to do with the potential for community financing and the relationship of size to regulation and something called “gaming.”
Gaming is essentially what happened to California, where power producers and fuel suppliers saw an opportunity to make money by manipulating the availability of source fuel for electricity and the electricity itself, creating an artificial price bubble. They got rich while California, and California ratepayers, lost bigtime.
But when you are not able to control vast expanses of power demand, and when smaller generators can be turned on and off to supply power for local areas, the ability to “game” the market is lost. Prices, while perhaps initially higher to cover capital expenses, become more stable, like the supply of power itself.
So when the lights went out, a lot of us got to see how much we need electricity – and how we may need to think not about bigger interconnected grids, but smaller, safer, more stable power neighborhoods, fueled by renewable energy.
-- Bill Burtis |
