Winter weather has brought about more wide spread power outages from Illinois, Ohio and east to New England. The Western States are not expected to fare much better according to the North America Electric Reliability Corporation, which oversees reliability of the U.S. electric power grid, is projecting an increasing risk for blackouts because of the lack of available power.
The annual revenue projected for a build out of 20% energy from wind is estimated to be $23 Trillion. To put that in perspective our annual budget for 2008 was $3.1T and we receipted $2.8T with the deficit applied to our national debt now at over $10T. So in one year, earnings from renewable energy production could run our country at current costs for over seven years or pay off our national debt twice.
Yet Congress does not choose to invest our tax dollars in energy preferring to leave it to the private sector. Energy is up from 2008 but still accounts for less than 3% compared to 21% for the Global War on Terror and utility costs to the consumer have risen steeply in the last ten years.
GE inked a $500B deal to provide gas and coal powered electric generators for power in Iraq on a continued course of centralized power despite repeated failures such as we are suffering here. Clearly there is money to be made in energy and energy production and the same holds true for more reliable decentralized energy.
Decentralizing allows smaller investments in local energy production $5M projects rather than $500B and affords the opportunity for communities and neighborhoods to share in revenue that would normally be sent to a distant investor owned utility. The money normally paid in utilities can cover the debt service on local generation and net profits reinvested in schools, roads and infrastructure.
Beginning in early January I begin working, once again, with Portland State University to design new motor control circuitry for the V-LIM generator as well as data collection to determine output, wind speed, ambient and coil temperature and other parameters. The PSU Software Engineering Capstone provides students with a realistic software development experience that utilizes the skills and knowledge acquired during the first three years of their program.