Economist Paul Krugman points out the dangerous after effects of trying to make government smaller

The lights are going out all over America — literally…a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back.

Another grave sign our infrastructure is in dire need of shoring up is the increase in blackouts in the US. CNN reports a 124% in non disaster related blackouts

During the past two decades, such blackouts have increased 124 percent — up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to 92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of Minnesota.

In the most recently analyzed data available, utilities reported 36 such outages in 2006 alone.

“It’s hard to imagine how anyone could believe that — in the United States — we should learn to cope with blackouts,” said University of Minnesota Professor Massoud Amin, a leading expert on the U.S. electricity grid.

Without reliable energy everything comes to a standstill. Without energy we cannot even repair the existing infrastructure. Energy, human sweat included, is critical to a sustainable economy so relying on a system that is clearly breaking down, whatever the reason, is a flawed strategy.

This should make microgrids more and more attractive as both a way to avert blackouts but also to generate badly needed revenue for local economies.

With all the talk about modern smart grids and the call for increased transmission to deliver new renewable energy to consumers, eager to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, little attention is given to how antiquated and inefficient long distance transmission is. A March 2009, National Geographic article, citing the Energy Information Administration points out, “…for every kilowatt-hour used, 2.2 are “lost” as that energy is generated and sent over transmission lines.”
Hardly a sustainable business model, centralized power production only works for the monopolized utilities because the ratepayer is compelled to pay for their inefficiency by the PUC. The centralized grid delivery system is like taking the mountain to Mohammad except as energy demands increase the mountain keeps getting bigger and further and further away.

As promising as smart grid technology seems the primary goal is better load matching and therefore fewer wide scale blackouts, not efficiency. Smart grids will be effective for managing over spinning events that have wind farms producing excess power and redirecting it elsewhere but it does nothing to reduce wheeling or thermal losses.

Today’s central grid is based on Edison’s 1882 Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, serving less than 500 customers. More than 100 years later advancements in transmission technology have been mainly around stepping up voltage higher and higher to make the ever increasing distances required by building power plants out of sight of the urban centers.

Perhaps because the ratepayer picks up the tab for these losses little has been done to reduce them and the resultant CO2 emissions. Add in the enormous environmental footprint associated with thousands of miles of transmission lines hundreds, even thousands of feet wide, making the central grid ‘smarter’ is perpetuating 19th century technology into a 21st century world.

Cost estimates to improve the central grid vary widely with one suggesting $46B worldwide within the next five years. Investing just 10% of that money into developing utility scale clean storage technology would help eliminate the need for a central grid.

Producing power at the point of consumption, implementing wide scale distributed energy makes more and more sense, environmentally and economically. Smart microgrids can employ multiple renewable technologies such as rooftop wind and solar without any of the losses associated with the central grid.

Practically, it is hard to imagine a technology that wastes 2.2 kilowatt-hours for every single kilowatt-hour produced surviving into the 22nd century. Let’s hope it doesn’t, it simply isn’t sustainable. We should be imagining that next century now, hopefully one without a crisscross labyrinth of ugly transmission lines, something with thousands of independently functioning renewable energy microgrids.

Coquille, Oregon
Rogue River Wind, Ltd, (RRW) an Oregon renewable energy company has acquired the rights to a revolutionary new relativistic generator (REM) design. RRW is the developer of a ducted fan wind turbine, the V-LIM, capable of operating in low, high and turbulent winds up to Class 2 hurricanes. The V-LIM requires an equally robust, high bandwidth, direct drive generator capable of capitalizing on these powerful kinetic forces. The higher the RPM the more power the REM produces.
Until now modern generator technology began with Barlow and Faraday in England, and rather quickly matured through the dynamo into the recognizably modern generator by about 1900. The REM design represents the first radical design departure in generators since that time.
The REM has no inductive wound coils. Plasma or laser cutters cut continuous and precise shapes simplifying manufacture. There is no inductive steel significantly reducing total weight. The design incorporates a magnet topology that requires only 1/5 the neodymium used in traditional generators. As a low resistance device there are no heating or cooling concerns.
The generator uses no flux targets so there is no magnetic hysteresis. The generator has low internal loss and no thermal loss. The generator operates at a high bandwidth, requires low starting torque and has zero cogging. The direct drive generator can be scaled and stacked to replace existing generators in traditional wind turbines and eliminate the need for gearboxes and reduce the weight at the top of a tower by over 2/3. These combined features result in a 15% efficiency gain over contemporary generator designs.
The general topology can be elementally reconfigured into all different generator design aspects and parameters, from axial to radial. It can function as stacked element generator in a traditional BIG WIND megawatt power mode, or as the power-generating element in a wind turbine based micro grid configuration.
The REM can be used in a radial mode as wheel based motor in an electric vehicle design, or in water driven electrical generation modes. It can replace any traditional field coil or rare earth permanent magnet generator design in most applications, as an efficient coupling element between a mechanical power input, and an electrical power output. It can even be a stepper motor in a disk drive mechanism.
The generator is available for license in any application where generators are required.
For information please contact Mary Geddry, CEO Rogue River Wind, Ltd, at 800-490-8060 x210

The Hood River Hotel has a nice April special on river view rooms and so I stayed there Monday to attend a NW Seed conference on wind power held at The Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles. As you can see from this window shot, not only is there a view of the river but the railroad tracks and terminal as well. Unlike Coos County, the trains run in Hood River County, rather a lot, so I was a little sleep deprived for the conference.

The conference was a lot about community wind, wherein local investors or the community own the project and partake in the ongoing revenue stream, something I am well in favor of as readers of this blog know. The focus, of course, was on centralized wind production and traditional turbines, but there was plenty of information on all the incentives supporting community wind in Oregon.

Probably the best moment of the conference occurred when another Coos County citizen attending mentioned during the presentation to the ODOE, Energy Trust, USDA NW Seed representatives that Coos Bay had recently placed a moratorium on wind. Jaws dropped and there was so much guffawing, snorting and laughing that a few city councilors must have felt their ears burning. If only I had video…

As I have been railing for years now, importing essential services like energy and food exports dollars. Once those dollars leave the county they are no longer available to reinvest in sustainable jobs and local infrastructure. Sadly, not many of our civic leaders understand this well known economic dynamic and The World editorial staff don’t either. Consider this graf from a March 26, 2010 editorial supporting privatizing public minerals. (my thanks to whomever typed this because it isn’t available online)

Oregon Resources has begun building a $45 million plant to extract chromite and other minerals from ancient sand dunes. It has its permits, and it has several mining sites. It wants to explore an additional 6,000 county-owned acres, with the prospect of paying millions in royalties.

Main has speculated publicly that the county might conduct its own mineral exploration and mining, but the idea is fantasy. Would the county rehire its laid-off road workers to drive loaders and backhoes, expecting them to mine more efficiently than private enterprise? Would the county build a processing plant in competition with Oregon Resources, expecting two local plants to be more profitable than one?

Coos County taxpayers don’t belong in the mining business. Instead, our chronically underfunded county needs to make the best deal it can with the one company proposing to pay royalties.

Especially take note of the phrase questioning whether county workers can possibly be more efficient than private enterprise. Guess what! Study after study shows that when managing public resources, public management is, in fact, more efficient. Read one here Does it Matter Who Owns the Wind in Big Stone Montana? Since I have written about this before and quite recently look here.

Check out the comparison of publicly managed wind farm compared to allowing a private corporation to come in and manage wind energy for a mere royalty from the study above. Community owned wind shows higher rates of return to the taxpayer on every level. Not shown in this graf is the efficiency of the wind farm is higher also.

The World editorial staff are not alone holding these archaic views of private enterprise being more efficient but statistical and empirical evidence simply doesn’t support it. When you factor profit into any equation services are sacrificed. With today’s Wall Street model quarterly returns are critical to ratings affecting borrowing capacity for private entities. As such, quality and maintenance and long term impacts are sacrificed in order to make quarterly margins. For essential services like power, health, road maintenance and public safety and management of community resources the for profit model is a disaster for the consumer.

In the March 15, 2010 edition of The New Yorker in a well written article by George Packer about Martinsville, VA once booming until NAFTA sent all the textile jobs overseas. Martinsville is an area very much like Coos County and sports a 20% unemployment rate. The article notes some harsh statistics. Ninety cents of every dollar spent on gas leaves the county. Eighty six cents of every dollar spent at a big box store like Walmart or Staples, leaves the county. Now The World is mocking Commissioner Bob Main for attempting prudence and they are advocating to have 97 cents of every dollar earned off public resources LEAVE THE COUNTY!

Who actually wrote the editorial? Clearly they haven’t done an economic impact analysis either. Whoever they are they need to rethink their allegiance to Reaganomics and take Economics 101. If that doesn’t work, just look around you – the evidence is overwhelming and right before your eyes.

The New Yorker article is really about decentralization, one of my favorite topics and about rural America going back to its roots, taking care of itself and once again being independent of corporate influence. Local entrepreneurs in Martinsville are creating bio-diesel and reinvesting local money back into the local economy. What a concept! Let me repeat, Coos County can make more money simply by importing less electricity and thereby exporting fewer dollars than they will ever earn handing off a mineral lease to an Australian mining company who will likely just flip the deal once they sign a lease anyway. Coos County would do well to grow its own food too…

Living in the hydro-rich Pacific Northwest it is hard to imagine rationing showers and lawn watering in order to have a few hours a day of electricity, but that is what is happening in Venezuela right now.

One of the severest droughts in decades has given Venezuela’s socialist president a political nightmare as hydro-electrical power dribbles to a standstill, unleashing blackouts, rationing and protests. The waters behind the Guri dam, which supplies more than half the nation’s power, have touched perilously low levels.

Nevertheless, with energy production requiring as much water as agriculture and once mighty rivers like the Rio Grande no longer reaching the ocean and energy usage expected to grow beyond existing capacity, unless we decentralize now, it will happen here.

There are many reasons I focus upon wind energy, not the least being the ample supply…this from the November 2009 Scientific American.

Plenty of Supply
Today the maximum power consumed worldwide at any given moment is about 12.5 trillion watts (terawatts, or TW), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency projects that in 2030 the world will require 16.9 TW of power as global population and living standards rise, with about 2.8 TW in the
U.S. The mix of sources is similar to today’s, heavily dependent on fossil fuels. If, however, the planet were powered entirely by WWS, with no fossil-fuel or biomass combustion, an intriguing savings would occur. Global power demand would be only 11.5 TW, and U.S. demand would be 1.8 TW. That decline occurs because, in most cases, electrification is a more efficient way to use energy. For example, only 17 to 20 percent of the energy in gasoline is used to move a vehicle (the rest is wasted as heat), whereas 75 to 86 percent of the electricity delivered to an electric vehicle goes into motion.

Even if demand did rise to 16.9 TW, WWS sources could provide far more power. Detailed studies by us and others indicate that energy from the wind, worldwide, is about 1,700 TW

Another reason I favor wind is that wind is the only renewable energy source that does not require any water during the production of electricity. Even solar requires massive amounts of water when used in a centralized system.

According to the American Wind Energy Association, to generate one kilowatt hour of electricity from nuclear power 2.3 litres of water are needed. Coal requires 1.9 litres and oil consumes 1.6 litres…Some CSP technology utilises rows of curved mirrors focus heat onto a tube filled with oil which boils water to make steam, in turn spinning a turbine a turbine – this is called a trough system. Another uses reflective mirrors called heliostats to reflect and concentrate sunlight onto liquid-filled tubes used to generate steam and spin turbines.

In the case of trough technology, the water footprint is considerable – around 3.6 litres per kilowatt hour.

This video produced in England shares the benefits of decentralizing even if still using fossil fuels.

Rogue River Wind is very proud to announce the successful development of a high bandwidth wind powered generator capable of working in turbulent, gusty wind at all speeds utilizing the increased aerodynamic efficiencies of ducted fan technology. To be specific what we mean by high bandwidth is that unlike typical power curves where the turbine only produces power between 22 and 29mph for example, the LIM turns on at 8mph but more importantly continues to produce power at 80 or 90mph. Since the power output of a turbine is proportional to the cube of the velocity, every time you double the wind speed you get 8 times the power.

We did it. We will be build one more pre production prototype before beginning the full production V-LIM here in Oregon but what is most exciting is the scalability of the generator.

With a few adjustments generators now being purchased with American tax dollars from China could be built right here in the US with much higher efficiencies and providing American jobs. Something to think about with respect to the new $1.4B Oregon Shepherd’s Flat wind farm slated for 2012. While the LIM generator coupled to the standard open bladed wind turbines will not operate at a high bandwidth because open bladed fans simply cannot, the generator can be stacked and perform much better than the Chinese generators based upon 1930′s technology…. AND MADE IN AMERICA!

We will be making some noise about these jobs going offshore when we can build them right here, providing long term family wage jobs in Oregon, in the coming days and weeks. Please watch the news and contact your representatives to keep American tax dollars in the US.

It has been painful, it has been hard, but boy am I a happy camper!