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

Am attending the CADER conference being held this week in La Jolla. One of the topics so appealing to me is “Community Energy + Cleantech = Homebase for the new economy. ” Hot topics will include community owned energy AND micro-grids!!! They will be talking about the role of energy in our economic future.

No representatives of Coos County attended the Future Energy Conference in Portland that I saw but other communities are actively embracing the potential of energy to produce badly needed revenue streams. The cities of Troutdale, Gresham, Corvallis, Klamath Falls and Portland are all actively implementing and looking for ways to finance energy projects to fund public services.

Then there is Coos Bay…. how long will the citizens allow the moratorium on wind energy??? Rogue River Wind has plenty of business without Coos Bay but the citizens are the real losers if they allow city leaders to ignore decentralized energy opportunities.

We are closing in on our pre-production prototype and I am lucky to have a great staff in operations. As part of the company goal to provide jobs for veterans three of the four members of our operations department have served their country. My VP of Operations was a Lt Commander with the Navy and managed a 7MW floating power plant and has a masters degree in systems engineering. He is well suited to implementing smart/microgrids with distributed energy sources like small wind and solar and has been instrumental in getting us from earlier prototypes to the production model.

We also have a former helicopter mechanic from the Army (you can imagine how he comes in handy with a turbine like the LIM) and a grunt from the Marine Corp (yes, my grunt). Last, but not least we just added a fourth member to operations who has had a dream of working in wind energy since he was 15. Am very proud of my staff and wanted to give them all a shout out.

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.

Last Thursday, I participated in a forum in Salem put on by the US Department of Agriculture related to economic growth in rural America.

The USDA is leading an effort nationwide to listen to Rural America’s thoughts and ideas about what is needed to create jobs and stimulate economic development in rural communities across the country. These forums follow the lead of President Obama’s December 3, 2009, national roundtable discussion. So, plan to attend and share your thoughts and ideas about job creation and economic growth.

In Oregon, the following Community Forums have been scheduled:

> ALBANY, January 21, 9AM-Noon; Linn County Fair & Expo Center, Conference Center Rooms 1 & 2
> REDMOND, January 28, 1-4PM; Central Oregon Community College, Hitchcock Auditorium

Coos County Commissioner Nikki Whitty was there along with Sandy Messerle director of the South Coast Development Council (does anyone know what, if anything, SCDC has successfully developed?).

The forum consisted of two panels, the second putting some focus on energy, hence the reason I was invited. ODOE was represented on the second panel by Bob Repine, Assistant Director, Energy Incentives who began by talking about the opportunities for jobs in Oregon relating to the wind industry. Repine noted that many parts break on big wind turbines and while, “…Oregon will never compete with Europe”, Oregon can manufacture the replacement parts and create jobs.

Oregon could manufacture the generators. The Shepherd’s Flat wind farm awarded a $1.4B contract to GE to ‘assemble’ the turbines with China being the primary manufacturer of components. Shepherd’s Flat like all big wind farms is heavily subsidized with US taxpayer money, so why are we providing jobs for China?

State Senator Chris Edwards, representing part of Lane County, also on the panel, proudly advised that Oregon can trade with China producing fine wood products and other sundries. Now that China has all the jobs, it is no wonder they can afford to import our turned bowls our trinkets.

Naturally, I saw red and leaped up to give my opinion about what the government can do to help with jobs creation, such as insisting taxpayer funded projects be manufactured in the US. Oregon has the manufacturing infrastructure and the technology in place all it appears to lack is the political will.

Neither Messerle or Whitty contributed anything to the forum conversation but when I spoke to Whitty she told me she thought everything “was so interesting”.