Local is the way to go! More resilient, more reliable.
That’s why a growing number of people who work in the industry are now questioning whether massive, centralized clean-energy projects really are the future. What good are huge solar farms in the desert if you can’t get them wired? Perhaps smaller, distributed sources of clean energy — rooftop solar panels, say, or small turbines — that don’t need fancy new transmission lines are a more promising option.
“It’s long been conventional wisdom that it’s much easier and cheaper to build those big plants,” Allan Schurr, vice president of strategy and development at IBM’s energy and utilities group, told me. “But, when we interviewed customers, we found a strong appetite for individuals having control over their own energy future.” As an alternate model, Schurr points to Germany, where well-crafted incentives for rooftop panels have transformed the cloudy nation into a solar leader. And there’s a lot of untapped potential here: the National Renewable Energy Lab has estimated that we have 661,000 megawatts of rooftop-solar resources here in the United States.
via Are transmission lines holding America back? – The Washington Post.
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