The Case Against Distributed Energy
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Every architecture and choice also bring negative effects. What would those be for decentralised energy?
Firstly the community may be too small to gather enough money for the capital sum - the initial amount to get the energy generation going - or they have other, more pressing needs. This is actually true of all decentralised infra activities. When digital goods are open sourced and can be self-produced, the price will reduce sharply but this takes time and in the mean time the cost for decentralised alternatives may well be higher per unit of generated electricity. This initial kick-start problem can be alleviated with the Miethäuser model where as one community gets the system going, they mentor and monetarily help other communities get off the ground.
There is also the skills issue. In a small community there often is a single person with required technical skills. The whole burden of providing reliable energy and fast correction times rests on this person. Over time this this easily starts to become a stress factor and they may want more compensation that the community is not willing to pay. Who looks after the grid when they are on holiday? What if they move away?
As there is high dependence on one or very few for something very essential, they may start misusing that position. Due to political or monetary disagreements people can start misusing the technical infrastructure and cut out some part of the community to force their will. The organisation running the decentralised system needs to have good legal protections in place so that everyone is treated equally. This is again true of all central decentralisation activities. This can be alleviated if several decentralized communities join forces and form an association to run the care services. Then the support and repairs are performed by a larger group that is impartial.
Electrical grids also pose dangers for workers from simple occupational accidents to electrical shocks. Proper education is needed and this may be lacking in smaller communities.
When microgrids are built using intermittent local energy sources like solar and wind, there will be big swings and they have to build strong storage for themselves taking costs up. Some good and reliable energy sources like geothermal and small modular nuclear have initial investment costs that require larger community/area level investments.
The risks are smaller in bigger units. Clearly there is some minimum size below which decentralized micro-grids do not make sense (home solar systems where you are responsible only for you, are a different story). To mitigate, again several smaller microgrids can join forces.
The whole micro-grid organisation may be tempted to optimise income for microgrid with the detriment of some potential customer. This is bad from the larger point of view. Assume there is a lucrative customer like industrial park nearby and some isolated houses further away. The microgrid is tempeted to sell to the big, juicy customer next, but building connections to small, isolated customers further away is not in their interest.
If one assumes that same kind of people work both in big and small organisations, it becomes evident that smaller organisation are not necessarily more fair than a big grid operator (it needs to be said that in an impersonal, big organisations its easier to act in a cold and calculative manner. See the post of forces governing commons for details).
Still decentralisation bring resilience to the energy supply that is today lacking.
Can you think of other reasons against it?
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