(Categories: Wzzup)
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Two years ago we visisted existential tech professor Steve Mann. He was building himself a 100% self-sustainable house with the latest tech, in the midsts of downtown Toronto. One of his contributions was consumer wind-power. Until fairly recently, wind turbines were huge structures that were only available for commercial use in turbine parks or empty rural areas. No longer so. Consumers can now choose from various wind turbines for residential use. For example, the first Urbine, the StealthGen is small and silent enough to be used in a densely populated area. One StealthGen produces roughly one-fifth of the energy used by an average household. |
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His other project is Flexible-sunpower cells which can be used as florring for flatroofs and sunterraces… unbreakable so you can walk on them. Imagine 80% of city roofs are not being used and just laying their in the sun?!.. These innovations will cause a big shift in energy-distribution… like all one-directional systems, will energy need to prepare itself and its grid for consumer generated power. |
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Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler
52 customers reviewed this article averaging 4.0
Isbn-13: 9780300122237
Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself. Thaler...
Steve coined the term ‘blue roofs’ as part of a sustainable urban ecosphere entry for the Coram International Sustainability Design Competition… and guess what.. he won =)
if the grid would be capable of bidirectional energy transfer the business model would be radically different. would you invest in 200.000 stealthgen for your customers or would you build a powerplant? is that the question executives of power production companies are asking themselves? is the current separation of grid and production (of power) beneficial to generating innovation and adoption in this area? is separation of grid and production a worldwide trend?
i remember a wired article where the scenario was being depicted where a customer sells back his self generated excess energy to it’s energy provider. is this future thinking or is this realistic in the current environment?
is this a development that has to be realized by government ‘intervention’ or is this a shift that will emerge from the needs of individuals (and communities)?
I think the question is broader. Not only business executives but also local governments, home-owners, construction agencies etc should not only focus on the reduction of energy-consumption, the become-X-neutral-trend like with CO2, but maybe the ambition should be to add something… so energy-positive?! Impossible? No. 2025? No.
I tried to get subsidy for my Solar-panels (yes, Dutch government was subsidizing)… but unfortunately the enthousiasm enormous and they ran out f budget in three months. So willingness is growing in both sides of the fence. I know from an inside contact that companies lie Nuon are actively researching the ways to upgrade the network (mostly the connections to the home) to enable consumer-power generation for ‘the masses’. Will this change business-model… yes… but furthermore… how will this change mentallity?
We have seen that economizing a problem sometimes helps to overcome a hurdle. Like we see now with green-house effect and I expect soon with poverty (look at micro-credits).
There are plenty of tools to start with early stage projects, but are we willing to invest, are we willing to let consumers into the energy-production-chain? Are consumers willing to see energy as an effort not as an abundant commodity?
Today UK and NL announced a new sub-marine powerline to connect both continents. Why? Because the big challenge (also for the discussion above) is the storage of ‘power’ which is difficult. Therefor capacity and peak-usage go hand in hand. UK and NL have different consumption patterns and therefor different peak-hours enabling optimization of infrastructure and the reduction of cost.
So the big question is what can a distributed power-generation network add to the capacity/ peak-usage ration of the grid?
Another issue concerning energy-consumption drew my attention today, Dutch government wants to raise additional taxes for families who are consuming an above average amount of energy. Why us the stick and not the carrot? Why not subsidize people who save energy or even produce energy? That would be far more structural. In the end… it is usually the upper-classes who consumer more energy and they will choose comfort over cost-savings… but investing in the future might be more appealing to them.