Why Everything We’ve Thought About Generating Electricity Is Wrong
Power generation is one of the most interesting challenges of our time. We’ve got an indisputable problem with power — it’s largely fuelled by big, inefficient resources that cost a fortune to get out of the ground and ship around the world.
Coal alone as an industry is worth over $1,000 billion a year. And as a resource, it’s incredibly inefficient. You have to mine it out of the ground, process it, ship it to it’s source and then burn it… All to spin a turbine.
Which gets you thinking about the problem of power generation. Why haven’t we found a better way to spin turbines than burning shitloads of fuel?
It all starts with how we plan power grids
When you research how our politicians and bureaucrats plan out power generation, the result is quite different to most other sectors like cars or trains. Power generation is a really centralised excercise — in essence, companies plan to build power stations in big, big scales. They’re looking to power 500,000 homes, not 50.
The challenge with this type of thinking is it immediately locks out smaller sources of power. When you’re thinking about power as a mass-market, rather than peer to peer service, it’s pretty messed up. The tendency is to work to build large-scale capacity over small scale service.
That sounds a bit confusing, but it boils down to this — governments and very large corporations rarely find an economy of scale building a small power plant in the middle of a suburb, so they instead try to build a massive one far, far away. That means the power generation is quite far away from the consumption.
Something like 6% of all power transmitted in America is lost in transmission — which is a huge energy expenditure in and of itself. That’s all driven by electrical resistance, or the resistance energy experiences when transmitting over wires.
Which makes the way our governments/power corporations plan power quite perverse. They plan out these big, large scale projects to service hundreds of thousands of people. And that leads to large, inefficient grids where power is far away from the source, and many people are reliant on one overworked turbine.
The challenge is size
Power itself is a one to one thing. Most things (traditionally) have needed mass production to be affordable. But that’s rapidly changing today. Technology is fragmenting a lot of our traditional processes. 3D printing is radically changing manufacturing. Peer to peer currency is changing how we value currency.
Technology is also doing the same thing for power. And the major innovation here is the fragmentation of the grid. We don’t need big substations anymore — every home can be a place to stabilise power as large, affordable batteries become a reality.
What’s brilliant about this is it allows our grid (and storage of power) to get smaller, and more localised. This changes the game on power consumption, because you no longer need one big, central point to plan out your power consumption needs.
It’s really interesting when you combine that with the increased efficiencies being found in smaller power generation schemes. The biggest example of this has been in solar, where you can see the massive efficiencies gained over the years below.
Solar has quietly become one of our best performing pieces of technology for power generation, slowly becoming far more efficient than when we first developed it.
Yet we all seem to reject solar farms — mostly because they’re large and take up a lot of space. Today, it’s hard to convince people to let a large space in a centralised city spaces. Most people don’t want large power facilities in their space because it’s an eyesore.
In the recent scandal in Woodland residents voted to stop a large solar farm being built. The challenge with solar farms was the ‘reduced value of homes’ according to many residents. Again, no one wants large power facilities in their backyard.
Hydro faces similar problems. Numerous arguments around dams always pop up and most people are averse to the massive environmental impact that hydro power normally has. Again, people are afraid of the massive dams and the impact that they have.
All of this points to an interesting challenge — most of the renewable power sources, and most power in general, is planned at mass scale. We’re therefore looking for the best solution for mass power, instead of the best solution for power itself.
Shrinking our energy grids might be a solution
When you think of power as the end solution, instead of power stations, then there starts to be a bit of clarity. And exploring technology and power generation globally, it’s clear this is where the real opportunity lies.
In Sydney alone, there are over 1.4 billion litres of water used a day. Compare that to the peak times in the Snowy River, one of the major sources of Hydro power in New South Wales, at a mere 1,000,000 litres used per day and it’s a pretty staggering difference. The sad thing is this water movement or energy is mostly wasted (as in physics, energy is neither created nor destroyed) as water just sloshes down to the sewers.
Capturing even a fraction of that energy would result in massive changes to how we deal with power. But the challenge is these are micro-energy gains, not macro-energy gains. We need to think of power generation as a network, not a single pipe.
Portland Oregon is already taking steps to do this with the Lucid Pipe, putting power turbines into sewer systems. It’s a great example of innovation en-masse and fragmenting the grid into a network of power generation systems.
What’s next? The same logic can be applied to wind and solar energy. Masses of roofs go unused, and yet could be used for power generation. By having the technology and the storage located at each home we could complete reinvent how we think about power.
A software solution to drive a hardware solution
Funnily enough this change probably doesn’t start with hardware, but with software. Equipping individuals with the means to spend capital creating power assets and helping them identify unused spaces/sources of power is surely one of the first steps.
The government also has to deregulate spaces and think about utility a little more. No expenditure is likely needed to create a lot of these spaces — in fact, government could make a lot of money leasing sewer space to entrepreneurs seeking to build power generation businesses. But the real trick is in the network/platform — a piece of software built to map power capacity, opportunities and allow entrepreneurs to buy/build power generation throughout a city and link it up to homes.
This only works, though, if…
- Government becomes a lot more flexible about people changing utilities. Abolish fixed codes, and instead work on ‘what works, what doesn’t’.
- The grid can become more localised and more fragmented. E.g you can track how much power you, as someone building these assets, are selling back to the grid and profit from it.
I’m planning to build this software solution over time, but hey, if someone beats me to it who cares. We’re all in this human thing together. Follow me on Twitter here.
