Hey MNN. I did some research on our energy economy with a slightly different angle than usual. Just like all other consumer goods, energy must be transported – how do we distribute energy? Are we doing it well? How much energy does it take to get our energy to us (how efficient is our power grid)?

 

I want to take a quick moment to look at how efficiency has evolved in our country's history. For the past 100 years the development of efficiency has been focused on specialization and comparative advantage. These concepts have worked well because transportation across the globe has been so cheap. There is no doubt that specialized production of goods, services and sometimes energy is more efficient without taking account of transportation cost. 

 

However, this energy cost of transportation has increasingly diminished the utility of specialization, even with electricity. Some think that we will need to switch our energy sources from a few big plants to many smaller ones to make energy more local and save on transportation. A system of many small, geographically dispersed plants is referred to as a distributed energy system.

 

But, hold on, electricity travels on its own at the speed of light – how do we spend energy transporting electricity? The second law of thermodynamics tells us that no energy transaction is 100 percent efficient. In fact, large amounts of electricity can be lost through the grid. A nonprofit called the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) estimates that up to 20 percent of electricity produced at centralized power plants is lost in transition from the plant to the consumer. This means that by localizing energy production, we could cut up to one-fifth of our energy use.

 

One of the main obstacles in our way is that utilities have no incentive to change their current practices. In a Wired Magazine interview with Paul Tonko, a New York Assemblyman, Paul said that "there hasn't been major spending to improve transmission lines by the state since the 1970s and no major work by utilities since the 1960s." Utilities are paid for the amount of power they deliver, not where it comes from or how much is wasted in the process.

 

Another great strength of distributed energy is its room for a diverse and resilient energy portfolio. The concept of increased resilience through diversity is something that has evolved as a successful strategy for natural ecosystems over millions of years.

 

Imagine that there is a bridge collapsed on the road that is used to supply coal to a large coal plant in a county of Virginia. The plant is temporarily put offline, and thousands of people are without power for a week. Alternately, if the county had utilized distributed electricity sources, only the facilities that burned coal would be affected, or only the ones that depended on that road. This reliability helps protect against all kinds of terrorism and natural disasters.

 

An overhaul of our power grid would require a huge amount of government resources and many tax dollars, but the current grid is old -- it will need to be updated one way or another in the next couple decades. A switch to localized, smaller energy sources could be a really great option.