Renewables will lead to decentralised energy generation systems

I have just read a nice article published on The Engineer Online about a five year project as St. Andrews University which is looking at new technologies that, in the words of the article, will allow the development of a decentralised energy generation system in the UK.  As an aside, I actually consider that we already have the technologies available to allow this to happen. What we don’t seem to have is the will to create it and the fee structures needed to make it work.

The research led by Prof John Irvine involves 27 researchers working on a variety of projects, but mostly seem to be around fuel cell technology. All interesting stuff but what I found most interesting about the article was the comments about the distribution system of the future. In the future a bigger proportion of energy production is expected to come from renewables, including micro-generation hopefully,  such as solar, wind, tidal and biomass, supplemented by nuclear, natural gas and coal. This change will allow development of the decentralised electricity generation infrastructure to be powered by renewable and clean technologies with a strong fuel-cell component, as opposed to the large centralised based system we have presently. According to Irvine

In the future renewable energy is more likely to be generated from numerous small self-contained generation nodes joined to the national grid by an umbilical. Fuel cells will provide back-up for when renewable generation is not producing at capacity - such as when winds are light. As energy will be generated closer to its point of use, the resulting system will have lower transmission losses, creating higher total energy efficiency with improved energy security.

Great stuff! But being a bit of a geek I really liked this quote.

‘The power system will be similar to Microsoft virtual networks,’ said Irvine. ‘It will create the same revolution as that did - this will literally be “power to the people”.’

Read the article yourself at The Engineer Online

Written by ashleys on August 12th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and micro generation.

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