Al Gore compared his vision of the future of electricity generation with the current state of the internet. I think it’s a pretty useless comparison. I will, however, spend a little bit of time examining why the comparison might be relevant.
He might be right because the internet has been fantastic for allowing user generated content. If home generation becomes easy and cheap then the electrical grid can contain much more user generated content, in this case power. From the perspective that users can also be producers he is right.
As I said before, though, the content of the internet can enjoy a fantastic multiplier effect where any bit of content can be easily replicated millions of times. Excess power sold to the grid, on the other hand, will disappear as soon as it has been used.
A better comparison that Gore could have made would be to food. Anybody with a little land and a green thumb can grow their own food, and if they have an excess, share it with their community. This too is a far from great comparison. The simple fact is that most people do not find it to be in their own interest to be involved in growing their own food. Plus, at least a gardener with extra food can exchange that for other types of food from other gardeners.
Let’s go back to the comparison with the internet and look at something familiar, perhaps blogging. Many fantastic bloggers are generating valuable content without putting too much, if any, effort into adding infrastructure. Only the geeky and outgoing actually pay for space that they must maintain themselves. The rest don’t bother with the details. They let someone else take care of all that so that they can enjoy a relatively hassle free experience at no cost.
Which leads me back to an idea from Part 1 of disagreeing with Gore.
Basically, most people will not want to deal with managing their own little power grid for the sake saving or making a small amount of money. Only the geeky or dedicated among us will really want to deal with keeping solar panels clean and making sure that everything is in tip top shape. In the way that free blog services gain advantage by scale and huge numbers of users, any shift to be made toward distributed generation will entail having hired system managers and reduced system redundancy.
What do I mean? As for reducing redundancy, instead of having sets of equipment in each house, the solar panels of many houses — a whole neighborhood perhaps — will be wired together. The output of those panels will then be converted to grid-ready 115-Volt in a more central location. All these systems, then, will be managed by a much larger electrical entity.
This may be similar to the installation of cell phone towers. Towers are not constructed if the equipment can be put in or on a nearby, tall, existing structure. A power provider is unlikely to have a lot of space for putting a lot of solar panels to create a huge solar plant. Instead the power provider will effectively be leasing roof space.
Does that constitute “a revolution in small-scale electricity producers for replacing coal?” I think not. The benefits from economies of scale will force large-scale companies to dominate for the sake of lowest costs. The end result, if there is a huge switch to solar, will be not much different from the current state of things. Everyone will have a sufficient supply of electricity and very few of us will take an active role in generating that electricity.
