Gore was before Congress recently:
Gore advised lawmakers to cut carbon dioxide and other warming gases 90 percent by 2050 to avoid a crisis. Doing that, he said, will require a ban on any new coal-burning power plants—a major source of industrial carbon dioxide—that lack state-of-the-art controls to capture the gases. [my side note: he should be recommending performance metrics as opposed to equipment mandates]
He said he foresees a revolution in small-scale electricity producers for replacing coal, likening the development to what the Internet has done for the exchange of information.
Today I’m mostly interested in the 2nd idea, but I had to include that first paragraph for a little context. Less importantly, I have serious doubts about how viable and popular home generation will become (I assume home generation is equivalent to “small-scale” or else the comparison to the internet will be worse than I contend below). More importantly, however, the comparison between the electrical grid and the internet is pretty wrong.
To talk about small-scale production, I’m also assuming that he’s talking about solar, or maybe wind production and pretending that no one would consider adding home diesel or natural gas generators for selling electricity to the grid. One thing we often forget about home generation, is that suddenly the home owner is really in charge of their own grid. A bit of information I gleaned from watching Living With Ed, is that there is more equipment involved than just a bunch of panels on the roof. I don’t think there are enough monetary savings for people to want deal with the potential hassle of having another new, strange appliance. Maybe being independent is good for avoiding the occasional grid blackout, but any home blackout now means the owner is the one who has to fix the problem. Is having to deal with all the maintenance really worth a few cents a kilowatt-hour? However, one can conceive of a system where big electric companies possibly install and/or maintain home solar systems in exchange for cash or electricity.
Moving on, I’ll grant that maybe a lot of people really will try generating some extra electricity. That still doesn’t warrant the comparison to the internet. As more people join the internet, Metcalfe’s Law [thanks Yeti] proposes that the value of the network increases proportionally to the square of number of users.
Currently, the grid is unidirectional. It is also obvious that adding small-scale generators won’t change the number of people on the grid. So I will analogize — because Metcalfe’s law is intended for telecommunications networks — that the value of the electricity “network” is mostly related to the number of user-producers. However, while the amount of power may vary by producer, the product is basically identical.
The user-producers of the internet, on the other hand, can take in and use content vastly different from what they are self-producing. Moreover, the delivery and replication cost is almost zero. Thus once the content is produced, it can be multiplied millions or billions of times. Thus small groups of small producers can create huge impacts. An influx of small electricity producers, however, will only create, on the grid, a marginal difference on the total supply.
The net effect, maybe, is the reduction of emissions, primarily from coal plants. Still, that is a finite benefit. Plus, the internet doesn’t bury and destroy old information, as it surely hasn’t stopped the sale of books or wasting of paper. Al Gore’s forecast is probably right in that do-it-yourself power will become increasingly popular as prices decrease. And coal use may decrease if and only if regulations make it prohibitively expensive, which is probably why he favors equipment based regulation instead of performance based regulation. To that end his forecast a simple economic one. If that succeeds, however, it will not be due to the level of sharing or exchange like the internet… that he invented. It will be a basic case of improvement in applied technology.
References: (more…)
