Vocal Voices

This is quite interesting. Labour's energy spokeswoman, Lisa Nandy, has said that local communities should take ownership of their energy provision. I quite agree, to some extent.

It will never work for our largest towns and cities, but for rural communities it could be a Godsend.

A combination of micro-wind, solar and small scale hydro could take many small towns, villages and hamlets off grid forever. Doing that would reduce overall baseload and the need for massive infrastructure projects.We would still need traditional power stations (hopefully nuclear) to cover the country's 24/7 baseload, but smaller generating methods have to be part of the overall mix.

The UK is criss-crossed with flowing water and nearly all villages and hamlets are situated next to them. These islands are windy, but we do not need huge windmills to benefit from it. Small wind generators - one per house - could harvest a huge amount of energy. And only one solar panel per building would generate more energy than a few traditional power stations.

If we think out of the box we could be world leaders in mixed power generation.

The one real gap is reliable, large scale, power storage which could gather up all this ad hoc power and then release it when needed.

I've done the figures for myself and to take my home off grid I need a minimum of 7kwh panel coverage with a minimum of 6h of light per day to drive it. Or whatever balance of other energy generation we can get. Backed by at least 120kwh of batteries.

Mainly because when I switch on my 25kw hob for an hour, I need the power to back it up. Plus my fridges and freezers are total off grid killers. Most small off grid installations use gas fridges and freezers. Also I can't afford to discharge my battery array more than 50% and preferably not more than 25% once fully charged. Which would lead to extreme longevity even though I produce more power than I need.

Also I have a friend in Scotland who did the wind calculation and decided that he would need a 15m tower to get any really meaningful power out of a wind turbine to make it worth the effort.

So a real need to sequester the water based power and the solar power in the summer. But where do you put it? pumped into water towers? Truly massive friction motors. Lifting massive weights? All of which take space to store the power.

I'm not saying don't do it. But people will approach it with the immediate assumption that they will get absolute grid level reliability and feed power from day1. If they don't get it from day1 they will simply dismiss it as rubbish.

The thing should be viewed as cumulative. A small % each year which, over the years and decades, both provides return and reduces grid dependency. Plus reduces power cost which is a doubler as a reducing cost instead of an increasing cost is twice the benefit.

Marketed that way, I see it working.

I wasn't thinking of these things in terms of storage, but more like a low level baseload to be used as produced. Any shortfall would come from the central generating of power companies.

A few solar panels attached to nothing more than a few lead acid batteries would produce more than enough power to light a home using LED bulbs. A small marine type wind generator (1m dia) would produce enough power to heat water to 60ºC for hot water washing and central heating. Appliances that draw down a lot of power would get it from the mains.

Get 20 million homes involved in such a combined system and the country's baseload capacity drops. If they all saved a couple of kilowatts per day that's 40GW.

I know, if the politicians viewed it this way, then we would all win. Sadly they think £ and big companies, rather than popcorn style implementations and the scale that comes with it.

But, think, even the 3kw arrays put on most homes, in summer, produce far more power than the homes need and, potentially, far more power than the grid needs for much of the day. 10 hour daylight would give up to 30kwh which is more than most homes could usefully consume.

If we don't have a way of sequestering it, then we just lose it and then we have to make more of it. We've been doing that for so long on the grid that nobody seems to be able to think out of the box.

Which is why you and I get nowhere when we try to get people interested in lowering our grid dependency.