Decentralized Energy

Decentralized energy would make an industrialized /information society much less vulnerable to terrorist attacks. But can big government and big business support such a revolutionary strategy?

Source: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: How To Do Decentralized Energy.

Greenpeace UK has just released a massive (~75 page) report entitled Decentralising Power: An Energy Revolution For The 21st Century, looking at what it would take to move the UK aggressively towards a distributed power network. The capsule argument, from the report, touches on arguments familiar to WorldChanging readers:

In a decentralised energy (DE) system, electricity would be generated close to or at the point of use. Buildings, instead of being passive consumers of energy, would become power stations, constituent parts of local energy networks. They would have solar photovoltaic panels, solar water heaters, micro wind turbines, heat pumps for extracting energy from the earth. They might also be linked to commercial or domestic operated combined heat and power systems. The massive expansion in renewable capacity that this would represent, and the fact that when fossil fuels were burnt the heat would be captured and used, would lead to dramatic reductions in overall carbon emissions – at least half of all emissions from the power sector, or 15% of total UK emissions.