Energy efficiency, investing in public infrastructure, including schools and education, and improving access to broadband internet are all part of president-elect Obama’s plan to create millions of new jobs. During his weekly address, Obama emphasized the importance of all these matters in order to reduce our dependence upon foreign resources and improve our competitiveness in the global market.
Rebuilding our roads, dams, bridges, schools and transportation and power networks cannot happen too soon. A new report produced by London-based GFC Economics is predicting by next spring, the United States could be facing a million layoffs every successive month.
“Expenses related to corporate debt, and muddy credit markets consumed by fear, are driving a fast-approaching ‘hard landing’.”
Whether Obama’s plan can avert these dire predictions and how he plans to pay for it will soon be learned as he prepares to take office next month. Either way, his drive for energy efficiency is going to be crucial to the ultimate success of his economic plan.
With energy demands expected to increase, the push to find renewable energy sources and almost daily intermittent grid failures, investing in the grid or rethinking the single machine grid matrix is crucial for our economic survival. In order to fully realize renewable energy generation, absent clean storage solutions, is it easier to implement renewable energy using the centralized production model or a decentralized model?
Comparisons between electricity storage and transmission almost always center on utility scale capacity rather than smaller, more manageable micro-grids. Within the realm of centralized electricity storage technologies such as pumped hydro, compressed air, flow batteries, etc., are thought not just in terms of load leveling, peak shaving and arbitrage but also power conditioning.
The best argument for maintaining the single machine grid and subsequent utility scale storage is financial gain whereby huge producers continue to game the system as Enron did to control profit margins. Despite the well documented technological and efficiency benefits of micro-grid applications it is the independence offered to consumers that brings up the most resistance from privatized energy producers.
In any event, the development of electricity storage technologies, such as capacitors, flywheels, superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES), pumped hydro and more will have a profound effect upon the economic recovery of the country and its future as an energy independent state. Rural America has an advantage over our power hungry urban neighbors because we can implement micro-grids and smaller storage systems to manage our load demands much easier and without imposing on a grid network owned by out of state investors.
To help Obama overcome the enormous hurdles before him we all need to do our part and address our energy use habits and our energy production methods. Demonstrating energy independence and modeling it for the rest of the nation will not only help resurrect our own local economy by keeping dollars local but may help small towns all across the country.
