“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, … that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.†Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
Such are the headlines in our local news as budget woes force staff reductions, schools consider teaching four days instead of five, shopkeepers halve inventory or close their doors for good. Skilled workers have no alternative but to pack up their belongings and bundle up their families in search of work in less distressed areas and another chunk of the local economy leaves with them making it that much harder for those that remain.
Despite this seeming winter of despair there may be the spring of hope if big consumers of energy such as schools, hospitals, grocery stores, industrial sites and airports embrace the concept of distributed generation and micro-grids. Producing power at the point of consumption and selling the excess via a micro-grid to immediate neighbors earns revenue.
Coos County spends approximately $500,000 per year on electricity, (I went through rather a lot to get that information). The County spends an average of $12,000 per month wasting 750-degree heat at the solid waste dump instead of capturing the heat and converting it to energy to at least offset their costs. Even now, as I write this at 6:30 AM, I hear the noisy whine and rumble of the courthouse diesel generator trying to maintain load levels.
The Coquille School District consumes about $100,000 of electricity annually. That money, if used to finance distributed generators on-site, could produce enough power to meet the needs of the district, pay the debt service and earn another $200,000 to boot. Spending money to earn money rather than exporting those dollars to utility company shareholders will save jobs and provide services for our children.
Taken one step further, the district might earn via a micro-grid as much as $1.2M annually selling power to its neighbors. Not only would there be more money for the schools but there would be additional jobs associated with producing the power and installing and maintaining the systems. Utilizing a mix of locally plentiful renewable energy such as wind and solar and clean wood waste, after amortizing the capital costs over ten years, the power is essentially free.
The US Department of Energy is paying close attention to distributed generation and micro-grid technology. Both concepts properly deployed offer cost savings, improved power quality, greater reliability and increased efficiency. The last iteration of the stimulus package included $28B allocated to renewable energy, $11B for grid upgrades and $14B for environmental improvements.
As stated in previous columns, these are complicated deals to put together and require a fair level of sophistication to work through the myriad technical and financial details. Still, they have been done successfully, more commonly in Europe but also in the US in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Washington. Given the dire reports and the increasing number of layoffs I will shamelessly speak in the superlative and say that Coos County must act now to avert further disaster.
