Baby Steps..

Over my many years of working in the electrical industry, I've always wondered:

"If we decide to go with alternative energy sources, how do we do it?"

I've always viewed alternative energy sources as a way to save the consumer money. Unfortunately, the implementation of many of the alternative sources are being done by entities I call Mega-Corp.

The mission of Mega-Corps is not to save the consumers one red cent. Their mission is to make piles of cash for the corporation and their investors. Helping the consumer is completely secondary.

This is not to say that corporations are bad or evil! They aren't evil by any standard. Some of them are just owned or controlled by people who don't know how much is enough. As a mimimalist I have problems with many of corporations. My lifetime of experiences have generated an inherent distrust of such.

This has had a great impact on on how I view the solution to the energy problem.

From a basic electrical engineering foundation, BIG generating facilities are almost a necessity. The efficiency of scale makes it quite adventageous. But think about this:

If the costs of generating, transmitting and distributing electricity were to drop by 50% overnight, do you truthfully believe that your bill would go down?

Our current energy providers are Mega-Corps. If Mega-Corps can make an extra dime, they will. The Mega-Corps have (on several documentable occations) lobbied to have laws passed to minimize competition, artificially inflate prices, get tax incentives (read as: TAKE THE MONEY YOU GAVE TO THE GOVERNMENT) to aid their operations and even illegally bill consumers. Trusting Mega-Corps is a questionable act at the least.

While we have to have them in some degree or another, there has to be better ways for the consumers to minimize their stranglehold that Mega-Corp has on us.
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In a post I made on Cowboys for Pickens Plan, I wrote about Centralized vs Distributed (Decentralized) vs Semi-Distributed (Semi-Decentralized) generation techniques.

I personally like the concept of a mixture of the three. It allows for consumers, investors and corporations to all have a dog in the fight. I've had to tweek my ideas a bit and will continue to do so with more experience and input from others.

The centralized and semi-decentralized (Semi-Decentralized) generation is almost already taken care of. Let the big boys with the piles of money hire the paper pushers and such for that part.

I would like to concentrate on the distributed (decentralized) generation.

With a bit of work, it should be possible to build a vertical axis wind turbine with a power output of 1 to 3kw. The vertical shaft allows for the installation to have a minimal land footprint, simple installation and simplified maintainence.

The biggie is getting the price to about $1000 per KW and making it capable of paralleling output back on to the grid. Once that is accomplished, the installation and implementation should be fairly stright forward.

Once in production, five major markets should be targeted, at least in this part of the country:

1: Rural farms---the rural location should provide possibilities for multiple installations
and electrically propping up the grid from the line ends.

2: Oil Pump Jacks--for those of you who don't know, pump jacks are the electric motor driven pumps that
actually pump the oil out of the ground. Pump jacks are not operational at all times, but are periodically
checked. Since the land footprint of the pumps already exists it shouldn't be too difficult.

3: Cellphone, Radio and Television towers--These facilities have a huge land foot print and already have the
basic infrastructure to support installation.

4: Rural water district water district installations. This is mostly due to locations (water towers are normally
located in elevated locations--->more wind) and water is a nice thing to have.

5: Small towns (populations under 1000)

All of these types of installations should have a minimal affect on the grid power quality, should provide immediate benefits to the local communities in the form of lower electrical expense and additional employment, supply auxilliary power for communications and other utilities, provide experience for realworld application and good PR.

Another positive aspect is that many of these installations will be providing power relief to small electrical co-operatives. This can either minimize the electricity they need to purchase for distribution or allow them to sell excess generation which can then be used to fund the installation of semi-distributed (semi-decentralized) generation installations.

The protective relaying for distributed generation installations should be minimal at best and (with a bit of programming) provide at least some power in the event of tornado or icestorm damage to powerlines.

Even with this start, lots of details still need to be worked on..