This is my second attempt at blogging and I'm still working on figuring out the workings of the editor but I'm just going to splat these ideas against the wall of the web and see what happens. I'll work on uploading some pictures and graphs later.

My goal is to articulate the feasibility and advantages of a decentralized energy infrastructure.

Take for example nuclear power verses solar water heating in Florida. Progress Energy has manipulated the state government to allow it to bill Florida ratepayer in advance to build a new 2.2 GigaWatt nuclear power facility for the "ESTIMATED" cost of about $28 billion dollars. This plant will increase Florida's base load capacity by about 4%, cost ratepayers thousands of dollars each to build, and result in a 50% increase in the cost of electricity.

Now almost every one of those ratepayers has a water heater and collectively those water heaters use approximately 10% of the electricity consumed in Florida each day. Solar water heating could eliminate that demand on the electric power grid for a fraction of the cost it will take to increase the grid capacity to meet growing demands.

If consumers where given the choice between spending $5000 dollars of their money on building a new nuclear power plant that will increase their electric bill by 50% or investing $3500 dollars into building a statewide decentralized energy infrastructure that would decrease their electric bills 20% by eliminating the need for that nuclear power plant, what do you think they would choose?

Ratepayers need to be given the choice, it's their money and they don't appreciate or understand how it is being spent by others and what some of the real alternatives are. It won't happen easily because the decision to persue a decentralized energy infrastructure where every home has a solar water heater and micro power system big enough to supply 1 kWD per household will represent a huge transfer of wealth from a small minority of power brokers to all the people of Florida. But this approach is better for the ratepayers, better for the economy, and better for the environment.

The choice of a decentralized energy infrastructure will not eliminate the need for our current centralized electric distibution system but could eliminate the need for it to grow and even require it to contract a little. This is going to cost some people with a lot of power a lot of money. The current business model of investor owned utilities is in direct contradiction to the goal of reducing carbon emmissions and global warming. Nuclear is not the best solution but it is certainly the most profitable solution for the electric energy industry. Just because it has low CO2 emmissions does not make Nuclear "Green".

We need to make it a goal to displace conventional energy consumption with renewable energy technology at the point of use where it is most effective cost efficient. And we need a mechanism to capitalize this technolgy transfer using ratepayers money.

It's a lot easier and more profitable for utilities to build more capacity to meet growing electric demand but it is a much better approach to reduce that demand with alternative energy resource develepment at the grass roots level. We need to solve the global warming problem the bottom up because it's not going to happen from the top down!