The following is from an interview on Alternet of Travis Bradford, the author of a book on The Solar Revolution, which clearly shows the potential distributed nature of solar power. It’s not just a new form of energy, but fundamentally overturns the centralized premises of energy production. We recommend reading the interview in full, but have excerpted the key citations on distribution, i.e. peer to peer developments.
Excerpt 1:
“We’re moving toward distributed [power generation]…”
Solar is different from other energy technologies in that it delivers energy at the point of use, directly to the end user. That allows it to circumvent the entire supply chain. It’s not another option for a utility, it’s a competitor to a utility — the first time utilities have really had a competitor.
The best way to describe it is with an anecdote about cell phones. We used to have these monopoly telephone infrastructure players. They controlled everything, and they had all the processing power at central switching stations. You had these dummy terminals that you just picked up; you had a connection, but no brains. All the brains were in the center of the network. And then these cell-phone producers came along and, in the Telecommunications Act of ’96, were given access to the telephone grid. They began to go completely around the supply chain and offer competing services to the same customers, wireless and easier. The telephone utilities … first they ignored it, then they tried to fight it legislatively, and when they lost that they tried to fight it economically. Eventually they just decided, screw it, we’re going to buy them. Today those are the most profitable parts of their business. That’s the transformation.
This also happened in computers. We went from large, centralized mainframes with dummy terminals to a distributed hybrid architecture.
Solar is slowly going to begin to unwind the existing utility economics, to the point where utilities decide they have to get in or they risk losing their core business — exactly the transformations we’ve lived through in the last 20 years.
The solar revolution does not require new breakthroughs in technology. You could do it with the technology we have, scaling it up and learning how to do it incrementally better every year — which is what naturally happens with scale.”
Excerpt 2:
“Solar’s going to change the electricity infrastructure in a way that will make coal unnecessary. This distributed architecture is going to get to the point where wind and geothermal, where available, take over a lot of the baseload needs; solar will meet a lot of the peak needs, and some of the base needs during the day. The combination of these portfolios will make coal irrelevant. Wind and thermal are nearly as cheap as coal, if not cheaper, and coal still enjoys tremendous subsidies. Under certain circumstances nuclear power would be OK, but I highly doubt those circumstances can be met.
Solar is a universal system available inversely with the wealth of the nation. The richest countries have less and the poorest countries have more.”
Excerpt 3:
“Deregulation has allowed utilities to squeeze their spare capacity. They’ve been able to reconfigure assets and put off upgrading their infrastructure. The grid today is deeply underinvested in. So it’s getting frailer — that’s what the blackout in Brooklyn this summer was all about. The upgrades are too expensive; they can’t afford it under the current rate structures.
The grid infrastructure is problematic, but distributed solutions help solve that. The utilities have already been moving toward distributed natural-gas plants. Solar provides a great alternative for utilities that don’t want to invest in line extensions and upgrades. Ultimately utility providers are going to figure out that they want this hybrid infrastructure. They’ll get to a point where they’re participating in and pushing the process rather than ignoring or resisting it.
I’ve talked to a number of senior managers and board members at utilities around the country. One of them — a board member of a Northeastern utility — said to me, “We don’t know what to do, but the writing’s on the wall, and the conversation is occurring at the board level at every utility around the country: How do we migrate our systems to a renewable, distributed system?” The conversations are being had, but these are slow-moving entities.”
Excerpt 4:
“Solar power is empowering. All things being equal, people like to control the resources upon which they rely. That’s why I spend time thinking about solar technologies rather than centralized, easily controlled technologies. At the end of the day, sustainability includes distributed power and democratization.”