Extremely Efficient

Extremely Efficient

By Elizabeth Cutright

Are you feeling overwhelmed? It’s certainly hard to avoid a sense of hopelessness while watching the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico—www.ustream.tv/pbsnewshour. At first, you’re hit with the visuals: the gushing pipe, the slick that can be seen from space, and the birds struggling under thick layers of crude. And then, the questions come: How did this happen; what must we do to make this stop; and how can we protect ourselves from future catastrophes?

Before we attempt to answer any of those questions, I think we must first acknowledge that we are in our present situation because we gambled and lost. In order to satiate our need for fossil fuels, we enabled risky behavior—we became champions of “extreme energy.”

In a recent blog—“Efficiency to the Extreme,” —I discussed the concept of extreme energy and its cousin, extreme efficiency.

A term originally coined by Professor Michael T. Klare (Hampshire College), extreme energy attempts to define energy sources that require big environmental tradeoffs. Looking for oil in Canada’s tar sands, fraking for natural gas, promoting the cultivation of corn-based ethanol—all of these activities have large-scale environmental impacts. But of course, the biggest example of extreme energy is offshore, deep core oil drilling—as exemplified by the current Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

But what does extreme energy have to do with onsite power and energy efficiency?

Last month, Grist staff writer David Roberts posted an interesting piece, at www.grist.org/article/2010-05-20-too-big-to-fail-isnt-working-out-in-the-energy-world-either, on the undue burden placed on the public due to impossibility of indemnifying risky—i.e., extreme—energy enterprises. With no insurance available to mitigate the damage when things go wrong, the public shoulders the costs. Sadly, we’ve no clearer example of this burden than the current devastation in the Gulf. Robert’s solution: onsite renewable energy.

Of course, I couldn’t agree more. As Roberts points out, onsite renewable energy makes sense because it “is more resilient in the face of unforeseeable error; no one node is so big that failure is catastrophic.” Because, Roberts says, renewable energy is “iterative and innovative”, the risks (and rewards) are “borne by private actors in competitive markets.”

It has always been my belief that distributed energy is the ultimate form of energy efficiency and reliability. Diverse energy portfolios that include onsite power (especially when that power is supplied by renewable energy sources) provide security, stability, and energy efficiency. When the flexibility provided by onsite power is combined with low-risk fuel sources (including renewable energy), you gain the ability to nimbly maneuver between the grid and locally generated power, to switch between energy sources based on cost, peak demand, and power quality. This allows you to utilize the most appropriate and reliable power source available at any given moment, which, in turn, allows you to manage costs—you know how much each kilowatt costs—to asses risk and environmental impact. If you’re at all concerned with energy efficiency, then onsite power is one of the most important tools in your toolbox.

And make no mistake—in order to begin to answer some of the questions poised above, we must first make a solid commitment to energy efficiency. We must reconfigure our energy sources, but we must also reduce demand. It’s the only way to being to make inroads into our dependence on extreme energy.

Author's Bio: Elizabeth Cutright is the Editor of Distributed Energy Magazine