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Why would you decentralize energy production? Centralization brings down the cost by the power of scale, it worked for every industry, I don't see why energy wo

Why would you decentralize energy production? Centralization brings down the cost by the power of scale, it worked for every industry, I don't see why energy would be any different. And even with renewables, it's far cheaper to make a renewable energy farm than spreading it randomly with massive subsidies.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Centralization creates transmission losses and enables control over the resource by an entity you might not have input into. My utility can’t do anything about the power I generate with the solar on my roof. Your local community has very little input over for profit generators (versus shareholders).
- realusername 8y ago
  > My utility can’t do anything about the power I generate with the solar on my roof. Your local community has very little input over for profit generators (versus shareholders). That's looks more like a problem than anything positive, electricity grid planning is at a country level, not a local one. And personally I don't believe on private electricity generation, it should be public without shareholders for that reason. > Centralization creates transmission losses and enables control over the resource by an entity you might not have input into. How exactly? Every industry is like this. Factories came bigger and bigger, farms got bigger, trucks got bigger, cities became more dense, that's just economy of scale. Renewables are not immune to that, it's far cheaper to create a solar grid than spreading them randomly.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    > And personally I don't believe on private electricity generation, it should be public without shareholders for that reason. Then there's nothing for us to argue further. Sorry to hear you don't support energy independence and efforts to be self reliant. I do not want to be beholden to someone else for my energy needs, whenever possible, most especially shareholders of a for profit corporation. > How exactly? Every industry is like this. Identifying a bug in a system isn't an argument for that bug to persist.
    - realusername 8y ago
      I don't really get this libertarian-like argument (no idea if you are libertarian or not, it just sounds like what I would hear from them). You are relying on the society for everything. Do you also make your own car? build your own roads? Go to harvest coffee beans to make your own coffee? Do you get water from the city or from your own means? And what about petrol and gas? > Identifying a bug in a system isn't an argument for that bug to persist. It's not a bug, concentration makes economy of scale possible, that's why everything is like this. Spread-out cities have traffic issues, small factories create more expensive products, small farms struggle to negotiate selling prices, small shops cannot afford to buy in bulk... Concentration is what makes everything cheaper.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        I can choose who I buy my car from. I have governance over politicians who manage my roads through voting and the political process. I can pick where I buy my coffee from. With rooftop solar, I can pick clean energy over the natural gas fired generation my city picked for local residents instead of the slightly more expensive clean nuclear the local utility was previously providing (Illinois allows local government to aggregate citizens into a bundle and obtain power from an independent generator, and they typically only care about cost, not externalities). I agree with you that concentration and scale does drive down costs; but it's myopic to look at only the raw cost alone (similar to how we don't price carbon into fossil generation costs). We subsidize food production in the US. Why? National security of our food supply, not being behold to other countries for our food. We should never be enabling the creation of monopolies (to your point about the necessity of centralization), but the distribution of power with citizens. In scenarios where centralization is unavoidable, rigorous governance must be implemented (which does not occur with for profit natural monopolies).
  - natmaka 8y ago
    "Whenever something is wrong, something is too big." This is superbly explained in Leopold Kohr's book titled "The Breakdown of Nations". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy
jMyles 8y ago
I think decentralized energy production is a great idea. I have six solar panels on the roof of my bus and they provide all the power I need. I realize that's not as effective in an urban environment, but I much prefer small batches to huge grids. Small, resilient, independent, diverse sources of energy are more robust against environmental changes, state violence, and monopolies-at-a-distance. Additionally, the direct costs of centralization in the form of transmission loss and voltage conversion are non-trivial.
yonaguska 8y ago
Power as electricity has an inherent high physical cost of transportation, you spend power to transport it. A solar panel is going to generate just as much power by itself as it would among a farm of solar panels, isolating for location and access to sunlight. I'm not sure how enforcing centralization in this case would be beneficial.
- realusername 8y ago
  Just the cost of installation, maintenance & the necessary batteries for solar make that cheaper in a farm with scale.
- sigstoat 8y ago
  maybe the panel does, but that doesn't much matter unless you're happy to make use of variable low voltage DC right there on the spot. it has to run through an inverter, and likely be stepped up, to go anywhere else. and both of those things will tend to be higher efficiency when you've got more panels in the same place.
  - brianobush 8y ago
    Micro-inverters are getting quite cheap now, each of my 20 solar panels have one. Out comes 120 volts, but still variable amperage.
toyg 8y ago
> it worked for every industry ... says the guy commenting on a massively-distributed network that is the poster child for decentralized access to “industry”.

toomuchtodo 8y ago

Centralization creates transmission losses and enables control over the resource by an entity you might not have input into. My utility can’t do anything about the power I generate with the solar on my roof. Your local community has very little input over for profit generators (versus shareholders).

realusername 8y ago
> My utility can’t do anything about the power I generate with the solar on my roof. Your local community has very little input over for profit generators (versus shareholders). That's looks more like a problem than anything positive, electricity grid planning is at a country level, not a local one. And personally I don't believe on private electricity generation, it should be public without shareholders for that reason. > Centralization creates transmission losses and enables control over the resource by an entity you might not have input into. How exactly? Every industry is like this. Factories came bigger and bigger, farms got bigger, trucks got bigger, cities became more dense, that's just economy of scale. Renewables are not immune to that, it's far cheaper to create a solar grid than spreading them randomly.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  > And personally I don't believe on private electricity generation, it should be public without shareholders for that reason. Then there's nothing for us to argue further. Sorry to hear you don't support energy independence and efforts to be self reliant. I do not want to be beholden to someone else for my energy needs, whenever possible, most especially shareholders of a for profit corporation. > How exactly? Every industry is like this. Identifying a bug in a system isn't an argument for that bug to persist.
  - realusername 8y ago
    I don't really get this libertarian-like argument (no idea if you are libertarian or not, it just sounds like what I would hear from them). You are relying on the society for everything. Do you also make your own car? build your own roads? Go to harvest coffee beans to make your own coffee? Do you get water from the city or from your own means? And what about petrol and gas? > Identifying a bug in a system isn't an argument for that bug to persist. It's not a bug, concentration makes economy of scale possible, that's why everything is like this. Spread-out cities have traffic issues, small factories create more expensive products, small farms struggle to negotiate selling prices, small shops cannot afford to buy in bulk... Concentration is what makes everything cheaper.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      I can choose who I buy my car from. I have governance over politicians who manage my roads through voting and the political process. I can pick where I buy my coffee from. With rooftop solar, I can pick clean energy over the natural gas fired generation my city picked for local residents instead of the slightly more expensive clean nuclear the local utility was previously providing (Illinois allows local government to aggregate citizens into a bundle and obtain power from an independent generator, and they typically only care about cost, not externalities). I agree with you that concentration and scale does drive down costs; but it's myopic to look at only the raw cost alone (similar to how we don't price carbon into fossil generation costs). We subsidize food production in the US. Why? National security of our food supply, not being behold to other countries for our food. We should never be enabling the creation of monopolies (to your point about the necessity of centralization), but the distribution of power with citizens. In scenarios where centralization is unavoidable, rigorous governance must be implemented (which does not occur with for profit natural monopolies).
- natmaka 8y ago
  "Whenever something is wrong, something is too big." This is superbly explained in Leopold Kohr's book titled "The Breakdown of Nations". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy

jMyles 8y ago

I think decentralized energy production is a great idea. I have six solar panels on the roof of my bus and they provide all the power I need. I realize that's not as effective in an urban environment, but I much prefer small batches to huge grids. Small, resilient, independent, diverse sources of energy are more robust against environmental changes, state violence, and monopolies-at-a-distance. Additionally, the direct costs of centralization in the form of transmission loss and voltage conversion are non-trivial.

yonaguska 8y ago

Power as electricity has an inherent high physical cost of transportation, you spend power to transport it. A solar panel is going to generate just as much power by itself as it would among a farm of solar panels, isolating for location and access to sunlight. I'm not sure how enforcing centralization in this case would be beneficial.

realusername 8y ago
Just the cost of installation, maintenance & the necessary batteries for solar make that cheaper in a farm with scale.
sigstoat 8y ago
maybe the panel does, but that doesn't much matter unless you're happy to make use of variable low voltage DC right there on the spot. it has to run through an inverter, and likely be stepped up, to go anywhere else. and both of those things will tend to be higher efficiency when you've got more panels in the same place.
- brianobush 8y ago
  Micro-inverters are getting quite cheap now, each of my 20 solar panels have one. Out comes 120 volts, but still variable amperage.

toyg 8y ago

> it worked for every industry ... says the guy commenting on a massively-distributed network that is the poster child for decentralized access to “industry”.