
Renewable power is good; more is not always better - martincmartin
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21678955-renewable-power-good-more-renewable-power-not-always-better-when-wind-blows
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briantakita
Distributed power generation would reduce transmission power loss & make the
grid more robust; similar to distributed computing or the internet.

Distributed power generation would also create more community autonomy.
Currently, there are large middlemen extracting profit from the users &
altering local ecosystems; where the decision makers are not part of the
ecological feedback loop.

Technologies like biogas use compost & manure to create methane. Biogas
reactors are inexpensive, can be built DIY, & scale small to large. Europe has
adopted biogas & has several large reactors. [http://european-
biogas.eu/](http://european-biogas.eu/). The compost can be used to create
soil health in the local area. Compost can be collected using bikes in local
neighborhoods.

Here's a coop called pedal people.
[https://www.pedalpeople.coop/](https://www.pedalpeople.coop/)

Communities becoming self-reliant with their energy production would increase
neighborhood autonomy, keep money inside of the community, & would increase
awareness what is thrown away.

Another underutilized resource is human poop. Millions of tons of nutrients &
fuel are poured into the oceans as toxic sludge. Rather than devastate
environments, we could utilize this resource to power our cities & heal our
soil.

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nl
_Better energy storage would help, too. Hydro-electric power stations have
been used to store energy for decades. But there is not always an uphill
reservoir handy, and other ways of storing energy, such as lithium-ion
batteries, are expensive. More promising, probably, is automatic demand
reduction. Smart meters can turn down household freezers and air-conditioning
units briefly when power is in short supply and then power them up again,
thereby shifting demand. Sia Partners, a consultancy, estimates that European
countries could cut peak demand by 9% with such methods._

This is what I'd bet on.

Re-flow batteries are cost effective for many application and available now,
and combined with companies like Tesla pushing the cost of lithium-ion and
other technologies down it is pretty clear it will only get cheaper.

Batteries and smart meters also de-centralize power generation. This is
important because it cuts the costs associated with transmission.

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oska
This article makes quite an attack on Germany's Energiewende (energy
transition) and repeats a number of myths.

Here is a link that sets out to debunk some of those myths in a fairly
rigorous manner:

[http://www.energypost.eu/energiewende-dark-
side/](http://www.energypost.eu/energiewende-dark-side/)

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ZeroGravitas
What a strange _tone_ that article had.

I'm still trying to work out the headline, where the strange tone starts. More
wind power in Germany is bad because.... German miners will protest at the
closure of coal plants? Because Germany only has very limited carbon tax?
Surely a carbon tax would lead to... more renewable energy.

