OPINION | JEREMY GORDON
Jeremy Gordon is an independent communication consultant with 18 years of experience in the international energy industry. His company Fluent in Energy supports partners of all kinds to communicate matters of clean energy and sustainable development.
An energy democracy or energy chaos?
Going off-grid used to be a lifestyle choice, but mismanagement of some power systems has put ordinary people in the hard position of needing that ‘soft energy path’ – just not as its original proponents imagined it
Illustration: Olexiy Kovynev Ha! My house has been powered by a car battery for 20 years!
NE OF THE MOST IMPACTFUL ideas in the energy business has been the ‘soft energy path’ advocated by many since it was first put forward by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute in the 1970s. It
envisages homes and businesses being so efficient with their energy
14 | July 2022 |
www.neimagazine.com
that they hardly use any at all. The power they still need would come from domestically-owned renewables like small hydro and rooftop solar supported by batteries. This is an attractive vision which many people say is not only possible, but actually preferable to the current large grid infrastructure and the associated fossil and nuclear power plants that the electricity system has historically relied on. In the 2020s, though, this trend has meant increasingly that those large electricity grids have become unreliable. For example, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) which serves 15 states in the central US, as well as part of the Canadian province of Manitoba. Looking at their dashboard recently, MISO operators realised that they only had 119GWe of firm generation capacity available, whereas summer peak demand was forecast to hit 124GWe. A potential deficit of 5GWe compared to the needs of 42 million people. Depending on how renewables perform and what is
possible to import from other grids, MISO might need to implement “temporary controlled outages to preserve the integrity of the bulk of the system,” said JT Smith, Executive Director of Market Operations at MISO. That means rolling blackouts for neighbourhoods during periods of the highest demand – summer days when power hungry air conditioning has to work hard. When margins are reduced in grids like MISO, the system becomes dangerously threadbare. Lives could even potentially be lost in these rolling blackout scenarios.
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