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Meet the Experts |
John J.B. Miller, Kerrville, Texas: Despite encouragement from environmental groups for alternative energy, tremendous resistance from municipalities still exists. When I tried to put up a wind turbine, the objections were that it could be noisy, unsightly, and lower property values. Ultimately the city came around to permitting them, but required that the proposed property site be at least an acre. Since my lot is less than that, I couldn't have one. So I went to solar panels, but these must have an "inverter" that converts the direct current generated by the panels (a wind turbine would be the same) into alternating current to be used in my house, with the excess fed back into the city's power grid. But to go solar I ran into the requirement that I carry a million dollars liability insurance, with the city's public utility board as named insured, to protect them against failure of my inverter, (which could conceivably affect their power grid, even though the inverter is certified by Underwriters Laboratories to have automatic cutoffs to prevent this type of power failure). Until these obstacles can be overcome, wind turbines and solar panels will remain an option only for those people living in rural areas. Kurt Yeager responds: It is indeed regrettable that so much potential technical progress in electricity today is being stifled by shortsighted bureaucratic self-interest intent on maintaining the status quo. Technical change, by its very nature, is disruptive to the status quo and most of the issues that were used to discourage Mr. Miller could have been positively dealt with through simple innovations rather than negative resistance. For example, it is worth noting that six states (California, Maryland, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington) have already prohibited additional insurance requirements for net-metered (i.e., small-scale) energy facilities. Five other states (Idaho, New Mexico, New York, Virginia, and Vermont) have limited the liability insurance requirements for such facilities. Furthermore, in Mr. Miller's own state, the Texas Public Utility Commission has rejected insurance requests for such systems but it apparently has no jurisdiction over municipalities in the state. Properly designed and installed small-scale photovoltaic systems present little cause for liability concerns. However, the interface standards and protocols that would facilitate the connection of such systems to the power grid continue to be resisted in many locations--to the detriment of air quality and energy efficiency. One exciting development that is being stymied as a result is DC (direct current) Microgrids. Such local power networks, when connected electronically to the main AC (alternating current) utility grid, would integrate a variety of distributed DC power sources, such as solar panels, without the need for expensive individual invention. These Microgrids would also serve to fundamentally improve local power reliability, reduce the cost of digital end-use appliances and computers -- thus eliminating the digital divide -- and enable much higher levels of customer choice in terms of the cost, quality, and sources of electricity. Up to Top |
