Becoming Sustainable: Item Five – Energy Resiliency – Part 1 

Today’s post is by regular contributor, Richard Jurin. Before his retirement, Richard led the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, where he launched a degree in Sustainability Studies.  His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE          

A key idea to develop a positive focus is what the best-case scenario looks like.  For many, that would be to develop a caring, sharing society where corruption and money do not dominate our lives, which of course is the current worse-case scenario we are currently living.  If we focus on the best-case scenario from a realistic perspective at this time, it can only really happen at the local level where transparency can be maintained through personal observations and interactions.  This brings the five items I espouse as within control of the local systems.  We can escape the paradigm of ‘lack’ that allows us to be controlled.  We can escape the trap of struggling to survive by taking control of our own lives, both individually, in families and collectively within local communities.  Visionaries like Rob Hopkins (Transition Towns) and the Findhorn Foundation have championed these ideas for many years.  I don’t just talk about transition, I visualize localized transformation.  Much as we like to blame the hierarchies and corporations, we are complicit in the state of the world we are living in.  When we accept the negative things we do, regardless of how they started, we can make the decision to change.    Radical responsibility for our sovereign selves and our actions and behaviors 

Item five in my essential list for resiliency and local sovereignty on the path to true sustainability is energy resiliency.  Anyone living in a developing country will know firsthand the vagaries of energy reliability.  In the developed world we take it for granted that the national level energy grids will remain reliable and consistent.  Often international in scope as electricity is transferred between neighboring countries, energy is a geo-political-corporate controlled business in which regional monopolization is a common outcome.  The seemingly robust electrical grid systems are prone to brownouts and occasional blackouts as parts of the system fail for a variety of reasons as the system ages.  The influx of large-scale ‘renewable’ systems (mainly wind fields and solar fields) offers options for moving away from fossil fuel dependency but their contribution to the total grid systems overall remains disturbingly low as financial considerations still dominate energy markets.  Nuclear power and ‘new’ technologies are, as always, only minor players in the energy economy and unlikely to change in any national grid system, despite good intentions to reduce energy derived global pollution problems.   

Local communities are literally at the mercy of fickle energy markets and the just as fickle grid systems.  The energy triangle for large scale energy policy decision-making, as we try to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, is based on security of supply, affordability, and that oft touted environmental sustainability.  As I have stated in my Item 3 discussion (New metrics), what we focus upon is where we place our intentions and action, which for energy policy inevitably always rests on the affordability leg of the triangle.  Security of supply is a close second with environmental sustainability a distant third as the other two legs dominate policy thinking.  There is no reason to believe this will change anytime soon.  Just like food production (item 4) is now best managed at the local level to establish healthy and nutritious food that in turn nourishes the soil that sustains such food, energy production is best managed at the local level.  

We need to stop thinking about large scale grid systems and begin thinking localized interactional energy systems that fit the environmental conditions for any specific region.  

The first step is to decide the scale at which the energy can be generated and utilized most effectively – large neighborhood to local regional; i.e. do you set up for 50 houses, 5000, or 50,000 houses?  All will depend on the local environmental attributes.  Next is the energy inventory for the most optimum options to the least.  Is wind, solar, or mini-hydro a viable option – what sources of energy capture are available?  For those close to a coast, can wave energy generation be an option, as it is in many Scottish coastal areas at this time.  For mini-hydro, is there a local river where small barrel generators can be placed, or can small-sluices be used to channel water through a series of mini-turbo generators.  While the challenges of funding such projects can seem daunting at first, making them a priority for local energy sovereignty can yield cheaper and innovative localized systems that will fit the three requirements of the energy triangle.  The key is a multiple portfolio energy generation system.  As the local system matures, if not already a part of the initial planning, newer technologies can be added that make every building a local generation system that contributes to the local system and can power local light industrial plants.  The key is not to let current thinking about the scale of energy generation limit local energy innovative thinking.  If this sounds like a lot of work, consider life with a disintegrating national grid system.

To be Continued …………………..

Richard can be contacted at: richardjurin@gmail.com