Alternative & Renewable Energy Blog

Historic unemployment – historic in my forty-two year lifetime, for sure – has hit the U.S.: 9.4% as of this month, the worst it's been since David Bowie's popular Let's Dance album was released in 1983.

Connected with this statistic, comes the fact that the auto industry, once a key factor for producing, in volume, the kind of high-paying jobs that help the global economy recover from its normal, cyclical downturns, will not be playing its normal recovery role this time around.

So what will fill the void of those lost auto industry jobs, in helping us get back to a "new normal" of global economic stability?

Image at right and next two images courtesy Wikipedia. -->

Replacing those forever-lost Detroit jobs with newer and longer-lasting "Green Jobs", or jobs connected to the production of clean, renewable energy, has been one of the solutions proposed by many leaders in both the U.S. and from around the globe.

But it's difficult to replace a hundred-year-old, tried-and-true "top-down" North American model of energy production, with a newer model utilizing a "thousand points of light", distributed-producer approach. This I discovered while viewing a November 2008 CBC-TV documentary entitled The Gospel of Green, available on the CBC's web site. Click here to go there.

The CBC's Fifth Estate journalists focused on the work of Dr. Hermann Scheer, a German parliamentarian who was successful in getting his fellow citizens of the Federal Republic to adopt laws requiring regional energy providers – equivalent to our local utility companies here in the U.S. and Canada - to buy back electrical energy from small producers, like independent family farmers.

As a result of these laws, already in effect for a number of years in Germany, farmers used to raising - for usually small margins - livestock like pigs and cows, are now processing otherwise wasted – and greenhouse-gas contributing - organic waste material, turning it into biogas, and running turbines for electricity production and sale back to the local grid. On the same farms, photovoltaic cells – manufactured at a newly-built facility in high-unemployment former East Germany – are used to boost even further the energy output of the re-tooled farming facilities.

Unfortunately, as the documentary points out, when the equivalent small family farmer – working on a farm in Ontario – tries to replicate success seen in Germany, he runs into a number of obstacles – like the cost of making an uplink to the local grid – and his long term success, as a profitable, small and independent electrical producer, is in question. Much of this farmer's problems have to do with the mentality of the regional authority responsible for nuclear, coal, and "traditional" energy production, a mentality not really viewing the small producer as adding much value, and more of a headache than an answer moving into the future.

<-- Dr. Hermann Scheer, author of Energy Autonomy (2007), The Solar Economy (2002) and A Solar Manifesto (1994). Image courtesy citris-uc.org.

So what are your feelings about a thousand points of light, when it comes to selling energy back to the grid? Do you think incentives for your local utility are fine as-is? Will Dr. Hermann Scheer be making his pitch in your home town soon?

Not sure if he's traveled to my area yet, but I think a speech at our capitol in Albany, New York would get folks in the Empire State and elsewhere thinking a bit.

- Larry Kelley

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2008-2009/the_gospel_of_green

http://www.citris-uc.org/CDS-Feb16-2007