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Walt Patterson proposes that we refocus so-called ‘energy’ activities to shift the balance, away from supply of fuels and electricity toward upgrading the user-technology and user-infrastructure – especially buildings – that deliver the services we desire. At the moment that viewpoint is not represented strongly by any party anywhere on the political spectrum in democratic society anywhere. If we stop taking traditional electricity for granted, if we begin to examine and question it, we may come to prefer innovative electricity.


Vasilis Kostakis/Pavlos Hatzopoulos: What have been the past failures that have led to the dominance and perpetuation of traditional energy systems?


Walt Patterson: The dominance and perpetuation of traditional energy systems has not been due to past ‘failures’ as such, except – crucially – the failure to take advantage of changing circumstances, technology, business arrangements and institutions, and the opportunities such changes offer. Even that has not been so much a ‘failure’ as a consequence of the existing power structure. Traditional energy systems are not just technological; they are social, including financial, institutional and political. Many powerful groups in society are doing very well with existing traditional energy systems. These groups have no desire to change. On the contrary – they actively oppose change, very effectively if quite understandably. That has major implications for most of the following questions.


If we are to seize opportunities now available, we must address the problem of so-called ‘legacy assets’, and the legacy mind-sets that go with them. Traditional energy systems are many and various, different and for different purposes, using ambient energy, technology and fuel as appropriate. We need to understand how these traditional energy systems fit into the political and social power structure: how they were established, how they are maintained, how they fend off challenges from innovation, who benefits from traditional and legacy arrangements and how their opposition to change may be overcome. Subsequent responses will return to this crucial theme.


V.K./P.H.: If energy, as you suggest, is a process involving technology and infrastructure, what would you see as the main political dividing lines in relation to how these technologies are used and for what purposes and how this infrastructure is built, managed, and controlled?


Walt Patterson: Be careful here. Energy use is a process – not ‘energy’ itself. Energy use in modern society usually involves technology and infrastructure. It may also involve fuel or electricity – or may not, for some physically simple applications such as comfort. We then have to ask: who provides the technology and infrastructure, on what basis? Who provides fuel, who provides electricity, on what basis? If I understand the question correctly, the ‘political dividing lines’ are those that address these questions and propose preferred answers. Those with differing political opinions and affiliations will propose differing answers – differing usually as to the roles of government and of private capital, business and industry, and the decision-making procedures for developments. Relevant political aspects include commercial laws and regulations; taxes, subsidies and other financial matters; standards; government procurement; and international agreements. One particularly important distinction is between central and decentralized decision-making. Political parties often differ on aspects of energy policy such as these.


However, I believe we have a more fundamental problem. I think the balance of activity, whether government or private, errs heavily on the side of providing fuels and electricity, to run seriously inadequate user-technology and infrastructure. To most people involved in energy, whether government or private, ‘infrastructure’ means pipelines and power lines, and other technology to produce and deliver fuel or electricity. Yet we have long known that much if not most of this fuel and electricity is wasted, in inadequate buildings, fittings, appliances, vehicles and other user-technology and infrastructure.


Accordingly, we need to refocus so-called ‘energy’ activities to shift the balance, away from supply of fuels and electricity toward upgrading the user-technology and user-infrastructure – especially buildings – that deliver the services we desire. At the moment that viewpoint is not represented strongly by any party anywhere on the political spectrum in democratic society anywhere, that I am aware of. Parties are on record as differing about the balance of supply technology, as for example about the possible role of nuclear power, coal-fired electricity generation or renewables. But no party is calling for the shift of focus we need, away from supplying fuel and toward upgrading energy performance. Indeed I’d be delighted if a major national political party anywhere decreed as a key feature of its energy policy an active and comprehensive programme to upgrade the government’s own facilities, especially its buildings and their contents. The US federal administration under President Obama, and the California state government, for instance, have launched such programmes. As yet, however, they do not figure prominently in any party manifesto I know of.


V.K./P.H.: What do you see as the main obstacles for the transition towards distributed energy networks?


Walt Patterson: The main obstacles, as noted above, are the legacy assets of existing centralized physical facilities and the legacy mindset of their owners and operators. Start by asking why networks of any configuration are necessary. In the case of natural gas, the gas emerges from the ground at a particular location. If you want to use it somewhere else, you need the network to carry the gas from the gasfield to the user. Electricity is different. You can generate electricity anywhere, in any quantity from minute to vast. [See my books Transforming Electricity and Keeping The Lights On for detailed commentary, including historical.]


If the traditional centralized electricity system were optimal, no one would be interested in decentralized electricity. But think about traditional electricity. As Keeping The Lights On, “It is based on large central-station generators, most of which operate either intermittently or at only partial load most of the time. The central-station generators that use fuel waste two-thirds of the fuel energy before it even leaves the power plant. The system necessitates long lines of network, in which line losses cost another significant fraction of the energy flowing. The configuration is inherently vulnerable to disruption, by mishap or malfeasance, over a wide area and almost instantaneously. It assumes that every load is essentially equivalent, requiring the same high quality of electricity. The system produces and delivers high-quality electricity as required by sensitive loads, much of which is then used for undemanding services such as heating and cooling. The generators are almost all thousands, more often millions of times larger than most of the loads on the system. Most of the loads are inherently intermittent or variable; but the system’s large fuel-based generators are inherently inflexible. The mismatch is so complete you’d think we planned it that way.


Nevertheless those of us fortunate enough to have electric light now rely on systems like this to keep the lights on. We cannot scrap them and start over. For every particular system in a particular location we now need a ‘road map’ of feasible changes, technical and political. Well-known obstacles include rules for access to networks; payment for use of networks; existing configurations of networks ill-suited for small-scale generation at low voltages and close to loads; and so on. Much work is long since under way to address these issues and remove these obstacles. But the process is frustratingly slow.”


V.K./P.H.: In a nutshell, how would a genuinely sustainable electricity system look like?


Walt Patterson: In a nutshell, genuinely sustainable electricity might be invisible. The closing pages of Keeping The Lights On put it like this:


“For a vision of sustainable electricity we can start, paradoxically, with a building. You buy it as an investment. It will contain a variety of active technologies, and entail maintenance and running costs; but focus here on the physical asset that is the structure of the building itself. We know that the better the structure the lower the maintenance and running costs. The physical infrastructure of the building converts and reorganizes energy, particularly in the form of heat, as an inherent part of the function of the building. You neither measure nor pay for the flows of heat into, out of and through the fabric of the building. They are simply part of the performance of the building as built infrastructure, designed, paid for and used accordingly. The structure itself delivers, among other things, energy services such as comfort, as and when you use the building. The energy service is not a commodity. You do not measure it or pay for it by the unit. The physical asset, the building, delivers the service continuously, as a function of infrastructure.


You therefore design and construct the building to take maximum advantage of natural ambient energy flows, including light, heat, and convection currents of air. Daylight reaches much of its interior. The building structure acts as a heat store, soaking up excess heat or releasing stored heat, to keep the interior at a comfortable temperature whatever the temperature outside. Air circulates throughout the building gently and continuously, because of its interior layout and the small temperature differences between various parts of the building. These principles underlie a rapidly growing number of modern buildings in many parts of the world, and, indeed, many very old buildings, constructed before electricity became an option, when builders made skilled and subtle practical use of the light, heat and air circulation naturally available.


The building itself provides much of the illumination and comfort required. Electricity has much less to do to augment these services. The interior illumination comes from high-efficiency lighting. You use compact fluorescent lamps or light-emitting diodes, LEDs, for all lights that are on more than briefly, or are in awkward locations where you might otherwise have to replace burned-out incandescents frequently. Well-designed fittings direct the light to where it is wanted, with minimum waste. In temperate and tropical climates, buildings appropriately designed and constructed can maintain comfortable interior temperatures with little or no assistance from electricity. If your building needs active air-conditioning, it is badly designed. If, however, your building is in a cold climate, with outdoor winter temperatures well below freezing, you provide additional interior warmth by microcogeneration or by heat pumps, already common for instance in Scandinavia. You equip the building with sensors that measure temperature, light levels, occupancy and other relevant information. Automatic controls adjust the comfort and illumination to the levels you desire.


Inside the building, electric motors deliver motive power. You choose motors of the appropriate size, not oversized as is otherwise common, with variable-speed drives to maximize efficiency over most of their operating range. You also choose appropriate sizes of equipment they drive. Youintegrate fans and pumps, for instance, into ducts and pipes laid out to minimize frictional and other losses. You can therefore choose smaller fans and pumps, and smaller motors to drive them. Improving system design, integrating and optimizing the performance of all components together, gives you higher reliability and lower environmental impact, while costing less.


Electronics are designed to optimize performance and minimize losses. They handle information, including communications, data-processing and entertainment. Digital networks link together telephones, faxes, computers, television, video, building controls and security systems, not only within your own building but across cities, countries and continents. Note, however, that the stand-by mode for electronic equipment, such as the red light that stays glowing on the television when you use the remote control to turn it off, is a surprisingly heavy user of electricity in modern society. If you are aiming for high reliability and low impact, you redesign standby modes to reduce this insidious drain on electricity. In any case, when you are not using them, you just turn things off completely.


The building itself, the lighting, the motors and electronics all contribute to the electricity services you want. But they still need electricity to run them. Aiming for high reliability and low impact, you generate much of this electricity in or near the place it is used, minimizing vulnerability to disruption. Your building may have a gas engine, Stirling engine, microturbine or fuel cell in the basement, fuelled by natural gas, possibly operating in cogeneration mode, delivering electricity, heat, hot water or steam as you require. If your building is on an industrial site needing a lot of heat or steam, your cogeneration plant may include both gas and steam turbines. If your building is, say, a supermarket needing heavy-duty refrigeration, you can use not cogeneration but trigeneration, delivering not only electricity and heat but also ice-water for chillers. Trigeneration can raise overall fuel efficiency yet higher.


You can also equip your building to utilize not only ambient heat and light but also innovative electricity. As well as, say, the gas-fired fuel cell in the basement, in the skin of the building you incorporate photovoltaic (PV) tiles and cladding. You include three sets of cabling from
the outset, one for telecoms, one for synchronized alternating current from the external network, and one for low-voltage direct current from your on-site fuel cell and photovoltaics. All computers and other electronics, the most sensitive loads in the building, require low-voltage DC. Traditional electronics need to include a heavy transformer ‘power pack’ to convert external AC to low-voltage DC, with accompanying heat, fan noise and losses. But if you operate them on your own low-voltage DC you can dispense with the power packs. Moreover, power electronics keeps the supply more stable and reliable than the electricity from the external network. Your high-performance lighting likewise operates on your own low-voltage DC. So long as the lights stay on, the computers and other equipment work, and the building remains convenient and comfortable, you may not even bother to measure the electricity flowing through your local DC system. You will measure and pay for the gas flowing into your fuel cell; but you may not measure the electricity coming out, nor that from your PV panels. You certainly will not pay for it by the unit. Instead, this unmeasured but functional electricity becomes analogous to the heat flowing through the fabric of the building. The electricity becomes part of the function of the infrastructure, part of the way the infrastructure delivers the energy services you desire.


We can now expand the vision of sustainable electricity. A wider network connects your high-performance building and other buildings on the system. It includes larger generators, notably large old hydro plants and modern microhydro units, as well as larger cogenerators, offshore wind plants and some generators in rural areas, such as village-scale biomass power plants. The wider network has some sections operating as synchronized AC. But it also includes many AC–DC–AC links that use power electronics to transfer electrical energy while blocking AC disturbances. The wider network is also heavily instrumented, and carries continuous real-time two-way information, not only about flows of electricity but also about flows of value through the network. The instrumentation keeps the network stable. It controls not only generators but also suitably flexible loads, also instrumented with embedded microprocessors and other controls. Instead of always increasing generation to follow load, the instrumentation may also reduce or disconnect flexible loads to follow generation, as appropriate. It also keeps track of network services, who is providing them and who is using them – who pays and is paid, and how much. Remote rural areas are not, however, connected to this network. They rely on self-contained local systems, that may include biomass power, wind power, photovoltaics and possibly batteries for storage, as well as appropriate system monitoring and control, also local.


If we stop taking traditional electricity for granted, if we begin to examine and question it, we may come to prefer innovative electricity. Changing the way we think about electricity will affect profoundly the decisions we take henceforth. Traditional electricity assumes centralized decisions. Innovative electricity does not. If many participants with many agendas make their own decisions, the effect may be untidy but dramatic.


If we get this right, if we overcome low expectations and a legacy mindset, our grandchildren may discover that sustainable electricity is invisible. No one measures electricity, buys it or even notices it. Infrastructure keeps the lights on.”


V.K./P.H.: What role can the modern ICTs play for a more sustainable mode of energy production and distribution?


Walt Patterson: See my previous answer. ICTs will play key roles both on individual premises and on the wider interconnected systems, both local and large-scale, for sensing, control, responses to changing circumstances, interaction between system components such as generators and loads, and – where necessary – measurement and attribution of costs and who pays them. This will be true not only for electricity systems but also for systems that distribute heat and/or cooling; and it will also be true for systems for natural gas, especially as they interlink and interact with local systems for electricity, heat and cooling.


V.K./P.H.: You argue about the significance of innovative decentralised technologies for optimising energy systems. Would their use also lead to the democratisation of energy as a process?


Walt Patterson: Again, remember we’re discussing energy use as a process, not ‘energy’. Yes, decentralized systems, by their nature, would entail decision-making, about buildings, user-technologies and infrastructure, much closer to and often by the actual users of local systems, either directly or by local government such as elected local councils. I interpret that to mean enhanced ‘democratization’ of decision-making about energy use, and indeed – at least to some extent – about supply of fuels and electricity.


V.K./P.H.: Is the future of sustainable energy a market-based one?


Walt Patterson: Markets, including commodity markets, will certainly play a role in sustainable energy. But remember that we can invoke a variety of different markets – not only markets for short-term batch transactions in commodity fuels, but also markets for contracts, for investments and for services – longer-term business relationships entered into by agreement in a market framework of appropriate laws and regulations. Such longer-term markets will play a role likely to be much more important over time, as the sustainability of energy business increases.


V.K./P.H.: As we know you have strong bonds with Greece and thus a good view about the Greek reality in the energy world. If you were asked to conduct a short action plan for the next 5 years, what would you suggest?


Walt Patterson: I would, however, make one suggestion: that the new government carry out, as a matter of priority and with vigorous publicity, an energy audit of its own facilities, especially the buildings it owns or leases and uses, all over the country. If it then launches a programme to upgrade its own facilities, it will set an important example not only for private landlords and industry in Greece but for other countries around the world.


My paper ‘Managing Energy Wrong‘ puts the case like this: “Governments all over the world, national, regional and local, use energy in their own facilities, especially buildings. In the UK, for example, the national government is directly or indirectly responsible for tens of thousands of buildings across the country. Within the past two years reports from the UK Sustainable Development Commission and the National Audit Office have declared not only that the energy performance of the UK government’s buildings is unsatisfactory but that since the year 2000 it has deteriorated. The conclusion should be obvious. Governments such as that of the UK should stop telling the rest of us what to do, and show us instead. Governments should launch programmes to upgrade their own facilities, their own energy service infrastructure,to much higher standards – better insulation, better doors and windows, better lighting, better controls, better appliances and electronics, probably even complete local systems using on-site generation of electricity, heat and cooling.


Such government programmes could create the conditions for the new form of energy business we need. They would make managing energy explicitly a matter of investment in infrastructure, especially energy service infrastructure, as it must be. Government upgrade programmes, with their scale, variety and continuity, would be a launching pad, to persuade major energy players to create effective and profitable energy service companies to bid for and carry out the work. They would create skilled jobs everywhere. They would also offer the private sector a vivid example of the benefits of such investment. Bulk orders for upgrades would bring down the unit cost of innovative materials and technologies. And of course, properly managed, government upgrade programmes would save all us taxpayers money. Imagine what such an approach could accomplish all over the world, enhancing climate and energy security while bringing economic advantages to countries, companies and citizens alike.


These ideas are neither new nor radical. Many articulate advocates in many countries have advanced them before, almost since the advent of energy policy nearly four decades ago. Perhaps, at last, their time has come.

Special issue: p2p energy
Tags: distributed-energy, energy, Greece, Walt Patterson

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