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5 Barriers to and Solutions for Community Renewable Energy

Community renewable energy has significant political and economic benefits, but is often hindered by five major barriers. Watch this vividly illustrated presentation to learn how communities can overcome the barriers and advance more local renewable energy.

ILSR Senior Researcher John Farrell gave this presentation as part of a Sustainable Economies Law Center webinar on April 30, 2013.

You can also download or view just the slide show.

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"The amount of solar energy that hits our atmosphere has been well established at 174 petawatts (1.740 × 10^17 watts), plus or minus 3.5 percent. Out of this total solar flux, approximately half reaches the Earth’s surface. Since humanity currently consumes about 16 terawatts annually (going by 2008 numbers), there’s over five thousand times more solar energy falling on the planet’s surface than we use in a year. Once again, it’s not an issue of scarcity, it’s an issue of accessibility."

Abundance by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

What's particularly interesting is that capturing all the energy we need from the sun would only take less than 1% of the available land on earth. The Fossil apologists claim that this would cost an inordinate amount but the drastic drop in costs of solar are literally transforming that equation before our eyes.

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Today, we are witnessing the convergence of a new communications media and energy regime—a Third Industrial Revolution. Businesses across widely divergent fields—clean energies, green construction, telecommunications, micro-generation, distributed grid IT, plug-in electric and fuel cell transport, sustainable chemistry, nanotechnology, zero-carbon logistics and supply-chain management, and so on—are developing an array of new technologies, products, and services.

Jeremy Rifkin

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Since the typical car is parked about 96 percent of the time, it can be plugged back into the interactive electricity network to provide premium power back to the grid. An all-electric and hydrogen fuel cell fleet powered by green energy has four times the electricity storage capacity of the existing national power grid in the United States. If just 25 percent of the vehicles were to sell energy back to the grid—when the price of electricity is right—it would replace every conventional, centralized power plant in the country.

The Third Industrial Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin

Actually rather astounding. Imagine the electricity in your home goes down but you keep right on surfing the web because your car in the garage has kicked on its battery until the juice is restored. 

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Children have access to the internet almost from birth now

Dr. Richard Graham

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NRG Solar, which has mostly focused on investing in large solar power plants, has designed a solar electric system with energy storage for the residential market. The company plans to show the system at a conference in Southern California later this month. The design makes use of solar panels to create [...]

Natural gas line plus Solar will make the utility electric line obsolete. With gas being pumped into our homes and businesses for heating and base load power if needed and solar during the day and increasingly as prices fall, charging up batteries for back up. Our buildings will become more and more self sufficient.

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[thedistributedgeneration]

Brave New World

We are going through the the most profound and rapid fire period of change in human history. The constant declines in prices of information technology is leading to an explosion of innovation and taking over every facet of human life. This is more than a business story, an economic one, or one for techies and nerds. It is the most profound change in our history. Many people focus on the web and silicon valley start-ups changing our world, or the smartphones in our pockets. But there is a deeper change going on, one of the spreading, the democratization of power laterally ever more locally. The communities on the forefront of these changes are benefiting tremendously while others are at danger of being left behind. The impact is profound, a generation of young people will grow up in a world that looks very little like the one we've had since the Industrial Revolution. They will be The Distributed Generation.