The trend toward homes that get power from alternative energy, sources, starting from wind turbines and solar collection cells to hydrogen fuel cells and biomass gases, is one that needs to continue into the 21st century and beyond. We have great need of getting more energy independent, and not being forced to rely on the supplying of normal fuels from unsteady countries who are sometimes antagonistic to us and our interests.
But even beyond this factor, we as people need to get off the grid, and also stop having to be so dependent upon government-lobbying giant oil companies who, while they don’t seem to be really concerned in any secret conspiracy, however have a stranglehold on folk when it comes to heating their homes ( and if not thru oil, then heat usually supplied by grid-driven electricity, another stranglehold ).
As Remi Wilkinson, Senior researcher with Carbon Free, places it, necessarily, the growth of distributed generation will lead to the restructuring of the retail electricity market and the generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure. The power providers may have to diversify their business to make up for cash lost through household energy microgeneration.
She is talking about the conclusions by a grouping of UK analysts, herself included among them, who call themselves Carbon Free. Carbon Free has been studying the continually increasing trend toward alternative energy-using houses in Britain and the West. This trend is being driven by ever-more regime recommendation and often backing of alternative energy research and development, the climbing cost of oil and other normal fuels, concern about environmental degradation, and wants to be energy independent.
Carbon Free concludes that, assuming traditional energy costs stay at their current level or rise, microgeneration ( meeting all of one’s home’s energy needs by installing alternative power technology such as solar cells or turbines ) will become to home energy supply what the web became to home communications and information gathering, and ultimately this can have deep effects on the enterprises of the present energy supply companies.
Carbon Free’s analyses also show that energy companies themselves have jumped in on the game and try to leverage microgeneration to their own advantage for opening up new markets for themselves. Carbon Free cites the example of electricity firms ( in the United Kingdom ) reporting they are seriously researching and developing concepts for new geothermal energy facilities, as these companies see geothermal energy generation as a highly worthwhile wave of the future.
Another conclusion of Carbon Free is that solar power hot water heating technology is an effectual technology for reducing home water heating costs in the longer term, even though it is initially quite expensive to install. However , solar electricity is not yet cheap for companies, as they require too much in the way of specialised plumbing to implement solar power hot water heating.
Ultimately, Carbon Free tells us that installing turbines is an effective way of reducing home electricity costs, while also being more independent. Nonetheless again this is initially an especially costly thing to have installed, and firms would do well to begin slashing their costs on these devices or they could find themselves losing market share.
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