Turn Every Home into a Mini-Power Station; Greenpeace Urges Power System Reform
Posted on: Wednesday, 20 July 2005, 09:00 CDT
BRITAIN could become the leading nation in the fight against climate change if it turned homes and workplaces into mini-power stations, it was claimed yesterday.
Environment campaign group Greenpeace wants offices, factories and homes to have solar panels, small wind turbines and combined heat and power boilers, which generate electricity as well as providing heat and hot water.
The ideas come in a Greenpeace report, Decentralising Power: An Energy Revolution For the 21st Century.
It argues that a reform of the electricity system is urgently needed to end environmentally destructive wastage.
It says Britain's outdated electricity system is so inefficient that two-thirds of the potential energy in power station fuel is wasted before supplies reach home and workplace.
The huge loss of energy - enough to heat all the buildings and all the water in the UK - is due to power stations being far from the cities they supply.
Enormous volumes of potential energy are discarded via heat loss through power station chimneys and through transporting energy long distances through power lines.
The report warns that the power sector is the single greatest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions in the UK.
The solution is to generate electricity close to where it is needed, or to 'decentralise' it.
A decentralised energy system would see everyday buildings hosting devices such as solar panels, small wind turbines and combined heat and power boilers.
The electricity created would be used directly by the house or workplace, and the surplus would be fed into a local network.
The report claims that the combined contribution of these devices could be enormous.
If half the houses in the UK had combined heat and power boilers, it would generate as much electricity as current nuclear power plants, says Greenpeace. It would also save householders on average pounds 150 a year.
In addition to the power devices embedded in buildings, there would be a network of community scale generation plants close to the point of demand.
This could include district combined heat and power plants, generating power and also providing heating and cooling for nearby communities.
In the short term most of these would be gas fired, but capturing the heat would mean that the gas was being used far more efficiently than in large gas filled power stations
Source: Daily Post; Liverpool
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