For the majority of human history, it was obvious that power should be generated as close to its use as possible. 50,000 years ago, say, if you wanted to cook something, you collected the closest combustible available, and cooked your food directly over the fire. 10,000 years ago, if you wanted to plow fields with your domestic ox, you minimized the loss of energy in the connection between the point-of-work and the generator. 4,000 years ago, you would site a mill directly by the river that powered it, or directly under a turbine driven by the wind. If you were in Los Angeles 100 years ago, and you wanted hot water, you put a solar water heater on the roof. If you want AC in your car in a hot desert, a solar panel on your roof makes it sustainable.
Plants and animals generate the energy they need internally, foraging for, then directly consuming, what they need. It’s a tighter coupling, of generator and consumer, than any engineer could hope to achieve.
Of course 50,000 years ago people also had imaginations, so they fantasized about harnessing the sun’s power, or water, or lightning, or combustion, in systems to serve groups of people. When surfeits of power and fuel were identified, people overcame the technical difficulties and put it to use. 50,000 years of applied engineering later, a sober assessment makes the benefit not so clear.
The more energy we have, the more damage we do, to ourselves and to our environment. We don’t need the energy we are using. There’s nothing wonderful about poisoning an ocean to transport oil; destroying a mountain and enslaving miners to get coal; damming rivers and flooding valleys to get dangerous temporary lakes whose generator intakes silt up in a few decades; poisoning entire countries with nuclear waste and accidents; allowing corporations and power-driven governments to sell us these fantasies; all to get power which allows us to drive around cities divided by highways, build and purchase mass-produce goods that distract us from each other and the world around us, modify our immediate climate in a manner that destroys the global climate, and wage war for the sake of profiteers who care nothing for everyday people. It seems that centralized power is a problem, both at its source, and its destination.
So, let’s think again about decentralized power. The mills along millraces that stick their waterwheels into free-running streams. The solar panels that lift rain water into water towers to give us water pressure. The solar water-heaters that make us comfortable, and the ground heat exchange systems that give us refrigeration and cooling. The digesters that give us cooking methane without dangerous gas lines.
There is nothing that requires an automobile: it harms our lives and eats our land. Of course, to make it possible not to use a car, we’d need to live lives without impossible deadlines and profit-margins, rapacious banks, corporations, and other institutions of modern life.
This argument is easy to support technically, but harder to support politically. Our institutions of great power need to be called to task by democracy. So let’s get organized. The decentralization of power generation is only possible if we achieve an equivalent distribution of political power.