It's Time for Electric Democracy

Time For Electric Democracy

The time for electric democracy is now. The stakes could not be higher. The electric utility industry is in transition. The Central Station Era of the electric utility system is in a long and slow fade due to evolving technology that shifts the economies of scale. That brings forth an opportunity which we must take advantage of. 

So, argues founding our board member, George Crocker, in his new vision of an energy management system that provides a system-wide alternative to the utilities’ familiar central-station paradigm. His 4-page infographic essay Electric Democracy: Profitable Solutions To Environmental Problems And The Affordability Crisis updates and refines themes explored in his 2024 book About Power: How to Democratize Electricity Now.

In addition, Empower Hour out of Boulder invited George Crocker to be part of their program on July 21st for an hour-long interview on the same topic. 

What is the big news? Renewable energy is now dispatchable!

It's only been very recently that we've had the utility scale battery systems which enable renewable energy to be dispatchable. This includes iron oxide batteries and sodium ion batteries. This new utility scale storage capacity is relatively inexpensive and relatively benign from an environmental perspective as compared to digging up lithium all over the place. When we have dispatchable renewable energy that is also modular in that you can size it pretty much however you want to size it. 

We also have a breakthrough on cost. In the olden days of the early though mid 20th century, each unit of energy became cheaper as the power plants got bigger. Energy is now cheaper as you make more renewable power devices. The more solar panels you make, the cheaper they become. The modern renewable technologies have entirely different economies of scale. Their components become cheaper and cheaper as more of them get mass-produced in factories. Photovoltaic solar panels today cost about 10% of what they did in the 1980s in constant dollar terms. 

In the central-station model the vast majority of all electricity flows through 3 main steps: 1) large thermal power plant generation; 2) long distance transmission to substations along high-voltage lines; 3) then the load-serving substation steps down the voltage of the electricity so that it can be delivered through the distribution grid to all points of consumption.

With new rules to go along with new technology, the grid could be more resilient and efficient, lowering costs and overcoming the above limitations.

To provide a contrast, here are the four electric democracy differentiators that Crocker lays out:

1)     Investment and improvements in energy efficiency to significantly reduce supply-side load or demand.

2)     Development of opportunities to deploy roof-top solar on residential and business structures with adequate solar exposure.

3)   Strategically sizing and siting community-owned solar gardens to become the primary source of domestic and commercial electricity. 

4)  Strategically sizing and siting iron oxide batteries in a similar manner so that the energy from renewable power can be stored and then dispatched when needed.

That’s it.  Presto!  Electric Democracy! 

Substation Capacity

In sum, the key is strategically sizing and siting both new renewable power and battery storage to fit on the low-voltage side of each substation. By staying on the low voltage side of the distribution grid and substations and within community or neighborhood footprints, we stand to save a massive amount of time and expense by not having to build new high-voltage transmission lines. 

So, this whole new modern system of electric democracy becomes a matter of matching an amount of capacity with specific loads. We can now have systems that have the generation that is strategically sized and located close to the load that it's serving. Finding out the capacity of those substations will give us an idea as to how much renewable energy could be deployed within the footprint of that substation and thereby how much storage capacity would be needed to service the load within the footprint of that substation.

What is the load duration curve?

 While it sounds like a complex term, the load duration curve tells us the rate in which society or how a community is using electricity on a daily basis. It is low in the early morning hours with everybody snoozing away. Then as people wake up and get active, more power gets consumed. There is often a little dip in the noontime era followed by a peak demand time in the late afternoon. And then it drops down again as people settle in for the night. How is this relevant to dispatchable modular renewable energy? It means we have the ability for that generation to follow that load duration curve through the day, thanks to the storage capacity that these modern battery technologies now make available. That is a totally new thing for renewable energy to be able to do.

At any point during the day or night, whatever the load is coming from the people who are consuming that power, that load can be matched by the renewable energy coming in from afar over the high voltage system.

The renewable power that isn't used by the consumers can fill up these batteries, to be used later when the sun's not shining or the wind's not blowing. The batteries would be filling in the power requirements for the consumers of that substation, so every substation can be fitted uniquely to its to match the load that substation experiences.

So, what are we waiting for? What’s the hold up? Outdated rules have not caught up with Technology 

You’d think common sense would win out, but while our energy technology has evolved drastically, the overall rules governing the system have not. 

The regulatory structure, statutes and rules that govern electric utility management, originated in the early 20th century when economies of scale drove power plants to become larger. Each unit of energy generation capacity got cheaper as power plants got bigger. That also required countless miles of transmission lines to deliver electricity from distant sources to the population centers. The huge capital formations required to build and operate this central station power plant model. That locked in place then the regulated monopoly business model for electric utilities, which evolved from the robber baron era of railroads and steel mills. These “natural” monopolies, as we now know them, operate in their respective territories, and the whole construct is a human artifact, as natural as the now banned food dye FD&C Red No. 3. 

To quote George from the Empower Hour interview:

“Well, the problem is, is that we're still stuck in a regulatory framework in which everybody has to purchase from the central station machines. And so we're caught in a situation in which the technologies want to favor that dispersed and distributed pattern. The entrenched system wants to centralize it. So, we're faced with electric utility monopolies owning the generation that comes from renewable energy and making their renewable projects sort of mimic the central station machines so that they continue to have the power flowing from the power plant through the expensive transmission systems and substations one way to the load center. The fact that we have dispatchable modular renewable energy can change that.”

The statutory and regulatory framework that enabled the electric utility industry to grow and prosper during the Central Station Era are still firmly entrenched today. Through regulatory capture, and fleets of lobbyists, they are fighting to ensure that the ownership structures of the central-station model remain intact as far into the future as they can hold on. 

Here is another quote from George in the same interview: 

“So again, these rules, these statutes and the rules that govern how electric utility services get delivered were devised and enacted in order to capture the economies of scale of the Central Station era. That era is over. It is time to rewrite in their entirety the rules and statutes that govern how electric utility services get delivered. That's a political problem. That means that enough people are going to have to figure this out to elect enough politicians to change the law…This is not a technology problem. It's a human problem. Totally and completely a human problem… The barrier is the monopoly system and the whole edifice that society has built to protect the conventional central station system.”

In his book About Power, Crocker explains how the rules of the old system governing electric utility management make utilities inclined to centralize new solar power in a way that mimics the central station power plants. Thus, they continue to require high voltage transmission lines, adding expense and time delay.  

That’s unfortunate, because trying to make solar fit in the central station model forfeits the key benefit of solar technology which is that it is entirely modular and adaptable to almost anyplace. 

Do we need all these new High Voltage Transmission Lines?

The loudest voices in the room keep saying that we need all of this new transmission, that it’s what is needed to get all of this renewable energy to market. We do need a huge number of new high voltage transmission lines if the assumption is to follow the conventional central station model. That is if we want to make new renewable energy mimic the central station energy model with remote wind farms and remote solar farms way out in the countryside hooked to load centers with high voltage transmission. But at this point, it is much better to take advantage of the versatility of the modern technologies to be located close to the load, in other words, within the footprint of a substation hooked up to the load serving substation and have it backed up with a battery system or maybe a hydrogen system from an electrolysis and a hydrogen generator. If the energy can be produced here locally then this remote generation simply becomes a backup of reliability factor for times when there happen to be some excess load or some glitch within the local system. There's also a resilience argument to devising a whole system where we're no longer dependent on very large remote facilities connected with vulnerable high voltage transmission systems. In sum, we do not need a huge number of new transmission high voltage transmission unless the objective is to reinforce the monopoly business model.

How should the rules of the system change in terms of utility ownership structures to accommodate this Electric Democracy vision of generation and storage capacity?

Community Power supports ensuring community ownership of energy assets, whether through municipal governments, co-ops or other types of entities that are accountable to community needs. 

This would involve a wide variety of utility ownership structures: 

1. The owners of the distributed generation and storage capacity should be able to sell their electricity to the power company at a rate a bit below the retail rate. 
2. Then the power company would continue to serve its retail consumers as usual, at least at first.
3. The existing power company would then serve as back-up for reliability purposes and still serve larger industrial and commercial loads.

A transformation of our energy system will occur one way or another. The question is whether the management of facilities that provide society with electric utility services will continue to follow the monopoly model developed to serve the Central Station Era, or if instead, society will take advantage of the invitation that modern technologies offer for electric democracy.   

The Importance of Organizing: 

If we have the people, then organized people can beat organized money every time if the people are organized. In order to get organized, we have to get educated about energy and to learn what's possible in terms of how electric utility services get delivered. And then once we get some sort of a basic understanding of what's possible or what could be done, then it's a matter of sharing with our neighbors. It's a matter of organizing.

To quote George again from the Empower Hour interview:

“And the challenge is for enough of us to figure out how to engage societal decision making enough to make the statutory and regulatory changes that allow economic democracy, electric democracy, to start to take hold. And in order to get to the economic democracy part of it, there's a whole lot of educating and organizing that needs to go on, and that's our challenge.”

The politics to implement such a system would ordinarily be daunting. But these are not ordinary times.  

The case for top-to-bottom reform for a Clean Local Equitable Affordable Resilient (CLEAR) energy future will provide a positive message that many looking to provide leadership are seeking to articulate.

Let’s develop energy neighborhoods, and electric democracy for all.