Cunning Plan Number One

Letter to the Mayor


Like many services, including government, electricity has become more and more centralised over the years. Not unreasonable, considering the considerable cost of generation over those years.

However, centralization, like in government, has its drawbacks. Control, cost and even relevance are issues that often cannot be influenced from a local level. One answer can be to decentralize, sometimes in power generation, and sometimes in government.


One example of a successful model built on the idea of a decentralized resource is the Internet. Built on an interconnected, neural net design, it is called “The Web” because of its very structure. It’s DNA. Designed on a core of network redundancy, there are so many pathways between two points that it can survive considerable deterioration without loss of service. That is the advantage of decentralization.

Power To The People

Most buildings as we know them today consume energy. They rely on that energy being supplied from a centralized supplier, who generates it at a remote location.

What if there were houses, buildings, even whole cities who could produce their own electricity from wind or solar?

Instead of large centralized power stations and overhead power lines transecting the landscape, the buildings themselves become virtual power plants that make electricity from the sun and the wind. Energy-producing buildings form networks, instead of being totally dependent on a central power source.

Renewable energy is naturally decentralized. The sun and the wind are available everywhere.

Great! A power turbine in every street!

When we talk about wind generation, we think of those monstrous turbines, relegated to hills and paddocks far away from our view. While to many people wind turbines may have a regal beauty, to others they are an eyesore. They also need to be in those hills and paddocks, to get the unimpaired wind to drive them.

Another downside to these turbines is cost. They are spectacularly expensive to design, build and construct. Once built, these turbines are then very expensive to connect to the grid. Running that fresh renewable electricity from the back of beyond to where it is needed is not a cheap undertaking.

One Cunning Plan Coming Up

I would like to suggest an alternative; Vertical axis wind turbines. Rather than the traditional turbines, where the horizontal axis turbine needs to turn into the wind to operate, the VAWT can catch wind from any direction. VAWT turbines are also much smaller, and considerably cheaper to build and install, and they are designed to work within the city limits.

New technology has taken solar power from the hot tap to the light switch, and wind generators from the farm to the city.

There are various VAWTs being designed for the urban landscape. Even better, for the price of a single giant turbine, dozens of VAWTs can be installed all over the city.

Aesthetics

When cell-phone coverage took off in New Zealand, public acceptance of cell towers lagged well behind. As a result, towers were disguised and decorated to lessen the visual impact. When public resistance evolved into acceptance and apathy, cell repeaters started to appear as subtle bulges on top of street lamp poles.

I would like to avoid the aesthetic challenge of installing new poles for wind turbines, and trying to integrate them into the landscape. In the CBD, turbines can be mounted on high and low-rise rooftops to harness the omni-directional winds that whip around these buildings, while in the suburbs, I envisage hundreds of VAW Turbines, mounted high on street lamp poles. The poles are already there. The wiring access is already there. All that is left is to retrofit the turbine onto the post above the lamp assembly, relative to the weight-bearing properties of the post.

Let the wind of change help to power our city into the future.

Let us take the first, tentative steps towards that future, by encouraging businesses and citizens to generate their own renewable electricity, and to feed their surpluses into the established centralized network.

While we are planning a new Christchurch, lets try to include a little future-proofing while we are at it. Put your council at the leading edge of change, by encouraging each department to lead by example. As Mayor, you can also encourage your engineers to find the solutions in this proposal, rather than the obstacles.

While as a city we will never become completely independent from centralized power generation, by reducing our absolute reliance on centralized energy, a number of things can happen.

·        Money can be saved both individually and communally

·        Power shortages can be a thing of the past

·        Power supply companies can invest in improving the efficiency of current stations, rather than building new ones to keep up with growing demand

·        When parts of the grid go offline for any reason, those areas of the city can remain “empowered” with emergency minimums provided by their neighbourhood turbines

·        Whatever else befalls us during times of crisis, being able to switch on a light or to heat a meal keeps the despair at bay a little longer.