[Work in progress]
Imagine a city where power come from the people, from every corner of the street, from every home. Energy and electricity is no longer generated from huge centralised power stations, but from every cluster or even individual homes.
Distributed energy generation forms a free market where power is reliable, efficient, yet sustainable. Power will come from the masses.
Current Power Generation System
While current power supply system can meet the present demand, there may be several inherent weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the current system. The current power grid only allow power from one of the few large scale power stations to flow to end users, sometimes located at great distance, resulting in large transmission losses.
The current power grid cannot integrate alternative energy sources such as solar photovoltaic, urban wind turbine, etc, which must be harnessed from distributed locations.
Furthermore, the centralised model of the power supply may result in our power supply system to be very vulnerable to disruption, or even terrorist attacks. The failure of one of the large power stations can easily bring a fraction of the nation into power shortage, possibly causing great economic damages.
Distributed energy resources (DER) technologies
Distributed energy resources (DER) technologies consist primarily of energy generation and storage systems placed at or near the point of use. Distributed energy encompasses a range of technologies including fuel cells, microturbines, reciprocating engines, load reduction, and other energy management technologies.
DER also involves power electronic interfaces, as well as communications and control devices for efficient dispatch and operation of single generating units, multiple system packages, and aggregated blocks of power.
The primary fuel for many distributed generation systems is natural gas, but hydrogen may well play an important role in the future. Renewable energy technologies—such as solar electricity, biomass power, and wind turbines are also popular.
Videos on Distributed Generation
