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10 11 MICROPOWER: THE NEXT ELECTRICAL ERA COMING FULL CIRCUIT tion, as consumers become increasingly able to choose their power suppliers, marketers will have no option but to give customers what they want, and evidence to date suggests they want reliable electricity from clean sources. From the San Francisco Bay Area to Bangladesh, venture capital and microcredit models are being used to finance micropower, helping “startup” companies survive their revenue-losing early years and enabling potential customers to surmount the high first cost of the new technologies.13 The most important determinant of how far and how fast such systems emerge may be less technical, regulatory, or financial than institutional. Micropower may represent what management experts call a disruptive technology, one whose potential is greatly underestimated at first but whose even- tual popularity topples unprepared companies and takes analysts by surprise. By developing the appropriate micro- power “software”—the institutional base of support—busi- nesses, government, and civil society can prepare for such change, and facilitate broader public understanding, accep- tance, and use of the new technologies.14 It is difficult to gauge how much electricity may come from micropower in 10, 25, or 50 years’ time. Historians remind us that technical systems are formed at the intersec- tion of technologies and values. But electric power systems are also cause and effect of social change, and events of recent decades suggest that such change is not always grad- ual. Indeed, if upheavals in political systems are any guide, structural shifts can occur with surprising speed when peo- ple stop taking the dominant paradigm for granted. Not unlike Soviet-style central planning a decade ago, the large- scale electricity model appears to be collapsing under its own economic and ecological weight, creating big opportunities for a little approach.15 Coming Full Circuit Local, personal power may be depicted in industry jour- nals as a twenty-first century idea, but it is also the sec- ond time around for a nineteenth century concept. Edison’s historic Pearl Street station was a small operation, running on six coal-fired boilers that produced steam to run recipro- cating steam (piston-based internal combustion) engines and was designed to serve nearby customers. Operating a direct-current generator, the system sent electricity through underground wires and initially lit up some 400 of his new incandescent lamps, totaling roughly 33 kilowatts, of the 800 Edison had connected to the Drexel-Morgan building, the New York Times office, and 40 other establishments with- in a square-mile area of the Wall Street district.16 Edison anticipated a highly dispersed electricity system, with individual businesses generating their own power. His strategy, soon adopted by his competitors, was to build small generators within the area of use and sell electricity and illu- mination together as a service. By 1882 and 1883, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company had plans under way to dif- fuse the system to more than a dozen other large cities, among them Chicago, Philadelphia, London, Berlin, and Paris.17 At first, Edison’s conception aligned with reality. The system was well suited to heavily populated urban areas, and during the next two decades, several thousand central sta- tions (small scale and decentralized by modern standards) generating up to a few megawatts and serving small sur- rounding areas, were established in the great metropolises of the Western world. Also popular were smaller “isolated” plants, self-contained and sized as low as 100 kilowatts, that formed the bulk of the company’s initial business and were used in stock exchanges, factories, department stores, hotels, ranches, cafes, and apartment buildings. By 1886, Edison had installed 58 central stations and 500 isolated lighting plants in the United States, Russia, Chile, and Australia.18PDF Image | Micropower: The Next Electrical Era
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