I'd like to see some experimentation with "micro" levels of residential electric service.

[hunter]

Perhaps in exchange for free electric service the electric utility would install a 500 milliamp limiter in your breaker box. It could be built into a "smart meter."

Bring your own household load management, (modular battery systems or ??? ), add supplemental solar, or just utilize the micro electric service as-is to charge your smart devices and power a few LED lights.

Micro levels of electric power service might even be entirely subsidized by government as a means of encouraging people to "drop out" of high energy, high environmental cost consumer society.

Successful, comfortable, low energy lifestyles might evolve. Would you like air-conditioning? Buy the solar panels to support it, or think up other ways to stay cool. And so on...

Eventually you might end up with lifestyles where residential construction is greatly simplified and much less resource-intensive. Remodeling? Recycle all the copper wiring and coper water pipes inside the walls, replace with a single, very simple 16 gauge copper circuit and PEX water pipe.

Send the recovered copper to "developing" nations where new residential electrical and water service would be installed in a similar fashion.

( Originally posted as a comment here )

[MADem]

1. Interesting ideas...of course, the board of directors at the for-profit utility companies would

fight these concepts tooth-n-nail....

[oldhippie]

2. Interesting, but ....

... ridiculous.

[MADem]

3. Well, individuals could embrace the concepts. They then could cut the power companies out of the

picture, and perhaps the ideas might spread.

[hunter]

4. What's ridiculous?

My great grandma lived in a house with two forty watt light bulbs and a radio.

There was no point in having a television, there were no local broadcasters and VCRs, DVDs, and satellite TV didn't exist.

Electricity was nice. She didn't have to buy oil for her lovely old Aladdin lamps, but she kept them around for power failures.

Obviously, you are not going to cook food or heat your shower with such a limited electric supply, but it's plenty enough to keep your gadgets charged and a few lights on.

Even though I don't live with minimal electric use now (but I have) I think it's an interesting baseline to measure my own consumerism against.

I can't convince my wife to get rid of the refrigerator, and I like our electric coffee maker... etc. We cook with gas, so that wouldn't be a problem.

With the human population earth has now a consumer society like ours cannot be supported by renewable energy sources. Something is going to break, probably the climate. I do not believe a consumer society like ours is a requirement for human happiness, it is in fact the source of much misery.

[kristopher]

5. "society like ours cannot be supported by renewables"

But renewables don't build "a consumer society like ours" - it's well understood that a large part of the problem you are complaining about is a result of an energy system that is built large scale centralized thermal generation like coal and nuclear.

The nature of centralized generation means the business model has to be a controlled monopoly.

That, in turn, leads to management techniques that promote expansion of demand - it happens every time. To expand demand and justified by anticipation of it (see how that circular reasoning slips in), capacity in expanded in excess of forecast need.

Since large scale thermal plants are most efficient when run at an optimum speed 24/7, it is to the benefit of the utility to sell excess power for anything it will bring, ensuring that even the true retail cost of energy (which in the case of coal and nuclear is already externalizing a huge amount of their true costs) is something that the manufacturing seldom has to take into consideration.

Renewable energy, on the other hand, is largely harvested in a way that puts production in front of people - removing the 'black box' nature of electricity and raising awareness of consumption and costs among both business and the public. This awareness introduces natural incentives towards being more frugal with energy. I mean, ask yourself where your drive to reduce consumption originated? I can guarantee that the first step was removal of the 'black box' aspect of energy from your world view. You've stated that you once had lifestyle that was far closer to the norm, so your childhood experiences would seem to be something that you were motivated to recover from your mental archive and polish off for closer inspection. No matter the specific cause in you personally, we know from abundant studies that distributed renewables have a strong tendency to inculcate the same sort of norm.

So while your statement might be sort of technically true, what it leaves out in the nature of renewables makes in irrelevant as a valid critique.

[hunter]

6. I'm unreachable, kristopher.

No television, my car and computers were someone else's trash, and I'm just an evolutionary biologist (by inclination and some years of formal training) with a ring side seat to the current mass extinction event.

Life will go on, this civilization will not.

It really fucks up one's perspectives when one truly groks geological timescales.

You know how we can save the world? Mandate a twenty hour work week and do everything else we can to destroy "work ethics," economic theories of "productivity" and "efficiency," and then go home to have a nice day with plenty of art, science, and sex and very little reproduction.

[kristopher]

7. In hunter gather societies men usually had a 15-20 hour work week.

Of course the women worked pretty much 18-20 hours a day, but I don't imagine that fact will worry you any more than all the others that most would think should count in your opinion. After all, you're different - we get it.