Mission
Our mission here at Power, is to find sustainable energy generation for home owners.
The current environment in the US may lead to extended power outages. The infrastructure is fragile and is extremely outdated. This can be evidenced by how long outages are after a storm. The 1 or 2 day power outages of the past have become 1 to 2 weeks. One would think that the world has advanced and power delivery would be state of the art. The plain facts are that our power grid has been aging for decades. New and old technologies are mired in government bureaucracy, paperwork and regulations. This makes bringing new technology to the people more time consuming, more expensive, and less profitable, hence the lack of new technology and the presence of an aging power grid. For example the last nuclear power station in the US was commissioned in the 1996.
The average age of U.S. commercial reactors is about 32 years. The oldest operating reactors are Oyster Creek in New Jersey, and Nine Mile Point 1 in New York. Both entered commercial service on December 1, 1969. The last newly built reactor to enter service was Watts Bar 1 in Tennessee, in 1996. In 2007, the Tennessee Valley Authority voted to complete construction of Watts Bar 2. This reactor is planned to begin commercial operation in 2013. Source- http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=228&t=21
Source – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_Production_the_USA.svg
Why so little change in infrastructure? Just look at how stagnate nuclear and hydro are, our only growth is through fossil fuels and renewable energy is yet just a pimple on our energy supply.
My belief is that the power grid will be reduced to more localized power generation, whether it be home, neighborhood, town based to produce the power where it is used. I believe that many technologies have been bought and buried along the years by the major corporations that bring you the power. There is a stranglehold on the public and we need to do something about it.
The goal here is to build a community dedicated to creating sustainable home power generation. Hopefully we can scale that up to provide power for a neighborhood or small town. That’s the dream… now lets get going.
David L.