Microgeneration, rather than electric pylons

Three thousand miles of new electricity lines ordered by the president seems long, an impressive start toward energy self-sufficiency, but it is pathetic. For example, in New York state there are already more than 3,000 miles of high voltage power lines. They are, mostly, ugly and they crackle and leak electrostatic and magnetic flux.

Anyway, their new installation is undertaken with purchase of land with the bullyboy rules of eminent domain (meaning they value your land as if there was an ugly tower sitting there, and then they pay you the new valuation as they show you the door). Since early 2006 and particularly in 2007, the federal government tried to ram this “power corridor� down New York and New England throats in order to “boost the economy dependent on power.� When he was not off making a personal disaster for himself, at least former Gov. Eliot Spitzer tried to thwart these plans.

There is little doubt that a transmission corridor connecting east and west is needed under the current method of providing electricity to industry and homes. Why? Because while California sleeps, the New York subway and industry is sucking up huge amounts of juice. And while California sleeps, their nuclear power plants, windmills and coal-fired plants are running anyway, wasting a lot of what they produce into grounding rods (I know, don’t groan, but you see, they can’t turn the darn things off at night).

So it makes sense to take California’s, Utah’s, Nevada’s, Oregon’s and Washington’s excess electricityto power the decrepit and wasteful New York subway system. But what they are missing, in Washington, is the revolution at our doorstep. What they are missing is the value of microgeneration.

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Microgeneration is all about small power plants, small generators of electricity, each feeding the grid, each supplying local needs, each contributing a small amount of the power needed instead of big, sometimes dangerous (think Three Mile Island) power plants.

In Germany every house renovation permit and every new house build comes with a new condition: solar cells. Germany is farther north than most of New York state and Connecticut. Yet they have enough sunshine that by 2025, by their estimates, 35 percent of all their electricity will be homegrown. Roofing tiles become solar panels.

It is that simple. You get up in the dark; you take juice from the grid. You go to work and as the sun comes up, it powers your roof’s solar cells and they, in turn, supply the grid all day long while you are way. Your meter runs backwards, earning you cash (and not some rich corporation generating nuclear electricity).

Again, in Germany, they estimate that the standard household will supply more electricity than it will use — and remember that the juice a normal household uses is usually available (hours of dark) when industry does not need it — so the overcapacity of now smaller power plants at night becomes a thing of the past.

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If every home in America were already producing solar power with roofing shingles only, the estimate is that (allowing for 35 percent bad weather and only eight hours of light a day) there would be no need for a single — not one — coal or nuclear power plant. Period. Okay, we are far from that day, but the numbers are there. More electricity, cheaper, self-paying electricity, is just a rooftop away.

With the new solar sheets coming out in the very near future (thanks to NASA), the cost of solar panels will be maybe 20 percent more than the cost of roofing shingles. Wouldn’t that be worth it? Selling electricity and becoming part of the environmental, financial and, importantly, national security solution?

Instead of the hundreds of millions of dollars for a new electricity grid — technology designed and first put in place over a century ago by Thomas Edison! — isn’t it time for new thinking, lateral thinking, making us, each and every one of us, self-sufficient and environmentally sound?

Peter Riva, formerly of  Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.