Bill Nussey in his book Freeing Energy makes the assertion that simple power is the radical change in electricity generation occurring right now and is from the “Big Grid” to local energy. Driven by technology and economics, he forecasts that the failure of Big Grid to provide cheap reliable energy to 3 billion people globally has enabled solar panels and batteries to drive prices down below the cost of operating fossil fuel plants. In a previous article, I make the observation that renewable energy change will be faster than anyone suggests, and that following renewable energy become the primary grid source, it moves to electric vehicles.
Simple Power and Freeing Energy
There are multiple reasons, and this review of Bill Nussey’s book (available on Amazon & published in 2021) Freeing Energy: How Innovators Are Using Local-scale Solar and Batteries to Disrupt the Global Energy Industry from the Outside. For over 135 years since Edison flicked the switch on a suburb in New York, the energy world has been centered on monopolies and Big Grid. The systems have become complex and very expensive and tightly regulated. But the investment in R&D and scaling of renewable energy systems has give rise to where local energy is now cheaper than even the cost of operating fuel plants.
Simple Power Grid Systems
In one part of the book, Bill Nussey has 2 figures that demonstrate the simplicity of local energy. Most of the public media and investment has been around centralized power generation that is complex.
Simple Power Driven by R&D
Numbers of power plants
In one of the sections, Bill shows why the pace of innovation is so fast. By the end of 2019:
- Gas plants 3,900
- Coal Plants 2,400
- Nuclear Plants 440
- Wind Turbines >500,000
- Solar panels Billions if not trillions
We know that the primary reduction in cost is from R&D and secondly from scaling of production. The R&D investment by fossil fuel companies is less than 0.1%. Renewable energy – hundreds of millions.
Simple Power is Cheaper
Here is the prediction from Freeing Energy article https://www.freeingenergy.com/facts/solar-coal-nuclear-gas-cheapest-electricity-g211/
