Macro-power, Micro-power, and Meso-power: New Approaches to Electricity Generation and Distribution

To build a self-sufficient community, the critical component is electrical power. If you have electricity, you can grow food indoors or outdoors. If you have electricity, you can pump water or even pull it from the air. If you have electricity you can manufacture, construct, and live. No other resource is quite as critical to modern life as electrical power.

But how we usually generate the power, distribute it to our communities and our homes, and consume it is based on infrastructure designed nearly a hundred years ago. And in today’s environment, we find that the power grid that was designed way back when has become somewhat fragile. We expect power outages during inclement weather. In some areas of the country, we expect that our power systems cannot handle peak loads. We live with brownouts. We cede control of our air conditioning and general power consumption to government controlled entities who don’t know (or care) about our particular situations. When we reimagine community, we should also reimagine power generation and distribution.

When the power grid was designed, the only way to generate power in a cost effective manner was to build huge power plants that serviced large regions. These plants were built by corporations, tightly regulated by governments, and interconnected (to some extent) to minimize catastrophic failures. But these interconnection points themselves are large and expensive transformers that also become potential critical failure points. I call this type of industrial sized power production ‘Macro-power’.

Historically, there were great economies of scale to creating Macro-power, but also substantial disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage was distribution. Power has to be transported hundreds of miles in some cases. This transportation network (which was and largely still is above ground electrical wires) is vulnerable to accident or weather. And approximately 10-20% of the power is lost during transmission, a figure that is increasing as high voltage is used due to new power sources and as infrastructure decays.

Another disadvantage to Macro-power is the increasing difference between base loads and peak loads. Power companies can assume that they will regularly be able to provide – and get paid for – the base load for their area. But during heat waves or extreme cold or other periods of high usage the amount of power required is several times the base load. While the percentage increase for smaller areas would be the same, the absolute amount of energy required to be supplied is substantially different and much more burdensome on Macro-power.

Over time, ways to store (batteries) or generate electricity on a small scale have become ubiquitous. Today, individual solar panels power streetlights and electric gates on farms or estates. Individual homes use solar panels to offset some of their energy usage. These Micro-power sources can handle in a cost effective way the power requirements of small, remote uses. They do not require access to the electric grid which is a huge advantage both in the cost of energy and in the cost of infrastructure to power these items. And to the extent that these energy generation sources require no maintenance and continue to work, they are ideal solutions to many power challenges. A reimagined community will certainly make use of these Micro-power solutions when appropriate.

 But no energy generation source is truly maintenance free. And the more of these small sources there are, the more need there will be for continued maintenance, cleaning, or replacement. And Micro-power sources will not be replacements for Macro-power for most of the electrical needs of a community.

In the middle, between Micro-power and Macro-power is a neighborhood or community level energy generation – Meso-power. Fifty years ago, Meso-power was not realistic or potentially cost effective. But the relentless progress of technology in miniaturization and efficiency has brought us to a point where small but significant energy generation sources (50KW up to 5MW) are commercially available. These sources can provide all the electrical energy needs for a neighborhood or small community. And interconnecting these sources into a microgrid is also achievable with relatively inexpensive components.

In our reimagined community, Meso-power sources provide all the community’s electrical needs and can be networked to create a much finer, more local, and more robust electrical grid. It can even coexist and be attached to the existing Macro-power grids, providing backup electrical power in the event of outages.

There are many ways to generate power at the Meso-power level currently. Small, efficient versions of existing fossil fuel (natural gas) plants exist. But there are now self-contained versions of hydroelectric power that can be quickly installed in any year-round running water. Small solar arrays or a variety of wind configurations can be grouped into large enough farms for Meso-power. Even small nuclear or biofuel systems are available, though until regulatory hurdles are streamlined, nuclear is likely not viable for communities. Geothermal plants have been prototyped that generate Meso-power. However, until the costs of deep drilling are reduced, geothermal will likely be limited to surface or near-surface sources like hot springs and geysers.

Since Meso-power sources do not need to distribute power over hundreds of miles or to create high voltage power lines, they are automatically more efficient (they don’t have to overproduce by 20% to create the same end level of power) and the infrastructure is simpler and shorter.

In today’s climate of brownouts and increasingly fragile infrastructure, it is vital for a reimagined community to take care of its own electrical power needs. Fortunately, technology has advanced so that a new community is able to generate its own electrical power. Community planners and neighborhood developers should be including Meso-power electrical power generation in their site plans and designs, possible augmented by Micro-power on each building. Having power security within a community is both an important amenity and a prerequisite for all the other infrastructure that will make a community self-sufficient and resilient in the face of supply chain and infrastructure failures.