The electricity is sourced from solar panels, wind turbines, and heat from biogas. In addition they have a backup wood chip furnace. They also have a fairly beefy battery of 10 MW capacity to help level the fluctuations in production. The village runs its own grid and pays less for energy.
News articles: The Independent, The Huffington Post, GreenBiz.
(Score: 1, Troll) by bart on Thursday December 03 2015, @08:11AM
It would not surprise me at all, if their per person energy consumption is equal or higher than that of the person connected to a 1GW electric plant, because the energy investment in the creation of said plant is probably much lower per MW produced energy than all this small-scale stuff.
I think there is not enough emphasis on lifecycle energy consumption including energy required to produce the system components.
So In that sense, they're parasitic on the larger society, that does produce their batteries, windmills, inverters etc.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @08:49AM
Why should the energy required to build a windmiss be considerably higher than the energy to build a conventional plant? Note that they definitely saved on the grid infrastructure (since local production needs shorter lines and less technical management infrastructure; it also reduces the transport losses BTW), and unlike conventional power plants, they also don't need to expend energy/cost on fuel delivery (unless when they need to power up that backup wood chip furnace; but even then, I guess the wood is from nearby, reducing the transport cost considerably, both in terms of energy and of money).
Note that if you calculate the cost of the conventional plant, you also have to include all the cost of fuel production. You think getting oil, gas or coal out of the earth comes for free? Not to mention the additional cost for renaturation afterwards (or the indirect cost caused by not doing that).
Also if the fuel is transported on the road and/or railway, you have to add the hidden cost of additional wear and tear of the roads or rails caused by the transport, which implies increased maintenance needs with the corresponding money and energy cost. While transport by pipeline adds the cost of building and maintaining the pipeline system.
(Score: 1) by bart on Thursday December 03 2015, @09:13AM
You make good points, though you forget about the energy-costs of the batteries and solar cells.
But my point is, there should be far more system calculations, where honest attempts are being made to calculate total system costs, instead of one or other special interest group promoting their agenda. Me personally, I like the idea of small scale energy infrastructure, but I'd like to know that it's actually energy efficient on a global scale, instead of just moving the problems somewhere else (like to China, where they build the solar panels and batteries)
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:23AM
It cuts both ways. While we do need to consider all of the energy costs of a sustainable solution, including infrastructure construction and maintenance, we also need to consider these costs for non-sustainable solutions. In addition, we also need to calculate the total environmental cost of using non-sustainable solutions, in terms of pollution, using up resources at a faster rate than they are replenished, and so on.
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