Decentralizing Electricity Production

To R. Buckminster Fuller, whose ideas, lifetime work, and belief in individual initiative provide the inspiration to "dare to be naive."

Core structure

• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Problems, Planning, and Possibilities for the Electric Utility Industry
• Technology Is the Answer!
• The Pendulum Swings Again: A Century of Urban Electric Systems
• The Potential for Diversity: The Production Alternative

Main ideas

• The book is dedicated to Fuller, whose work inspires the spirit to "dare to be naive."
• This is a book about the future, yet it includes no forecasts or predictions.
• Electric utilities have problems that can be understood only in the larger social and ecological context.
• Amory Lovins presents a critical review of the electrical generation industry and of the concepts that currently guide its decision-making.
• David Morris places today's electric industry in a historical context and observes that the decentralized grid is not unprecedented.

Why it matters

The motivation is not curiosity about what is likely to happen but an exploration of what could happen. The authors begin from the belief that energy — how we produce, distribute, and use it — is at the heart of every social, economic, and environmental problem, and that policies derived from recent trends can only encourage more of what we are already doing. If there is one thing we do not need, it is more of what we already have.

Sources

• decentralizing_electricity_production/ — book project directory (repo-local source tree)
• index.md — project index