Renewable energy is key to sustainable development
Strengthening Local Economies
Renewable energy can strengthen local economies in these three ways:
- increasing energy security through ensuring community control over resources,
- providing job opportunities, aided by enhanced training and kept in the local area by the distributed nature of technologies -- but these jobs must be secured through active education and training initiatives alongside renewable energy development,
- resources, both financial and in human capacity, can then be kept in the community.
Benefits in local sourcing (distributed generation):
The distributed nature of renewable energy sources lend the technologies to easy dispatchability near load centres, and thereby removing strain on electrical grids, and making energy delivery more efficient (delivery is were a large portion of energy is wasted and siting generation near loads automatically reduces this waste). It is important to not that this is not a perfect solution as at many times, renewable energy sources are not placed close to load, and transmitting renewable energy is necessary. Rather, the point is that as much as possible should be sited close to centres of demand, cities.
The advantage of incremental development:
As a distributed resource of smaller scale, it is much easier to match renewable energy sources to incremental increases in demand. A renewable energy project generally take 1 to 5 years to go from planning to completion. Conventional large scale power plants work on much longer time scales. Incremental development of energy resources can be much more exact than planning massive chunks of supply for demand projected 10 to 20 years in the future. In 10 to 20 years, the needs and demands of a city, complicated by new developments in technology, are not likely to match projections. Instead, it is more efficient, and more cost effective to use renewables to meet this demand incrementally. If a 100MW wind farm is no longer needed due to advances in efficiency, is it more cost effective to stop this project than a 2000MW multi-billion dollar nuclear plant.