Working with Community Energy Scotland on the Land Art Generator Glasgow project has led to discussions about Local Energy Grids.
Reading Prof Paul Younger’s book on Energy highlighted the real challenges of putting renewables together with our existing national grid.
The limitations of the national grid have driven remote Scottish communities to develop proposals for local grids to enable them to make full use of the energy they can generate in their own environments. In this article local grids are being developed in Africa using solar, micro-payments and smart/mesh metering. Just as mobile phones have enabled much of Africa to bypass a ‘wired network’ problem so local grids bypass a ‘national grid’ problem.
What’s really interesting is the importance of a stable civil society, good governance, to support local autonomy and development (which is what this is whether it’s Scotland or Africa). Sustainability is after all totally scale dependent.
For LAGI Glasgow these apparently remote examples have real relevance for city centre regeneration.