GuestView Businesses can take control of their energy future By GARY HALE

GuestView
Businesses can take control of their energy future
By GARY HALE

Four years ago this month the Northeast power grid went haywire. A fluctuation at an Ohio electric generating plant caused a power failure that cascaded across Ontario, Canada, and much of the Midwest and Northeast, consuming large chunks of Fairfield County before becoming the largest blackout in U.S. history. Before it was over, the blackout impacted some 40 million consumers in the U.S. It is estimated to have cost a whopping $6 billion.

Despite this economic disaster and others like it very little in the past half-century has changed with the technology that supports the traditional power grid. Once a resource that fueled dramatic expansion of U.S. business and industry in the years after World War II, it is now significantly out of date. And there are few options for enhancing it.

But that doesn’t mean Connecticut is without alternative sources of reliable, less costly and cleaner electricity that can power the state’s economy. A new law, passed by the state Legislature and signed by Gov. Jodi M. Rell earlier this year, allows business owners and municipal leaders to become more energy independent through the development of a locally generated and locally controlled electric power supply. It is a framework for business owners to successfully take control of their energy future. Several Fairfield County municipal leaders and businesses are beginning to examine how they fit in. Two cities in the region have publicly committed to this system that’s already working in Europe and other places around the world.

Fairfield County businesses face three significant energy issues that should lead them to search out an alternative energy supply:

• They rely upon the nation’s most fragile and least reliable section of the grid infrastructure.

• They pay the highest rates in the continental U.S. for electricity.

• Much of that electricity is generated at sites linked to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, which is hardly in step with the national trend toward environmental corporate social responsibility.

Understandably, businesses want to insulate themselves from the next energy catastrophe. And, increasingly, they are asking for more control over a less costly and cleaner energy supply.

That’s the idea behind the new state law bill that permits local leaders to designate sections of their cities as energy improvement districts (EIDs). In these EIDs businesses would be clustered around smaller, clean-running power generators, creating an intracity micro-grid managed by a local authority.

Several cities, including Stamford, and nearby Ansonia, have already committed to developing EIDs. Other Fairfield County municipalities are only a few months away from following suit. In a nutshell, EIDs work this way:

A municipality agrees to create an EID, either in a designated downtown business district where a number of businesses will be able to share the benefits or in a commercial business park. The EID is built around a new, clean power generator (no oil or coal-burning power plants). And because the businesses are clustered within the district, the EID takes advantage of any waste heat that is a byproduct of on-site power generators, capturing it and using it to warm buildings.

Businesses that participate in an EID will receive electricity that is both reliable and less expensive. Because it is produced near all of the businesses in the EID, there is little chance for disruption. This form of power generation, known as distributed generation, protects against such failures, accidental and intentional, and clearly lessens the safety and environmental risks associated with operating today’s electric system. Importantly, local generation would reduce pressure upon the traditional grid, increasing its reliability for other Fairfield County consumers.

EIDs use clean energy power sources, such as natural gas, geothermal, solar power, fuel cells and hydropower, and produce almost no toxic exhaust. The Connecticut Department of Public Utility Contol’s Web site states that “… electricity produced from clean sources reduces the amount of electricity that would otherwise be generated from nuclear, coal, oil (generating plants).” That’s an immense benefit.

Creating EIDs will help municipal leaders to better serve the businesses already located in their cities and businesses that might be inclined to move elsewhere in search of more reliable and less expensive electricity. EIDs are also a tremendous selling point for municipalities marketing themselves to prospective energy-sensitive businesses.

Few problems represent a bigger challenge to the growth and health of the Fairfield County business community than energy. Chronically overtaxed, especially during the hot summer months when demand for power rises, the county’s power grid is only a span of hot summer days away from the kind of shutdown that, according to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report, cost one brokerage operation $6.8 million for every hour it was offline.

Gary Hale is a Connecticut representative of Pareto Energy Inc. Reach him at Hale@halloran-sage.com.

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