Local energy generation system in Woking, England, draws admirers - and skeptics

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/19/business/wbgrid.php

WOKING, England: Debra Keeble, the general manager of the Holiday Inn in this English town, is an unlikely eco-hero. She endured higher-than-expected electricity bills, a couple of four-hour blackouts and a cooling system that struggled to keep the hotel's 161 rooms air-conditioned in summer.

Yet at the end of the day, she still prefers using a miniature heat and power station next door to taking energy from the national electricity grid.

"I'm actually quite proud that we're doing this," said Keeble, who cited a recent spate of hot summers as evidence of the need to tackle global warming. "We've got to do something."

Over the past decade, Woking, a city of 90,000 people in the commuter belt southwest of London, has developed a radical model for meeting its own energy needs that aims to use less fossil fuel and reduce pollutants.

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1. DECENTRALIZED power is their radical solution.

Yet by reducing the carbon footprint for public buildings and a few businesses in the center of town, such as the Holiday Inn, by 82 percent, and installing the highest concentration of solar power in Britain, Woking has become a must-see attraction for engineers and environmentalists.

Woking is "a model that should be replicated not only throughout the U.K., but throughout Europe," said Doug Parr, the chief scientist for Greenpeace in Britain. Centralized power systems prevalent in Britain and the United States waste about two-thirds of the energy they produce, Parr said.

Jeff Bell, a research executive at the World Alliance for Decentralized Energy, an industry group which includes engine and equipment makers like Siemens and Caterpillar, said the sector was growing quickly.

Although local power currently makes up only about 9 percent of the world's total capacity, Bell said nearly a quarter of electricity from newly installed generation in 2005 came from small-scale systems, such as gas-fired heat and power units that serve a few hundred households.