No need to tell you that we've experienced another year of upheavals in the power market, or that their severity has been heightened by the inordinate series of man-made and natural disasters that have rocked the nation since the beginning of the new millennium.

Nothing should be more obvious to all business owners than the risks associated with any loss of electrical power…particularly when the outage may last for a protracted period of time. You don't need any horror stories from me to know the terrible impact this year's succession of hurricanes has had on Florida and to a lesser extent the entire Southeast and Mid-Atlantic Seaboard. Read any account of these events, and you won't get beyond the first paragraph before you will be confronted not only with the damage and destruction of wind, tide, and floodwater but by the impacts of power loss as well. Already we are seeing cost estimates ranging from $10 billion to $20 billion—in the final analysis it depends on who gets to say what gets tossed into the pot—but for certain such accountings tell only a part of the story for those who have seen their dreams, aspirations, and sweat go down the drain with businesses that failed as the result of downed power lines.

While backup power may not be your major reason for considering onsite power generation, it certainly has its place in the decision tree, particularly if you live and do business in areas prone to nature's violence, which as we have seen is pretty much everywhere. It is one thing to say to yourself, "Yes, with our increasing reliance on computers and communications, my business would be dead in the water without backup power," and quite another to see in this "cost of doing business" an opportunity to stabilize and perhaps even lower your overall costs. Yet in case study after case study that we've presented this year, that's exactly what we have seen. Moreover, in many of these cases the benefits have been unanticipated, as shown most indelibly in the article, "Not Your Usual Cogen Project: A First for Heavy Industry" by David Engle in our January/February 2004 issue, where a relatively minor amount of onsite power brought about a significant reduction in operating costs.

In the year since we began DISTRIBUTED ENERGY,we've had the opportunity to watch some very interesting projects come online, and good to our word we've been able to present many of them in ways that should help resolve a lot of the reservations those of you who are still working through the options and issues associated with onsite power selection have in determining your best course of action.

In this regard, of the 79 articles we have presented to date, 53 have been case studies detailing the challenges and opportunities others have faced in fielding distributed energy projects. Consider our record so far:

• We've reported on projects using wind, solar, diesel, natural gas, landfill gas, sewage-water methane, bio stock, and hydrogen as fuel for large and small turbines and internal-combustion engines, along with several direct-use applications.
• We've looked at simple systems, CHP systems, cogen, and trigen applications on the supply side of the energy equation, as well as a half-dozen peak-shaving and energy-demand-lowering approaches.
• We've looked at regulatory and legal issues and assessed state and federal incentive programs designed to jump-start distributed energy projects.
• We've delved into maintenance issues and financing opportunities, and stuck our nose under the tent of new technologies, renewables, and environmental credits.

And this all took place as we were getting our feet wet in a business that has been in a constant—one might almost say chaotic—state of change for the entire period.

So what does this say for 2005? It's anybody's guess, but my crystal ball tells me that we'll see a steadily increasing deployment of onsite power systems coupled with adoption of energy-efficient systems and practices in the face of uncertain but continually rising fuel costs. Additionally I see utilities looking more favorably on distributed energy practices not only to contain expansion costs, but also to allow for maintenance and upgrade of existing facilities.

If you believe as we do that distributed energy is going to play an ever-increasing role in our business and private lives, then DISTRIBUTED ENERGY is a great place to get a project-level look at what works and, by inference, a glimpse at what lies ahead.

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DE - November/December 2004