Ahh... this is big and what America 'should be doing'...
An ambitious project was unveiled in Germany on Wednesday to install mini gas-fired power plants in people's basements and produce as much electricity as two nuclear reactors within a year.
The Hamburg-based renewable energy group Lichtblick and its automaker partner Volkswagen say the plants would produce not only heating and hot water but also electricity, with any excess power fed into the local grid.
The two firms said the concept of "SchwarmStrom" (literally, "swarm power") would allow Germany to abandon nuclear and coal power stations sooner and help compensate for the volatility of renewables like wind and solar power.
In the coming year the program will install 100,000 of the mini plants, producing between them 2,000 megawatts of electricity, the same as two nuclear plants, Lichtblick and VW said.
"SchwarmStrom is revolutionizing power production in Germany. It clears the way for more renewable energy and an exit from power from nuclear and coal," the statement added. "The home power plants together form a huge, invisible power station that doesn't make the countryside ugly or require additional infrastructure."
The project "is thoroughly feasible if the project reaches the forecast size," Claudia Kemfert of the DIW research institute told AFP.
Gas plants have an advantage over nuclear power stations in that the heat produced by the latter is wasted, the DIW energy expert said.
But "the most ecological would be to feed these mini-plants with biogas" rather than natural gas, Kemfert noted.
Lichtblick said another advantage of its plan was that tens of thousands of generators could be mobilized to meet a surge in demand or if drought made it hard to cool nuclear plants or a calm spell idled wind turbines.
Read full by Agence France-Presse VIA GRIST Link
