Future Means of Energy for the Home.

Powering homes by alternative energy sources, ranging from wind turbines and solar collection cells to hydrogen fuel cells and biomass gases,should continue into the 22nd century and beyond. We have an urgent need of becoming more energy independent, and not having to rely on the supplying of fossil fuels from unstable nations who are often hostile to us and our interests. But even beyond this factor, we as individuals need to get "off the grid", and also stop having to be so dependent on government-lobbying giant oil corporations who, while they are not really involved in any secret conspiracy,even so have a vice-like grip on people when it comes to heating their homes (and if not through oil, then heat more often than not supplied by grid-driven electricity, another stranglehold).

As Remi Wilkinson, Senior Analyst with Carbon Free, puts it, predictably, the growth of distributed generation will lead to the restructuring of the retail power market and the generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure. The power providers may possibly have to vary their business to make up for revenues lost through household energy microgeneration. She is referring to the conclusions by a group of UK analysts, herself included among them, who call themselves Carbon Free. Carbon Free has been studying the ever-growing trend toward alternative energy-using homes in England and the West.

This trend is being driven by ever-more government recommendation and sometimes backing of alternative energy research and development, the escalating cost of oil and other fossil fuels, disquiet about environmental degradation, and desires to be energy independent. Carbon Free concludes that, assuming traditional energy prices continue at their current level or rise, microgeneration (meeting all of one's home's energy needs by installing alternative energy technology such as solar panels or wind turbines), will become to home energy supply what the Internet became to home communications and data gathering, and eventually this will have profound effects on the businesses of the existing energy supply companies.

Carbon Free's analyses also prove that energy companies themselves have jumped in on the game and seek to control microgeneration to their own benefit for opening up brand new markets for themselves. Carbon Free cites the example of electricity companies (in the UK) reporting that they are honestly researching and developing ideas for latest geothermal energy facilities, as these companies envisage geothermal energy production as a highly profitable wave of the future. An added conclusion of Carbon Free is that solar energy hot water heating technology is an efficient technology for reducing home water heating overheads in the long run, even though it is initially quite expensive to install.

Nevertheless, solar power is not yet cost-effective for corporations, as they require too much in the way of specialized plumbing to implement solar energy hot water heating. Finally, Carbon Free informs us that installing wind turbines is an efficient way of reducing home electricity costs, while also being more independent. However, again this is primarily a very costly thing to have installed, and companies would do well to set out cutting their prices on these devices or they may possibly find themselves losing market share.