Bill Resnick interviews Joseph Goodman of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Goodman works in "distributed energy," in which cities combine small solar panel and small wind turbine installations (on homes, schools, offices, right of ways, and more) with smallish utility scale plants to meet the city's energy needs. This array would replace corporate big plant big grid big cost systems as favored by the Investor Owned Utilities [IOUs]. Even if the IOUs decided to go to all sun and wind, distributed energy systems would be far cheaper, more reliable, quicker to install, easy to repair, reduce greenhouse gases faster, and create more jobs than the IOU system. The IOUs like PGE and Pacific Power are doing all they can to stop distributed energy. Bill and Joseph Goodman discuss distributed energy and how it could come to Portland.
- KBOO