Can Microgeneration ensure environmental sustainability?
When 189 nations signed the Millennium Declaration in September 2008, consenting to adopt the eight development targets and take steps to achieve them by 2015, many of us enthusiastically welcomed the notion of launching into an idealistic new future, only to turn our backs on the Declaration seconds later and continue with our busy lives. Particularly when it came to Goal Number Seven: ‘ensure environmental sustainability,’ we nod, right, great idea! Government, you do something about it.
Great Britain, in particular, has come under direct criticism for not doing enough to reduce its carbon footprint on our increasingly delicate atmosphere. And if governments cannot be counted on to set in motion a plan to ensure ecological sustainability, how can we, as individuals, be expected to do so?
To counter these accusations of underachievement, the government has, over the past two years, set up a Microgeneration Strategy that aims to provide Zero- and Low- Carbon solutions for businesses, communities, and domestic dwellings. Its targets include all new homes being zero-carbon by 2016, while all new non-domestic buildings should be zero-carbon by 2019. A few years past the Millennium target of 2015, but still a very good step forward.
But what exactly does microgeneration do? Microgeneration involves the producing of energy through small-scale energy generators such wind turbines and solar photo voltaic electricity generating panels. It means that in the future, all buildings will be equipped with these small generators, allowing them to produce and supply their own energy, and in the process, reducing the mass impact that big energy generators have on the environment today.
What is more, microgenerators are particularly beneficial for particular types of homes, such as those with no access to a central gas network. This newly acquired self-sufficiency of future households, communities, and businesses would make them less dependent on large industrial power plants. The Guardian argues that Microgeneration might even be a rival to nuclear energy. We need to ask ourselves whether these advantages are enough to encourage people to make their own contributions to helping preserve the planet for their great-grandchildren.
Microgenerators systems also have disadvantages in the way that they are not necessarily accessible to everyone. Microgeneration is not suitable for a minority of homes, whereas some business establishments such as shops have little access to this technology at all. Moreover, since microgenerators are a quite modern development, there are still only few specialists who know how to install a private energy producing unit. Microgenerators are not exactly cost-friendly either, which reaffirms the old argument that the future of sustainable development will not begin until costs fall significantly.
So is microgeneration the best way forward? Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks, among others, agree that it is. With the proper government support schemes in place, such as grants as well as more information regarding the pros and cons of microgeneration, more people will be ready to embrace it. It has the potential to have a massive impact on the reduction of CO2 emissions, so the more accessible microgeneration is made to the British public, the more individuals can do to reduce their ecological footprint. For now, it’s back to recycling for most of us until we can afford to produce our own energy.
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