DTE vs. the People

My poor cousin brought a friend of hers to my nephews birthday party a few weeks back. My cousin lived with me for while last year so she knows how overbearing i can be when it comes to shaking people out of apathy. Her poor friend though, had the unfortunate disposition to be employed by Detroit Edison, and was fully unpreprared for the discussion to follow. I won't bore you all with the details, but suffice it to say we were able to come to some agreements.

The first of which is the fundamental understanding that a few major industries in Detroit have not changed much in the past 100 years; The Auto industry (insofar as the products it produces), the construction industry (not counting efficiencies of premanufacturing), and the Energy industry (Nuclear was a game chager, but the distribution process is still the same).

The second agreement was little more than a recognition that the mentality of power companies think they need to produce energy on a massive scale in massive production plants (i've mentioned this before in the 1.0 version).

We all know that in order to survive in the coming we need to have diverse energy sources, but we never talk about scale. i.e. this latest study.

This much we know (from the article);

'What is certain is that it is all going to be very expensive – and we will be footing a big chunk of the bill, either through public subsidies or higher energy bills. The government predicts an 8% rise in household energy bills, and 17% for industry.
“None of this is going to be free,” said Garry Felgate, chief executive of the Energy Retail Association. “It’s good that the government is now being honest about it.”
Yet for all the government’s soaring aspirations, the two biggest obstacles to our green future remain money and planning.
In 2007, the top three banks lending money for renewable projects were Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Gold-man Sachs. Lehman no longer exists, and the other two are directing their shrunken resources elsewhere.'

But what we don't see is the solution to localize energy production down to the neighborhood scale. I'm being kicked off this public computer, but feel free to comment on the challenges and opportunities of getting energy production at a scale that could handle 500 to 1,000 homes and is sustained through community lifestyle (i.e. bike machines at the local gym, crazy i know)