Bear with me a bit on this: Yesterday our heater went out. Unable to repair it last night, a borrowed newer electric space heater served the role of heating practically better than the gas furnace heater (Small apartments, God bless ‘em..). That got me to thinking…
I am curious about the following: if the fuel I am burning in my house could be diverted to a local power station’s yard where it is used to spin a generator there, could storing electrical energy in chemical fuel till its on premise locally through implementing already in place natural gas infrastructure for delivery be used more efficiently than current mega-power plant standards?
The reason why I ask this is I live in Arkansas where considerable protest to a new Coal Plant is occurring. We have recently developed access to considerable volumes of natural gas but the plan for now is to sell our natural gas out of state while buying out of state coal to fuel the power plant SWEPCO is building. It’s worth adding they even started building prior to State permits being approved believe it or not. The debates against it are substantial, the most academic being that mercury emissions are too toxic as planned due to how environments can only absorb up to specific thresholds prior to toxicity but do not posses substantial means to cycle out old mercury accumulation however. While the yearly values of mercury release are debatably “low,” the continuous release of mercury into the land and water here are reasonably expected to cause fish to reach poisonous levels rapidly. This is no good for the “Natural State” as our tourism is largely game & fish focused. An alternative plan needs presented to change directions however.
The point -->
If a plan could be outlined to use current natural gas pipelines to provide modular applications of power through additional micro-power plants to townships etc rather then requiring a new titanic proportioned plant, I’d like to know if that alternative approach to power infrastructure could be viable by anyone’s estimation?