Articles, essays, and talks of Rey Lugtu

(Published in Manila Standard Today under the Greenlight column, Feb 23, 2009) For most of the last century, the world’s electrical grids stood as an engineering marvel of the modern age and a global symbol of progress. The cheap, abundant power they brought changed the way the world worked — filling homes, streets, businesses, towns and cities with energy. But today’s electrical grids reflect a time when energy was cheap, their impact on the natural environment wasn’t a priority and consumers weren’t even part of the equation. Back then, the power system could be centralized, closely managed and supplied by a relatively small number of large power plants. It was designed to distribute power in one direction only — not to manage a dynamic global network of energy supply and demand. As a result of inefficiencies in this system, the world’s grids are now incredibly wasteful. With little or no intelligence to balance loads or monitor power flows, they lose enough electricity annually to p