Power from the People: How to Organize, Finance, and Launch Local Energy Projects

Greg Pahl

Jan 2012 · Chelsea Green Publishing

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Over 90 percent of US power generation comes from large, centralized, highly polluting, nonrenewable sources of energy. It is delivered through long, brittle transmission lines, and then is squandered through inefficiency and waste. But it doesn't have to be that way. Communities can indeed produce their own local, renewable energy.

Power from the People explores how homeowners, co-ops, nonprofit institutions, governments, and businesses are putting power in the hands of local communities through distributed energy programs and energy-efficiency measures.

Using examples from around the nation - and occasionally from around the world - Greg Pahl explains how to plan, organize, finance, and launch community-scale energy projects that harvest energy from sun, wind, water, and earth. He also explains why community power is a necessary step on the path to energy security and community resilience - particularly as we face peak oil, cope with climate change, and address the need to transition to a more sustainable future.

This book - the second in the Chelsea Green Publishing Company and Post Carbon Institute's Community Resilience Series - also profiles numerous communitywide initiatives that can be replicated elsewhere.

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Greg Pahl is the author of numerous books on energy and has been involved with renewable energy issues for more than 25 years. He is a founding member of the Vermont Biofuels Association. He is also the author of Natural Home Heating: The Complete Guide to Renewable Energy Options (Chelsea Green, 2003), The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook: Community Solutions to a Global Crisis (Chelsea Green, 2007), and has written about wind power, solar energy, electric cars, sustainable forestry management, and biodiesel home heating. He lives in Weybridge, Vermont. Visit Greg's Web site at www.gregpahl.com