The waste of crowds
By Alister Gardiner,
Alister Gardiner puts some numbers to the costs of centralisation
[Science]
Any creative person will tell you that meetings, car parks and phones—essential for any large organisation—do nothing to inspire the imagination or encourage energy and innovation. Give a person a clean surface and something to write with and he or she will get on with the task in front of them. Give ten such people an electronic diary to share and pretty soon they’ll be so busy meeting with and cc-ing one another that they’ll cease being productive and spend the day, like fossil fuel-burning power plants, generating a great deal of hot air.
One possible solution is to recognise that creativity, like energy, is often best generated where it’s needed. Let’s try to measure the problem: consider our energy supply system, as we ready for another round of electricity supply blues. In our centralised model for generating and distributing electricity, built-in operational inefficiencies add significantly to the nation’s energy bill. For a start any fossil fuel-powered generator produces heat as a by-product, which then must be dissipated either into the atmosphere or our rivers. Moreover, between ten and 20 percent of the electricity generated centrally is lost in transmission. MED figures show that our entire electricity system, from primary source to delivered energy, is at best 45 percent efficient. And the efficiency of the thermal electricity generation, transmission and distribution system is even worse: 67 percent of the energy contained in the fuel is wasted.
We’re working on the problem. One option is to consider micro generation. Home-based energy units, fuelled by LPG, natural gas or (in the future) hydrogen, can generate both electricity and heat. Because the heat produced is not dissipated but used to heat the home, these units make more efficient use of scarce fossil fuels. And because the energy is converted at the point of use, it is not subject to transmission losses. Obviously there are energy costs in transporting fuel, but these are of a lower order than the costs and losses associated with remote production and transmission of electricity.
While large generating plants will still be required for industrial and other large users, micro generators could be sited in areas which are relatively distant from power stations and are responsible for the highest transmission losses.
“One possible solution is to recognise that creativity, like energy is often best generated where it’s needed.”
Of course there are technical problems to solve, including developing appropriate new-generation fuel cell systems to produce electricity directly from chemical fuels, and applying and managing them so entire sections of the network—such as a rural community or an urban subdivision—can operate autonomously.
This approach effectively transforms part of the energy problem by turning an infrastructural problem on its head. And the same approach can benefit any business that depends on combining resources, including people. Aggregation is, in itself, costly and often inefficient, and many organisations will benefit from looking at a more distributed model to deploy resources closer to the point of use.
Creative organisations that rely on putting together a critical mass of creative talent might look at how centralisation puts demands on infrastructure (paying a premium for office space and car parking, for example) and creates wasteful by-products (back-to-back meetings and long escape-the-office lunches). Generating ideas where they’re needed is likely to prove more efficient.
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