By James Kanter

WOKING, England: Debra Keeble, the general manager of the Holiday Inn in this English town, is an unlikely eco-hero. She endured higher-than-expected electricity bills, a couple of four-hour blackouts and a cooling system that struggled to keep the hotel's 161 rooms air-conditioned in summer.

Yet at the end of the day, she still prefers using a miniature heat and power station next door to taking energy from the national electricity grid.

"I'm actually quite proud that we're doing this," said Keeble, who cited a recent spate of hot summers as evidence of the need to tackle global warming. "We've got to do something."

Over the past decade, Woking, a city of 90,000 people in the commuter belt southwest of London, has developed a radical model for meeting its own energy needs that aims to use less fossil fuel and reduce pollutants.

Skeptics say that the glitches and expenses that customers like Keeble have experienced show that switching everyone to locally generated energy is an impractical pipe dream. But proponents say traditional power stations waste vast amounts of heat, and that grids and unsightly pylons lose even more energy before it reaches end-users.

"Let's be honest, when we established that system, no one thought about the environment," said Allan Jones, an engineer who formerly ran the local energy company in Woking and who now is chief executive of the London Climate Change Agency.

Woking proves that "you don't need national grids, you don't need to import electricity from remote power stations," Jones said.

A number of towns and cities in countries including Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden already have gone much further than Woking in decentralizing their energy systems. They use hundreds of smaller scale, combined heat and power plants near homes and offices. These systems often work in tandem with larger regional or national grids.

But in countries like Britain, where large power stations and distribution systems are largely owned by private companies, or countries with a dominant national utility like France, many green-minded authorities have less freedom to change the way they get their energy.

Authorities in Britain also have fewer opportunities than in other countries to sell locally generated power back to the grid.

To overcome these obstacles, officials in Woking took the radical step of creating an entirely new network of private wires and private pipes.

The system links 18 mini-power stations, some running on natural gas and hydrogen, others on renewable energy like solar power. Locally generated heat from some of these stations then is piped to nearby homes and offices in a process called cogeneration, saving on heating bills. In some cases, the process is used for refrigeration and air-conditioning, creating further savings.

With its concrete shopping precincts and modular office blocks, Woking is a community many people would happily bypass on the way to more pastoral parts of southwest England.

Yet by reducing the carbon footprint for public buildings and a few businesses in the center of town, such as the Holiday Inn, by 82 percent, and installing the highest concentration of solar power in Britain, Woking has become a must-see attraction for engineers and environmentalists.

Woking is "a model that should be replicated not only throughout the U.K., but throughout Europe," said Doug Parr, the chief scientist for Greenpeace in Britain. Centralized power systems prevalent in Britain and the United States waste about two-thirds of the energy they produce, Parr said.

Jeff Bell, a research executive at the World Alliance for Decentralized Energy, an industry group which includes engine and equipment makers like Siemens and Caterpillar, said the sector was growing quickly.

Although local power currently makes up only about 9 percent of the world's total capacity, Bell said nearly a quarter of electricity from newly installed generation in 2005 came from small-scale systems, such as gas-fired heat and power units that serve a few hundred households.

John Scott, the technical director at Ofgem, the regulator for Britain's gas and electricity industries, said, "It used to be the case that building a bigger power station was the way forward as this was the path to greater efficiency." Scott added, "Now we are going through a paradigm shift, a fundamental watershed. Huge power networks have their place but must adapt to work in conjunction with a rising penetration of low-carbon local energy."

Among the projects under construction by the Woking council is a modernistic glass and steel canopy next to the train station that will protect arriving and departing passengers from sun and rain. The council is covering the roof with 35,000 solar cells, which are expected to provide power equal to the needs of 84 homes for a year.

Another showcase item is a fuel cell, which turns natural gas into hydrogen and then into electricity with fewer emissions compared with burning gas. The fuel cell helps to heat and light a local swimming pool.

One of the byproducts - pure water - is used for plants in the surrounding park.

Yet private pipes and wires in Woking only cover about 5 percent of the town's residents and businesses, and the system still reconnects to the grid for backup power when needed. It can even sell surplus to the local distributor, a unit of Électricité de France.

One reason that the system in Woking remains tiny, Jones said, is that Britain restricts off-grid generators from selling electricity to more than about 1,000 households.

"The barriers are vested interests," Jones said. "The regulatory regime props up the high-carbon energy systems and acts as a barrier to low-carbon systems."

But there are technical and financial barriers, too.

The engine inside a mini-power station in the city center blew up last year. There were no injuries but repairs took two months. Another mini-power station at a home for elderly residents was under repair during a recent visit.

And the fuel cell, which was installed in 2003, now works at only 70 percent efficiency.

Ray Morgan, the chief executive of Woking Borough Council, said he wanted United Technologies, the U.S. company that made the device, to finance a replacement.

"It's not economic," Morgan said, referring to the cell. "I can't afford to keep it running."

The cell was performing poorly because it had not been properly integrated into the local power system, said Rob Roche, a product manager at United Technologies. Roche said that the company would discuss with Morgan whether to repair or install a new unit but said it was too early to say how much that would cost.

Morgan is among those who say that the achievements in Woking, while significant, have been oversold. Morgan said that the majority, or 63 percent, of greenhouse gas reductions came from everyday energy efficiency measures rather than from the system of private wires and pipes.

Big subsidies, including $200,000 for the fuel cell, came from the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Energy, which distributed the money as part of a program testing new energy technologies. The British government gave several million pounds in grants for solar panels.

Experts also warn that mushrooming private systems might make safety standards harder to enforce. Consumers might also find it harder to get backup supplies or to change suppliers.

"Let's say major towns and cities started losing power, and imagine that started happening two or three times a year," said John Loughhead, executive director of the British Energy Research Center, a government-financed body. "Do you think the government would survive? It would cause a major political crisis."

Chris Mostyn, a spokesman for the National Grid, the main transmission company in Britain, said large grid systems were set to survive even as a switch to renewable energy gets under way.

Grids, Mostyn said, would probably be the main way electricity from wind farms in Scotland would reach consumers in southeast England.

Yet Jones, from the London Climate Change Agency, is adamant that Woking provides a model for London and other major cities - and that local power will prove to be far more secure than centralized systems.

Jones, who was hired by the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, two years ago, said he aimed to have the city generating 25 percent of its power locally by 2025 and 50 percent by 2050.

As in Woking, Jones said he aimed to construct mini-power stations across the capital using efficient gas plants and to take power from renewable sources, like strong winds that blow along the River Thames.

His priorities include installing new systems - which could operate off-the-grid - to heat and cool the London subway system, the four London airports and some public housing.

"We feel that in London we perhaps have all the renewable resources we need," Jones said. "It's all very doable, and there aren't many technical barriers here."

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