Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

172Disasters Waiting to Happenplants would exceed the output of the entire Nazi synfuel program. Forty suchplants–the 1992 goal for which Congress authorized eighty-eight billion dollars’subsidies in 1980–would consume coal at about a third of the rate of allU.S. coal-mining in 1979, yet they would produce the equivalent of only atenth of present oil consumption. (The Reagan Administration in 1981 cutCongress’s target by fourfold–to the equivalent of ten plants, or enough tosupply seventy percent of the Pentagon’s peacetime energy needs. 7 The militarywould probably be the only customer willing to pay the very high pricewhich the synfuel companies would have to charge to cover their costs–probably,at retail, about twice the present price of imported oil.)These enterprises are not a uniquely American phenomenon. Many othercountries are following our example. Not to be outdone by the grandioseAlaskan gas pipeline, some key American allies–West Germany, France, Italy,Belgium. and The Netherlands–have agreed to build a fifty-six-inch pipelineto bring upwards of four billion cubic feet of gas per day from Siberia. Thegas would supply nearly five percent of Western Europe’s total energy needsand almost forty percent of Germany’s 1990 gas use. 8 In return, theEuropeans would get ten billion dollars in construction fees, a Soviet gas contract,and increased reluctance to upset their Communist suppliers.The trend towards central electrification produces some unintended sideeffects in addition to greater vulnerability. For example, doubling the proportionof U.S. electricity used for heating and cooling buildings–the only way to use asmuch electricity as is forecast–would make demand even more sensitive toweather, with bigger peak loads for air conditioning in heat waves and for heatingin cold spells. At these peak periods, the utility load could exceed its minimumvalue by an even greater factor than the present two-to-threefold. Plantswould therefore be even less efficiently utilized than they are now (when theaverage plant stands idle about half the time). More electric space-conditioningwould also increase the likelihood of failures in the overstressed power grid.Since it takes three units of fuel to make a unit of electricity, raising the fractionof energy delivered in the form of electricity from thirteen to as much asnineteen percent by 2000 would have a bizarre, if unintended, result: 9 betweenfifty-seven and eighty-six percent of the additional primary energy used in theUnited States would be lost in conversion and distribution before it ever gotto its final users. That is, two-thirds, perhaps as much as five-sixths, of ournation’s energy growth–the very objective of these vast energyprojects–would be thrown away in the form of warm water and cooling-towerplumes. Yet so ingrained is the habit of building power stations that suchanomalies are hardly noticed.It is really good business to create on the Alaskan tundra a new choke-