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

The notes for Chapter 13 appear on page 367 of this pdf.Chapter ThirteenDesigning for ResilienceResilience versus reliabilityAs we noted at the end of Chapter One, efforts to make the energy systemreliable seek to enable it to withstand calculable, predictable kinds of technical failure.But subsequent chapters catalogued many incalculable, unpredictablekinds of disruption—by natural disaster, technical failure, or malicious intervention—whichmost of today’s energy systems cannot withstand. Indeed,when those systems were designed, some of the threats which seem most likelytoday were not even perceived, so energy systems were not designed towithstand them. Those systems were designed rather to work with acceptablereliability in what the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hannes Alfven calls a“technological paradise,” where “no acts of God can be permitted” 1 and everythinghappens according to the blueprints. If such a place has ever existed, theworld emerging in the coming decades is certainly not it.Traditional analyses of the reliability of energy supplies have sought to assessthe probability and consequences of failure. Unfortunately, for the most seriousand unacceptable types of failure, the probability cannot be calculated, especiallysince it often depends on the unguessable probability of sabotage or attack.The vulnerabilities of complex systems often cannot be foreseen in detail.It is possible to classify general patterns of failure, 2 but even elaborate schemesof classification cannot predict which particular failures will be most important.A decade ago, intensive efforts sought to identify and to calculate theabsolute probability of various kinds of failures in hundreds of aerospace systems.3 While some useful insights into the relative reliability of differentdesigns did emerge, the estimates of the reliability of each particular designwildly understated the actual failure rates. Fault-tree and event-tree methods177