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

Chapter Thirteen: Designing for Resilience 181designed to cope with varying windspeeds. The British Astronomer Royal, SirMartin Ryle, proposed a system of wind machines 15 that would be moreresilient than an alternative wind system designed by the Central ElectricityGenerating Board. 16 The crucial difference was that Sir Martin’s design sacrificeda little performance at high windspeeds in order to be able to operate atlow ones, and therefore it could work most of the time. In a long period oflow windspeed, that design would still produce power much of the time, whilethe Board’s overdesigned machines would produce none at all, requiring overfive times as much storage. Kahn’s conclusion that the more “resilient systemminimizes the impact of extreme conditions” is just what Sir Martin intended.Such resilience “has important consequences. It means…[that surprises fromoutside] have already been built into the system. Therefore the impact of themarginal risk goes down.” 17“Resilience,” Kahn points out, “incorporates both a passive, behavioralnotion and an active feedback control notion.” The mechanical description ofbrittleness versus “bounciness,” he continues,is a passive characterization. [But the]…corrective response to disturbance isan active control notion. In the case of power systems, the correctiveresponse ultimately involves the political economy in which the [technical]system is embedded. Regulatory agencies institute investigations of majordisturbances and initiate action to reinforce perceived weaknesses. 18While Sir Martin’s wind machines themselves display only passiveresilience, the mental process that led him to design them to cope with uncertainwind regimes displays active resilience; it is a deliberate effort to becomebetter able to cope with surprises. Thus “passive resilience” describes the mereability to bounce without breaking; active resilience connotes the further adaptivequality of learning and profiting from stress by using it as a source of informationto increase “bounciness” still further. In the spirit of this metaphor, arubber ball has passive resilience; the nerves and muscles of someone learningto play basketball have active resilience. Systems on which our nation dependsneed both, but most energy systems currently have neither.Another way of saying this is that every “existing object or arrangement”tends to remain what it is rather than to become something else.Interfere with its existence and it resists, as a stone resists crushing. If it is aliving thing it resists actively, as a wasp being crushed will sting. But the kindof resistance offered by living things is unique: it grows stronger as interferencegrows stronger up to the point that the creature’s capacity for resistanceis destroyed. Evolution might be thought of as a march towards even morehighly articulated and effective capacity for resistance. 19