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

198National Energy Securitythat there are no shared vulnerabilities. For example, the diversity of power stations’fuel supplies permitted the transmission of coal power to oil-short areasin 1973–74, and vice versa during the 1977–78 coal strike. 67 But all the stations,and the grid connecting them, continued to be vulnerable to other threats suchas transmission and control failures (Chapter Ten).Standardization is a well-known way to reduce costs and bother. The abilityto plug in common replacement components can make devices far easier tomaintain with limited parts and skills. But standardization forgoes the benefitsof diversity. If the standardized components incorporate a design or manufacturingflaw, that flaw is then plugged in universally, as has occurred withsome automobile spare parts. And even if the individual components of astandardized series do not share a hidden flaw, they lack the diversity to resistsimultaneous failures from a single cause.This dilemma can be partly (but not wholly) evaded by standardizingthose features of components that help to make them interchangeable and mutuallycompatible, while making diverse those features that are more likely to beclosely related to the causes of failure. For example, the more the componentsof an electrical grid are designed to work at the same voltage, whatever it is,the fewer transformers (nodes) will be needed to interconnect them and themore kinds of parts will be interchangeable and directly interconnectable. Butthe more different sources can provide electricity at the standard voltage, theless likely are all the sources to be disabled by a common event (such as a coalstrike, oil embargo, or drought). Thus standardizing operating characteristicsneed not mean standardizing design or losing diversity in design. At the sametime, it would be desirable for each component to be able to tolerate a rangeof operating conditions: that is (to use the same example), to work well overa considerable range of voltage or frequency rather than being finicky.Dispersion A third way to isolate failures is to make components diverse (heterogeneous)in space—to put them in different places. Military commanders followthis principle by not needlessly bunching up their forces in vulnerableconcentrations. Geographic dispersion means that if a mishap occurs in a particularplace, it is more likely that some units will be there but less likely thatthey will all be there. The greatest possible simultaneous loss is thus reduced.In the spirit of the von Neumann quotation which opened this section, the aimof the dispersion is not to seize every tactical advantage but to minimize thepossibility that a single event will wipe out all one’s assets.By the same principle, wind, being a flow, is always blowing somewhere.Dispersing wind machines therefore means that some of them are more like-