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

206National Energy Securityarrived, for example, from a homesteader in a remote part of Alaska, a man of littleschooling and high intelligence, who had invented some novel and useful solarand wind systems to meet his own energy needs. His solar-warmed biogas digesterhandled normal organic wastes but balked at paper. However, he noticed a mooseeating a willow tree, shot the moose, seeded his digester with moose gut (presumablyrecycling the rest of the moose), and reported that his digester’s richer mix ofbacteria would now happily digest paper and even sizable chunks of wood. Thushe discovered something quite important, even though he is not Exxon.Technologies which are understandable are also likely to be maintainable. This isnot the same as being super-reliable, so they do not need maintenance: indeed,such devices may give people too little hands-on experience to be able to fix themwhen they do fail. Rather, maintainability depends on how well people withoutarcane skills can understand a device intuitively. Within limits (miniaturized systemscan be too small to work on), small devices tend to be easier to fix than bigones, partly because they are easier to carry around, experiment with, and cannibalizeparts from. Designs that are scalable—able to be built in many differentsizes according to the same basic recipe—have further obvious advantages.Reproducibility without elaborate resources enables many people to makeor fix a device even under disrupted conditions. A wind machine simpleenough to make in any vocational high school shop, and which can run withvirtually no maintenance for twenty or thirty years, is such a “vernacular”technology. 90 If the necessary information and materials are dispersed or stockpiled,such simple, readily buildable and operable technologies can make a profoundcontribution to energy preparedness. In contrast, technologies whichcan be built and maintained only by a pool of highly specialized people usingunusual skills, processes, and materials are hard to reproduce even in ideal conditions.If there is no longer enough business to keep those technicians continuouslyemployed, well-trained, well-motivated, and recruited at a high level oftalent (as appears to be the prospect for the nuclear industry today), 91 then reliability,safety, and maintainability will all decline. The “basal metabolism” ofsuch a complex enterprise requires major resource commitments and tranquil,well-planned conditions just to keep it alive for possible use in the indefinitefuture. Those resources cannot meanwhile be used in other ways.Accessibility, reproducibility, and scalability aid rapid evolution, permitting rapidresponse to new knowledge or new needs—the type of learning required for biological“active resilience.” Biological succession, including that of small mammalsover dinosaurs, depended on the rapid exchange of genetic information, trial ofnew designs, and feedback from environmental experience to reject bad designsand improve good ones. While not rapid on a human time-scale, these changes