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

Chapter Thirteen: Designing for Resilience 207were often very rapid on the time-scale of earth. Likewise, if an energy technologyis sufficiently simple, accessible, and quickly built to undergo many generationsof development in the time it takes to build one prototype of a large, complexdevice, the former is likely to achieve a high level of refinement much sooner,more cheaply, and more surely than the latter. Conversely, the complex technologymay reach commercialization only by so compressing its developmentsequence that the design used for each scaled-up new generation must be committed—“frozen”—beforeoperating experience has had time to reveal thestrengths and weaknesses of the earlier units. This process of outrunning realexperience greatly increases ultimate costs and risks. Likewise in biological evolution,small, frequent improvements are more likely to survive than abrupt, radicaldesign changes. Organisms whose large gene pool and rapid reproductionencourage many incremental changes can more easily find resilient design solutionsthan those that can afford only few and infrequent experiments.By this point many parallels between the principles of biological and of engineeringresilience should have become evident. Just as population biology, in theexperiment of the mites or in island ecology, reveals the value of being finegrainedand heterogeneous in space, so engineering experience shows a correspondingvalue in dispersion and in redundant, relatively small modules that cansubstitute for each other, filling in temporary gaps in function. The selective couplingin food webs, where organisms normally depend on each other but can dowithout their usual diet and cushion the transition with a buffer stock of storedfood if need be, is analogous to the optional autonomy of components—like ahouseholder who normally heats with gas but, at a pinch, can switch to thewoodstove and the backyard woodpile. The hierarchy of food chains, where (forexample) many different kinds of algae provide primary productivity in a pondinterchangeably without worrying about what will eat them in turn, is similar tothe redundancy of a grid energized by the similar, interchangeable outputs of differentenergy sources. The biological adaptability of prolific species is analogousto the ability to evolve a technology quickly through the efforts of many participants.And the compromises inherent in any design for resilience—between standardizationand diversity, between autonomy and sharing, between narrow efficiencyand broad survivability—are as central to engineering as to life itself.Analogous universesFew engineers deliberately design for resilience as an end in itself. If theyachieve it, they do so by accident while pursuing other ends. Design philosophyis normally centered around satisfying narrowly conceived regulations or performance/time/costspecifications, rather than around producing an inherentlyresilient product. This narrowness of objectives was tolerable, if sometimes expen-