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

208National Energy Securitysive, in an era when engineers could shrug and go back to the drawing board. Indesigning an energy system for the decades ahead, that is no longer tolerable.Even the electric utilities that have thought most about resilience (as they conceiveit) agree that such resilience as their grids possess is a side effect of otherdesign considerations (e.g., against earthquakes) rather than having been designedin. Grids are rather like military weapons which are designed only to cope withspecified operational threats that can be foreseen and quantified—so much heat, saltspray, neutron flux, shock, vibration, EMP—rather than with unforeseeablethreats. In both military and civil hardware, efforts to increase resilience tend to beonly (as one Pentagon analyst put it) an “hysterical realization after the fact”—aresponse to the previous failure. And even that narrowly framed response is seldomincorporated into existing equipment, because of cost, inconvenience, and pureinertia. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently fined the Tennessee ValleyAuthority fifty thousand dollars for still not having taken basic fire precautions atthe Browns Ferry plant, six years after its near-disastrous fire.Are there fields of design, however, in which the need for resilience hasalready been so clearly perceived that it has resulted in a coherent, readilyidentifiable decision to change the architecture of an evolving technical system?Data processing offers such an example. Its lessons have strong parallels,as will be shown, to a desirable direction for the evolution of the energy system;and they emerged in response to similar concerns.The brittleness of mainframe computersThe past decade has seen a wide-ranging professional debate about whetherdata processing should become more dispersed (“distributed”) or more centralized.As microprocessors have packed more performance into cheaperchips—already more complex than human microcircuit designers can handle 92 —the cost of executing an instruction on a large mainframe computer has cometo be equal to or larger than that of doing the same thing on an office microcomputer.But the centralized computers were meanwhile revealing a disagreeablelack of resilience and a high cost of failure. When they broke down, wholecorporations, including such time-sensitive ones as airlines and banks, wereparalyzed. Airlines would typically lose, in one instant, at least a fifth of a hugecomputer costing millions of dollars. The computer was typically coupled toabout ten thousand terminals and at any given instant would be handlingabout a hundred different transactions. Eastern Airlines alone could lose twentythousand dollars in bookings per minute. 93 The problems multiplied:[D]owntime may balloon to hinder the company’s day-to-day operations. For exam-