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

218National Energy Securityfuel from one of several competitive local distributors offers a sort of choice, buta narrow one if all those distributors rely on similar wholesalers.Although this list characterizes some of these eight qualities by their polarextremes, each has a continuum of values in a spectrum. Those values are relativeto each other and to a particular context of use. An energy system which issmall in the context of running smelters, for example, may be large if the useis running a television. A system which is distributed across the country maynonetheless be clustered in localized clumps, not spread evenly. A device whichis comprehensible to farmers may be mysterious to physicists and vice versa.A source which is local in the city may be remote in the countryside (and possiblyvice versa). Accordingly, it is important to remember, even in a specificcontext, that all the dimensions of “decentralization” are relative, not absolute.Centralization: the root of the problemUsing these concepts, the inherent vulnerabilities surveyed in the first halfof this book arise mainly because the energy systems which, for convenience,have been called “centralized”• consist of relatively few but large units of supply and distribution;• compose those units of large, monolithic components rather than ofredundant smaller modules that can back each other up;• cluster units geographically, for example near oilfields, coal mines, sourcesof cooling water, or demand centers;• interconnect the units rather sparsely, with heavy dependence on a fewcritical links and nodes;• knit the interconnected units into a synchronous system in such a way thatit is difficult for a section to continue to operate if it becomes isolated—thatis, since each unit’s operation depends significantly on the synchronousoperation of other units, failures tend to be system-wide;•provide relatively little storage to buffer successive stages of energy conversionand distribution from each other, so that failures tend to beabrupt rather than gradual;• locate supply units remotely from users, so that links must be long (the“long haul distances” considered in Chapter Four);•tend to lack the qualities of user-controllability, comprehensibility, anduser-independence. These qualities are important to social compatibility,rapid reproducibility, maintainability, and other social properties identifiedin Chapter Thirteen as important in turn to resilience.Even if one neglects the last point and focuses on purely technical proper-