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

Chapter Fourteen: Rethinking the Energy System 219ties, it is clear that the architecture—the basic structure—of today’s highly centralizedenergy systems flies in the face of everything that the previous chaptershowed was essential to resilience. As a recipe for disaster, its design couldhardly be more expert and comprehensive.Avoiding the resulting brittleness requires instead an energy system thatuses more dispersed, diverse, local, and redundant modules, incorporating the principlessummarized at the end of the previous chapter. But this concept of smaller,more distributed units of energy supply immediately raises serious questions.Indeed, it may conjure up caricatures of (as some critics put it) trying topower an advanced industrial society with billions of backyard windmills.Three questions particularly stand out:• Is not contemplating the use of smaller, less centralized energy technologiesreally a covert way of seeking to “decentralize society,” leading to fundamentalchanges in our way of life and to the dissolution of national power?•Are not small technologies too expensive because they cannot captureeconomies of scale?•Are not the potential contributions of small technologies too minor and tooslow to meet the needs of a dynamic economy and address the urgentproblem of replacing dwindling supplies of petroleum?This chapter and those following it will examine these questions.Social “decentralization”?The first question can be quickly dealt with. The observation that moredispersed, diverse, localized energy technologies are desirable for any reason(such as resilience) often invites the response that one is actually seeking toturn cities into agrarian villages, Congress into town meetings, and (by a furtheremotive extension) modern technology into primitivism. Whatever thepossible advantages or drawbacks of these or any other kinds of broad socialchanges might be, they are all, as Chapter One made clear, far beyond thescope of this analysis. This book asks only how our energy system, throughincremental choices of different technologies, might be made secure within theframework of our present institutions. This analysis is limited to examininghow to construct an energy system with maximal economic and national securitybenefits to meet the needs of a heavy-industrial, urbanized society—a society,moreover, that is assumed to wish to continue rapid economic and populationgrowth. Exploring what might be the most desirable form of socialorganization is far beyond the scope of this work.In point of fact, moreover, neither common sense nor careful study of theactual institutional impact of smaller energy technologies supports the con-