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

220National Energy Securitytention that they require people to live, or to manage their affairs, in a less centralizedfashion. 6 Smaller technologies actually preserve a complete range ofchoice in social and political scale, 7 leaving the desirable degree of centralizationin these arenas to be chosen individually and through the politicalprocess. Indeed, smaller energy technologies are often criticized by left-wingcommentators for not automatically producing political changes consistentwith those critics’ personal agenda. The confusion between the choice oftechnologies and the choice of patterns of social organization arises in partfrom sloppy terminology—which the above glossary has sought to clarify—andin part from some advocates’ failure to distinguish their technical conclusionsfrom their ulterior political preferences.The economics of decentralized energyThe second common question about less centralized energy technologiesis more complex: aren’t they uneconomic? Even if they’re more resilient, andeven though that is doubtless a desirable quality, aren’t they vastly moreexpensive than the large-scale technologies which meet our needs today? Thefollowing two chapters discuss (with the aid of technical appendices) the adequacyand cost of small energy technologies; but first the relationship betweentheir cost and their scale can be considered in general terms.There is no single “correct” size for energy technologies. The size shoulddepend on the use. Yet despite some preliminary research, for example by theTennessee Valley Authority, there is no data base anywhere in the world whichshows in detail how much of what kind of energy is required, where, and howdensely those needs are clustered. Even if such data existed, present knowledgewould still not suffice to calculate the best scale of an energy system for a particularapplication. This may seem surprising, since the energy industries makedecisions every day about how big an energy device should be. But those decisionsactually ignore many important factors relating scale to cost. More thantwenty economies of scale (effects which make bigger devices cost less per unitof output) or diseconomies of scale (which do the opposite) are now known.The diseconomies are far more numerous, and seem collectively larger, thanthe economies. In principle, all these effects could be added up to find, for aparticular technology and application, the size (or sizes—there may be morethan one) which will minimize cost. But in practice, no exact theory is yet availableto take all important effects fully into account.The observation that energy is generally supplied today by devices that areenormously larger than the uses to which the energy is put is therefore notconclusive evidence that this large scale is the cheapest. Indeed, the discrepancyof scale between supply and uses is so great that it seems to require more