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

Chapter Fourteen: Rethinking the Energy System 233sinews are made, whereas a small technology—a bale of roof insulation, acogeneration plant in a factory, a solar water heater—seemingly has only localand limited relevance. Yet in a deeper sense, the success of the free-market economicphilosophy on which American private enterprise has been builtdepends very directly on the collective speed and efficiency of many individuallysmall decisions and actions by sovereign consumers. It is preciselybecause those decisions are now the fastest and most accurate means of givingpractical effect to private preferences that Americans have opted for a marketsystem—one of decentralized choice and action—rather than for a centrallyplanned economy on the Soviet model. And in energy policy, recent eventsamply vindicate that choice.Despite the success of these decentralized energy options, many energyplanners are reluctant to rest their confidence in such individual actions. Howcan we be sure, they ask, that if we do not build our centralized energy plants,people will really insulate their houses and so make our plants unnecessary?After all, such dispersed, individual actions are not under the planners’ directcontrol as a large construction project is (or is supposed to be). Yet exactly thesame mechanisms are at work in decentralized actions to increase energy efficiencythat have always been invoked as the rationale for forecasting growth inenergy demand. The many small market decisions which collectively constitutenational demand are merely responding to a different set of signals todaythan they did previously. The bottom line is the proof: small, unglamorous,inconspicuous actions by individuals plugging steam leaks, weatherstrippingwindows, and buying more efficient cars are collectively increasing total energycapacity about a hundred times as fast as the annual investment of morethan sixty billion dollars in centralized energy supply expansions with the combinedmight of the energy industries and the federal government behind them.The hypothesis that many small actions can add up to greater speed thana few big actions is thus empirically true; there are good theoretical reasonswhy it should be true; and it is the approach most consistent with our nationaltraditions. It is one of the reasons, indeed, that a fundamental shift in thearchitecture of America’s energy system is already underway, with profoundlyencouraging implications for resilience. For the highly centralized technologieswhich are being outpaced and outcompeted in the marketplace todayare also those whose inherent brittleness so endangers national security.Whatever the reasons for building those vulnerable technologies in the past,those reasons are no longer surviving scrutiny by investors. Highly centralizedsystems are no longer the only or even the most timely and cost-effectiveway to meet our energy needs.Economic and engineering logic, therefore, no longer seems to be automat-