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

248National Energy SecurityInnovative industrial processes which save much more energy than thesedata indicate are being rapidly developed, such as a new process which savesover three-quarters of the energy needed to make ethylene. A substantial fractionof present industrial energy can also be saved through the more efficientuse and re-use of materials. 56 Altogether, stable or declining energy use in theU.S. industry could sustain rapid growth in industrial production. 57 The greatscope for saving industrial energy even in such already-efficient countries asSweden 58 offers further basis for confidence.Micro benefitsThe foregoing examples suggest that the energy efficiency of each sectorcan be more than doubled without approaching practical or economic limits.Any improvement, however—even a much smaller one—would greatlyincrease energy resilience at the level of individual users as well as for thenation. Large-scale benefits will be considered more fully later in this chapter.At the “micro” scale of an individual household, office, shop, or factory, energyefficiency can increase resilience in three main ways:• longer time constants;• limiting extreme behavior; and• shaving peak loads.The concept of making failures happen more slowly in order to give moretime in which to respond is familiar in preparedness planning. It is the strategyof a person who puts containers of water in the freezer as a “thermal flywheel”so that in a power failure, the freezer temperature will rise only slowlyand cannot exceed the freezing point until all the extra ice has melted. It isthe strategy of a smelting company that insulates it potlines to slow down theirheat loss, so that if the electric current that keeps the alumina and cryolitemolten is only briefly interrupted, they will remain molten. (The alernative—months of work chipping out of the pots with chisels—is so unpleasant that itis worth buying a lot of insulation.)Stretching out failures through more sparing, more efficient energy use isbetter than the traditional strategy of stockpiling fuels to be used during a supplyinterruption. Maintaining and financing a stockpile costs money, whereasan energy system which uses fuel more slowly to provide the same energy servicessaves money all the time, whether there is an interruption or not.The resiliency benefits of stretching time constants by using energy moreslowly can be illustrated on the scale of a simple superinsulated house: forexample, the Saskatchewan Conservation House, a two-story, two-thousand-