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

Chapter Fifteen: End-Use Efficiency: Most Resilience Per Dollar 253double antifreeze loops with heat exchangers, etc.) which can make conventionaloutdoor solar water heaters relatively complex and expensive.Macro benefitsThe foregoing examples have shown how a more thermally efficient housecan reduce its occupants’ vulnerability by lengthening time constants, preventingextremes of temperature, and making small, improvised sources of heatmuch simpler, more flexible, and more effective in meeting emergency needs.But the house is only a microcosm for the entire American energy system.Consider, for example, a car with the average efficiency of a turbo-chargeddiesel Rabbit—about sixty-four mpg, or about twenty mpg below the bestthat has been demonstrated for cars of that size and performance. Such a carcan be driven four times as many miles or days as a standard car (which getsabout sixteen mpg) on the same amount of fuel. The more efficient car cantherefore canvas a considerably larger area in search of fuel, or be four timesas likely to stay on the road long enough for improvised supplies of liquid fuelto be arranged. Alternatively, since each such car “frees up” three identicalcars’ worth of fuel, four times as many total car-miles can be driven with agiven amount of fuel. Visits to filling stations become four times as infrequent.Fuel stockpiles of all kinds last four times as long. (The April 1982 StrategicPetroleum Reserve of a quarter of a billion barrels, for example, wouldbecome sufficient to run the entire fleet of light vehicles for six months; theplanned 1989 Reserve, for eighteen months.) Yet this fourfold expansion ofeffective fuel reserves, far from costing money to maintain, actually incurs negativeextra carrying charges because once the efficient cars have been bought,their continuing fuel saving generates an immediate positive cash flow.Suppose now that America’s car fleet had an average efficiency of fourtimes its present dismal level. If each car had the same size of fuel tank astoday, and if those tanks were, on average, kept as full as they were in, say,August 1979 (sixty-one percent), 65 then the fuel carried by the car fleet itselfwould total some one and a half billion gallons. That reserve could run thefleet of one hundred thirty million cars and light trucks for seven hundredforty miles each, or a month’s driving at the average August 1979 rate. Thusthe dynamics of any fuel shortage would be dramatically different than withcars that must be refueled every few days.With such a fleet, the sudden disabling of several major oil pipelines,refineries, and ports would no longer be an instant calamity. Suppose, forexample, that the fuel reserves “in the pipeline” between the wellhead and thegas pump were the same as they are today. (In practice, they might be smaller