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

The notes for Chapter 16 appear on page 372 of this pdf.Chapter SixteenInherently ResilientEnergy SuppliesThe previous chapter showed how highly efficient energy use• can make some failures of energy supply inconsequential by reducing oreliminating dependence on the most vulnerable energy sources;• can at least delay and limit those failures which it cannot prevent;• can, by slowing down the speed of failures, make them happen more gracefully;• can thereby buy time to improvise substitutes; and• can, by reducing the amount of replacement energy needed to do a giventask, make those substitute supplies better able to maintain normal service.These achievements embody an important part of the design philosophyof resilience outlined in Chapter Thirteen. But they do not yet address howthe energy supply system itself—the energy sources whose output is beingused so efficiently—can be designed to be inherently resilient in the first place.The principles outlined in Chapter Thirteen showed that such a supply systemshould have the following characteristics.A resilient energy supply system should consist of numerous, relatively smallmodules with a low individual cost of failure. This is quite different from the approachpresently followed by most energy companies and governments—vainly tryingto build high technical reliability into modules so large that their cost of failureis unacceptable. The philosophy of resilience, on the other hand, accepts theinevitability of failure and seeks to limit the damage that failure can do. Forexample, rather than suffering a prolonged regional or national failure that canshatter the whole economy, one might occasionally have to tolerate a day ortwo of reduced production in an individual factory—rather like what happensnow when a single fossil-fueled industrial boiler breaks down.Second, a resilient supply system delivers energy to its users via short, robust264