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

266National Energy Securitythese advantages. These technologies are now in or entering commercial service,and most are cost-effective at current fuel and power prices. (In a few casesthey are cost-effective only at slightly higher prices, but those are still wellbelow the price of energy obtained by buying new power plants, synfuelplants, or other incremental supplies.) If properly designed and deployed,these technologies can provide a high degree of inherent resilience against alltypes of disruptions—foreseen or unpredictable, accidental or deliberate, civilor military, local or national.Sustainable sourcesA key feature which helps to make these energy sources resilient is that theyare renewable: they harness the energy of sun, wind, water, or farm and forestrywastes, rather than that of depletable fuels. This eliminates the need for oil andgas wells, gathering lines, terminals, tankers, pipelines, coal trains, slurrypipelines, and most bulk-transmission power lines. (However, as will be shownbelow, the electric grid could still have an important role to play in linking dispersedrenewable sources.) The renewable nature of these sources also eliminatesthe need for any technologies analogous to those listed above. Indeed, it eliminatesthe need for the fuels themselves—oil, gas, coal, or uranium—and hence fordependence on the nations or institutions which extract, process, and sell them.Also eliminated would be the need for the rest of the vulnerable technologiescatalogued in earlier chapters, such as refineries, gas-processing and LNGplants, and steam power stations. True, some of these would have analogues ina renewable energy system: falling water would still have to be converted toelectricity in existing and refurbished dams, wind would have to be captured byturbines and sun by collectors, and biomass would have to be converted to fluidfuels by thermal, chemical, or biological plants. But in general (with the exceptionof the large hydroelectric dams which already exist), all these renewableenergy plants would be very much smaller, simpler, and more dispersed thantoday’s giant facilities. For this reason, although they could still fail, the consequenceswould be smaller. They would still need repair, but the resources neededto fix them would be cheaper, more common, and more locally available.They could still be attacked, but the incentive would be reduced—just as thesmall, dispersed hydro plants which largely powered Japan in World War IIwere essentially immune from Allied bombing (Chapter Seven). Even if dispersedrenewable sources were destroyed, the consequences would be purelylocal: knocking over a wind machine could cost someone thousands of dollars(perhaps, with a giant machine, a few million dollars), but only a handful of people,if anyone, would be blacked out. In contrast, knocking over one transmis-