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

272National Energy Securitynow discovering) for more of this extremely expensive form of energy. 17Federal energy agencies and their major contractors also assumed, all but universally,that the way to develop renewable sources was to build prototypes—first of megawatt scale, then working up in stages to a scale of the order of athousand megawatts—just as if the product were a new kind of fission reactor.They apparently assumed that anything else, or anything designed for a marketother than utilities, “would fall short of a major contribution.” 18Thus considerable engineering talent, and contracts probably amountingto tens of millions of dollars, have been devoted to conceptual designs forsolar power satellites. Yet the cheap, efficient solar cells which they pre-supposewould deliver far cheaper electricity if put on roofs in Seattle or Boston. 19In that form they would be virtually invulnerable, whereas in orbit (as therocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth pointed out a half-century ago), they couldbe turned into Swiss cheese by anyone who cared to buy a weather rocket andlaunch a load of birdshot into the same orbit in the opposite direction. Therethey would meet the vast collector areas of the satellite every half-hour at acombined speed of thirty-six thousand miles per hour.Likewise, the Department of Energy in recent years spent most of its windbudget on developing multi-megawatt machines with blades like a jumbo jetwing. These machines are enormous, complex, prone to high-technology failures,and useful only to large utilities. Each unit costs millions of dollars and ismade, rather like a jetliner, by a highly specialized aerospace firm, then shippedacross the country to the site. In contrast, some smaller American manufacturershave independently developed wind machines a hundred to a thousand timessmaller. These have simple bolt-on sheet metal blades, no brushes, one bearing,two or three moving parts, and essentially no maintenance requirements. 20 Anyhandy person can use, if not make, such a machine. Indeed, as will be shownbelow, some designs this simple are now available at lower costs per kilowatt thanthe government expects its elaborate designs to achieve in the future.An anecdote reveals the philosophical divergence. After spending tens ofthousands of dollars on computerized electronic sensors to shut down anexperimental Department of Energy wind machine if it started to vibrate toomuch, its designers visited the two-hundred-kilowatt Gedser machine operateddecades ago in Denmark. It, too, had a vibration sensor: a saucer containinga large steel ball. If the tower shook too much, the ball would slop out ofthe saucer and fall down. A string attached to it would then pull a switch.(There is a postscript: the Department’s sensors proved unreliable, and had tobe supplemented by a closed-circuit television camera monitoring a paintedfilm can hung from a string so the operators could see when the tower shook.)There is thus a considerable difference between the renewable sources on