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

Chapter Sixteen: Inherently Resilient Energy Supplies 273which most federal attention has been focused and those sources which meritit by their economic and security benefits. This difference is partly in unit scaleand simplicity. It is partly in the types of technologies considered: there are fewif any cases where central-receiver solar-thermal-electric system (“power towers”),or ocean-thermal-electric conversion (OTEC) or solar power satellites, ormonocultural biomass energy plantations, look economic or necessary. Thedifference is partly in the basic concept of what energy is for: the central systemsfavored by most official programs would concentrate a natural energyflow (which was perceived, often wrongly, to be too “dilute” to use directly 21 ),then have to redistribute the collected energy to users whose needs were, forthe most part, fairly dilute and dispersed in the first place.Simplified versionsAppropriate renewable sources offer a range of opportunities not shared byany other energy technologies: a range of complexity in design, construction,and operation which can affect cost much more than performance. Anyonewho visits community-based energy projects or reads the many journals (NewShelter, Solar Age, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, etc.) dealing with self-helpand “vernacular” technology will be aware that many “soft technologies”can—though they need not—be built more simply than normal commercialmodels. What a high technologist would be likely to do with a steel tower, analuminum extrusion, a Fiberglas ® sheet, or a piece of digital recording electronicscan also be done passably well with scrap lumber or lashed saplings,a piece of an old oil drum, a sheet of cloth, or a person with pencil and paper.High technical sophistication is not inconsistent with cheapness or simplicity:a recently developed digital recording anemometer for analyzing proposedwindpower sites is made of a five-dollar Radio Shack ® calculator, cupsfrom two Leggs ® pantyhose containers, and similar odds and ends, and thencalibrated by driving at known speed down a highway on a calm day whilesomeone holds the gadget out the window. 22 It costs in all around ten dollars,but performs about as well as commercial versions costing many hundreds orthousands of dollars. There are tens of millions of Americans who would haveno trouble making one. Similarly, the project managers for some costly federalsolar projects were amused, on visiting one experimenter, to find that heused a bucket and a stopwatch to measure the flows of water through his solarpanels. 23 In their own laboratory, they did the same thing with fancy digitalflowmeters. They were less amused to discover that the National Bureau ofStandards calibrates those flowmeters with a bucket and a stopwatch.This is not to dwell unduly on “haywire rigs”—the kinds of technology that