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

Chapter Sixteen: Inherently Resilient Energy Supplies 275systems (with the difference that failures there are more often due to mistakesand overambitious technical efforts than to fly-by-night contractors). Ureaformaldehydeinsulation can cost health, money, reputations, and public confidence,but it cannot, given any reasonable alertness, cause the magnitude ofdamage that might arise from similar incompetence with larger-scale, less forgivingtechnologies than home insulation. However, this book will not defendanyone’s bad engineering. It seeks rather to call attention to the soundest oftechnologies and data sources, which exist in abundance.System integrationAnalyzing dispersed renewable sources is complicated. There are manykinds of technologies, many ways to build them, and many tasks for whichthey can be used in various ways. Further, they can be combined together into“hybrid” systems which may take on quite a new character, offering the advantagesof the parts plus perhaps some additional ones. Chapter Fifteen showedhow integrating efficiency improvements (for example, superinsulation in ahouse) with renewable sources (a domestic active solar system) can greatlyimprove the performance of both while reducing total costs. Integrating differentrenewable sources with each other often offers similar benefits. In general,these are available only at the modest scale of localized sources; they thereforehave no counterpart in highly centralized technologies. Integration can be assimple as cogenerating electricity as a byproduct of industrial heat or capturingthe waste heat from normal electricity generation (options which are describedin Appendix One). Or integration can embrace a complex set of interrelationshipsamong, for example, a building, its energy systems, and its food andwater supplies. A few examples show the rich variety of ways in which decentralizedrenewable sources can share, and thus cut, total system costs:• Successive uses of heat can be linked to cascade heat at successively lowertemperatures from one use to the next.• A dairy farm in Pennsylvania, like many in Europe, uses an anaerobicdigester to convert manure to an improved fertilizer (which saves energy) plusmethane gas. 24 The methane—homemade natural gas—then runs a diesel generatorwhich powers the farm. (Many such operations produce an exportable surplusof electricity.) The generator’s waste heat makes hot water to wash the milkingequipment, thus saving more fuel. Waste heat recovered from the washwateris then used to preheat the cows’ drinking water, increasing their milk yield.Dried residue from the digester, whose heat kills germs, is used as bedding forthe cows; this cleaner bedding leads to a reduction in mastitis, which by itselfsaves enough money to pay for the digester within a few years. An expansion