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

280National Energy Securitythis type of generator also happens to be the least sensitive to change in operatingconditions and to damaging grid transients and harmonics.Other design choices whose continued neglect will bear a high price inelectrical vulnerability for generations to come include the following:• There is little effort at standardizing voltage or other operating conditionsso that diverse technologies are compatible with each other. This will greatlylimit opportunities for interconnection, improvisation, and moving equipmentfrom one site to another in emergencies.• No effort is being made to make direct-current voltages and wiring detailscompatible between vehicles and fixed systems (such as houses). If this weredone, then the emerging low-voltage direct-current systems, powered for exampleby solar cells, could be interconnected in emergencies with the hundred thousandmegawatts of existing car and truck electrical systems. Household end-usedevices could be run temporarily, or battery banks charged, by plugging thevehicle into the house wiring. 38 Even in normal operation, this interconnectioncould provide considerable economic advantage by providing extra local storageto the grid. Such interconnection would be easiest using twelve-volt systems,though with careful design it can probably be done at the more common twenty-fourvolts, connecting the higher-voltage bank one-half at a time. Whateverthe voltage, making such an interconnection feasible and safe would require standard,foolproof terminals and instructions, perhaps on the outside of a housewhere standard color-coded jumper cables could be hooked onto them.• No civilian manufacturers appear to be planning to make inverters, controls,generators, and other renewable energy equipment resistant to electromagneticpulse. This could be done cheaply today, before many of the devices were built,but would be very difficult to do later after millions have been put into place.In all these respects, the evolution of the interface between the power gridand its potentially resilient new contributors is disturbingly haphazard. Themanufacturers and the engineering profession are quite capable of devisinggood standards on their own to correct these flaws, and can probably do itbetter than government agencies could. But so far they have shown no inclinationto, and little sign that they even see the problem.Dispersed renewable sources, properly integrated into the grid, could greatlyincrease its resilience, mitigating or even preventing cascading failures. Amajor analysis of the potential of such systems found:There is no question that [dispersed sources]…would have helped greatly [in theJuly 1977 New York blackout] provided that they had been properly integrated intothe power system under conditions of cascading outage. This means that fail-safe