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

284National Energy Securityby presently available renewable sources. These are consistently cheaper thanthe present world oil price, and in nearly all cases they are also cheaper thandomestic oil, gas, coal, or nuclear power. In every case, well-designed renewablesources now available are cheaper in capital cost, and several times cheaperin delivered energy price, than the nonrenewable, highly centralized energysystems which would otherwise have to be built instead to replace thedwindling oil and gas—technologies like synfuel plants, coal-fired or nuclearpower stations, or Arctic oil and gas wells.In general, as the celebrated energy study done at the Harvard BusinessSchool found, the best buy in long-term energy sources, after efficiencyimprovements, is appropriate renewable sources (in their term, “small solartechnologies”); the next best after that, synthetic fuels; and the costliest, centralpower stations. 59 But having not yet fully committed itself to a competitive marketplacein which all these options can compete on their economic merits, theUnited States, like most other countries has so far been taking them in preciselythe opposite order—worst buys first. The rapidly developing shift ofinvestment priorities described in Chapter Fourteen is a strong hint that theseeconomic realities, long ignored, are at last starting to assert themselves.External costs and benefitsEconomically efficient allocation of social resources requires that energy technologiesbe left to compete freely with each other and to stand or fall on theireconomic merits. The analysis in Appendix Three offers insight into those merits,and finds that appropriate renewable sources can be expected to continuetheir recent successes in competing with centralized nonrenewable technologies.But neither predicted nor actual market prices reflect, or are meant toreflect, many important social costs and benefits. Even if they did, an economicallyefficient result might not be equitable. Nor can it be expected alwaysto coincide with the results of the political process, which is designed to reflectand protect a broad range of interests not represented in market processes. Ademocracy works by “one person, one vote,” but the marketplace works by“one dollar, one vote,” and the dollars are not evenly distributed among thepeople. To increase equity and political compatibility, and to ensure the correctlong-term distribution of resources (which is not something markets do particularlywell), it is therefore important at least to recognize some of the mainexternal costs and benefits of alternative energy technologies.In economic formalism, it is not correct to count employment as a benefitof any project: it is treated (and must be for theoretical consistency) not as abenefit but as one of the costs of production, in the form of wages, salaries, and