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

Chapter Sixteen: Inherently Resilient Energy Supplies 285benefits whose payment causes some other useful output to be foregone. Theamount, duration, location, and quality of work provided by energy projectsare nonetheless socially and politically important. Such projects can eitherincrease or decrease total employment. Power stations, for example, are so capital-intensivethat each thousand-megawatt plant built destroys about fourthousand net jobs by starving other sectors for capital. 60 In contrast, careful anddetailed case studies, 61 confirmed by more aggregated calculations, 62 haveshown that efficiency and soft-technology investments provide several times asmany jobs as equivalent power-station investments, but better distributed bylocation and occupation 63 and arguably offering more scope for individualresponsibility and initiative. It is partly for this reason that many progressiveU.S. labor unions (such as the United Auto Workers, Machinists & Aerospace,and Sheet Metal Workers) officially support a “soft energy path.”Another important consideration is the effects of different energy programson the national economy via spending patterns and interest rates.(Respending effects—how people spend the money they save by using energymore efficiently—are important to the job analyses.) In general, efficiency andsoft-technology investments are counterinflationary: once in place, they provideenergy services at little or no additional cost, regardless of the price ofdepletable fuels such as oil. In contrast, purchasing oil and gas, which tookonly two percent of the Gross National Product in 1973, had soared to morethan nine percent by 1981. 64 This worsening hemorrhage drains nationalwealth away from more productive uses to buy fuel which, once burned, isgone forever, leaving people poorer and the economy weaker.The relatively short construction time and fast payback of renewable investments,and the direct saving in the money it costs to build them, also tend toreduce pressure on interest rates. An electric utility in financial difficulties canboost the present value of its cash flow severalfold by canceling long-lead-timeplant construction and spending the money instead on efficiency/solar investments,which repay their investment very quickly. 65 Indeed, many utilities—bygetting about ten times as much new energy capacity per dollar and getting theirdollars back ten times as fast as if they had spent the same money building powerplants—will be able to reduce their need for investment capital so far (nearly ahundredfold) that they will no longer need to go to Wall Street to borrow expensivenew money. Nationally, the effect would be to increase capital available forall other investments by several trillion dollars over the next two decades or so. 66Furthermore, the direct saving of money from the operation of those investmentsis not only immediate and continuous; it is also widely distributed throughoutsociety rather than concentrated in a few sectors or localities.Efficiency improvements and soft technologies have very much lower and