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

290National Energy Securitytion, in isolation from the grid, or even on direct current (Appendix Two).• Properly designed renewable sources tend to distribute energy in the finalforms in which it will be used, such as heat or unspecialized vehicular fuels.This eliminates many of the inflexible delivery systems that make nonrenewablecounterparts so logistically complex.• The cheapest and most effective renewable designs also tend to avoid interactionsbetween energy systems which depend on each other to stay in operation—whether by substituting convective circulation for active pumping in a thermalsystem or by using wind stirring or solar process heat in bioconversion.• Although many soft technologies have modestly high capital intensity, theirsis considerably lower than their competitors’ (Appendix Three).They have an even greater advantage in avoiding long lead times and specializedlabor and control requirements.• Their distribution systems, too, are seldom large enough to make distributionof noxious materials a significant concern.While all these agreeable properties are not a necessary part of a dispersed,renewable energy system, they can be designed into it in ways which a centralized,nonrenewable system does not permit at all. Indeed, doing this willoften tend to minimize direct economic costs.Properly arranged soft technologies also satisfy most or all of the principlesof resilient design (Chapter Thirteen). They are mainly dispersed to match theiruses, capturing inherently dispersed natural energy flows by diverse means inmany devices each of which serves sufficiently few and local needs to have alow cost of failure. Because the devices are near to and readily understandable by theirusers, moreover, early detection of failure would be a natural consequence of the“transparency” of the technical system. The energy devices’ large numbers,diversity, and overlapping end-use functions can offer both numerical and functionalredundancy—as would be the case if a town chose a blend of a large numberof different sources of electricity (wind, microhydro, solar cells, solarponds with heat engines, etc.) or of biomass liquid fuel technologies, offeringbuilt-in back-up in case particular devices or types of devices have trouble.The “fine-grained texture” of the many, relatively small devices tends to confinethe effects of failures to local users. As in a biological hierarchy (ChapterThirteen), whether or not a given device works, or is substituted for by another,need not affect energy supplies in a wider area. This is particularly truebecause electricity-generating technologies (those whose interruption is generallymost immediately consequential) can readily be interconnected whilemaintaining node autonomy—the ability to stand alone at need. They provide fargreater functional flexibility in adapting to changes in operating conditions and