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

Chapter Sixteen: Inherently Resilient Energy Supplies 291feedstocks than virtually any “hard technology” could tolerate. Their designcan readily incorporate—and often will for economic reasons—modularity andstandardization at least to ensure compatibility with each other, as in mass productionof solar cells or site-assembly of mass-produced collector components.The diversity of people and institutions pursuing them, however, will help toprevent a degree of standardization that might serve to propagate designerrors. That safeguard is reinforced by a speed of evolution that has already compressedgenerations of technical development into a few years. Being made ofrelatively cheap and simple materials and using relatively undemandingprocesses, soft technologies can readily incorporate internal decoupling and bufferingwithout unreasonable extra cost. Their simplicity and forgivingness, their accessibilityto and reproducibility by a wide range of actors, and their social compatibilityare among their main hallmarks. There is hardly a quality conducive toresilience which they do not have in abundance; hardly one conducive to brittlenessand vulnerability which, with proper design, they cannot avoid.A final feature of resilient energy technologies which, in these troubleddays, cannot be neglected is that they are far easier to protect from harm (aswell as to repair, replace, or augment by expedients) than are more elaborateand centralized energy systems. If natural disaster or attack threatens, smalldevices can be protected “from extremely high blast pressures, and presumably…[from]fires and falling debris, “by using the same techniques whichwere developed in the Soviet Union and adapted by Boeing for protectingvital industrial equipment. Considerable protection can be achieved just byplacing a device “on shock-absorbing material such as styrofoam blocks,wrapping it in plastic, covering it with crushable material such as plastic chipsor metal shavings, and covering this all with a thick layer of dirt.” 87 No similartechniques are applicable to technologies that cover many acres, stand hundredsof feet high, and are in their own right conspicuous, tempting targets—hard to repair, harder to replace, and impossible to shield.For all these reasons, the widespread use of inherently resilient technologiesfor supply energy, in conjunction with highly efficient energy use, canprofoundly improve national security. The combination could make impossiblemany types of large-scale failure of energy supply, and could eliminate theenergy systems whose failure could most seriously imperil the public. Theoption of making America’s energy system more efficient, dispersed, diverse,and sustainable offers arguable the greatest national security opportunity inour lifetimes. Technologies now available offer our nation an extraordinarychance to turn a present danger into a new source of security and prosperity.The next and final chapter considers how actions by governments, privateindustry, communities and (above all) individuals can together grasp this