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

332National Energy Securitycater specifically to customers’ exact needs and which have no innate preferencefor supplying more energy rather than improving energy productivity. 132Other institutional innovations are bound to emerge to meet the need of fixingup and solarizing our nation’s stock of buildings and equipment, just asthey have emerged in the past when it became necessary to change large capitalstocks relatively quickly. For example, decades ago many of our cities, suchas Los Angeles, changed the voltage or frequency of their electrical system.Metropolitan Toronto and Montreal did it with fleets of specially equippedvans which retrofitted each neighborhood in turn: one van contained hundredsof clocks from which householders could choose replacements to swapfor their clocks designed to run at the old frequency; another contained amachine shop for rewinding motors and rebuilding controls; all were staffed byresourceful people who had used the vans to clean up after the Normandyinvasion. Other technical and social innovations enabled Holland to switchmany boilers from oil and coal to Groningen natural gas; enabled Britain toswitch, over a decade or less, to North Sea gas and smokeless fuel, and in abouta year to decimal coinage; enabled Sweden to switch to right-hand driving duringa single night in 1967 (the main expense was recutting the bus doors); andare today enabling Sweden to change its cities from single-building oil furnacesto district heating in about ten years. These and other examples of how a societycan organize itself for constructive change offer rich lessons for the changesthat can, in the coming decades, create energy security for America.Resilience begins at homeThe foregoing sections have shown why community-based action is the fastestand surest way to build a resilient energy system. Support for such local analysis andaction—reinforcement of what is already a rapidly growing national trend—isour most important recommendation.This chapter has described the peculiar vividness and social effectivenessof efficiency-and-renewables programs built by local institutions with localresources to respond to local needs. (Readers are urged to communicate othersuch examples to us.) It has shown, too, how local governments—state, county,and municipal—have extensive powers and opportunities to hasten thetransition to a more efficient, diverse, dispersed, renewable, hence resilientenergy system. But governments at any scale are not the only or even necessarilythe most important ingredient of that transition. A multitude of organizations—women’sgroups, labor unions, churches, professional societies, farmgroups, business and fraternal groups, specialized societies—are alreadyemerging as leaders in this creation of a more lasting basis for national security.The Daughters of the American Revolution have written and sponsored