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

36Brittle Poweraverage customers. Some electricity travels much farther: British Columbiahydroelectricity goes as far as Southern California and Arizona, and someChurchill Falls (eastern Canadian) hydroelectricity probably gets nearly toFlorida.The average barrel of oil lifted in the United States is transported a total ofabout six to eight hundred miles before final use. 16 The average unit of naturalgas probably moves even father. In 1974, sixty-six percent of U.S.-minedcoal was hauled an average of three hundred miles by rail, and twenty-onepercent—much of it in the Ohio River Valley—travelled an average of fourhundred eighty miles by barge. 17 Remote Western strip mining and exploitationof Arctic and offshore petroleum resources will greatly increase the averagehaul lengths. “The average distance we have moved our energy sourceshas continuously increased ..., and all signs point to an even greater extensionof these vital supply lines.” 18 Longest of all—halfway around the world—are thesupply lines for Mideast oil.These long haul lengths increase vulnerability to all types of hazards.Different fuel delivery systems, of course, have different vulnerabilities. “The[California] pipeline network contains fewer parallel links than the highwaynet, and has less excess capacity for carrying fuel. Therefore, it is more vulnerableto disruption by earthquake. However, it is less vulnerable to aTeamsters’ Union strike.” 19 A few heavily used arteries of fuel transport makeseveral different forms of energy (oil, coal, coal-fired electricity) simultaneouslyvulnerable to localized events: for example, in the case of the OhioRiver, to freezing, bridge collapse, or river fires like the gasoline barge firewhich recently closed a fifteen-mile stretch of the river for two days. 20Limited substitutabilityUntil such recent developments as the commercialization of fluidized-bedboilers, 21 few of which are yet in use, it was costly and uncommon for boilersto be designed to burn more than one or at most two kinds of fuel. It is especiallyhard to handle both solid and fluid fuels, because they require differentkinds of equipment to store and feed them, and the duplication of investmentwould normally be unattractive. Indeed, the whole infrastructure for processing,moving, and using fuels, whether directly or via electricity, has been builton the assumption that several competing fuels will always be readily availablein essentially unlimited quantities. The engineer’s task was simply todecide which of those fuels would be cheapest in the near term and to procurea device for burning just that fuel. The lifetime of these devices typicallyranges from one to several decades. Accordingly, a complex pattern of past