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

Chapter Four: What Makes the Energy System Vulnerable? 37investments now locks each region and each industry into a relatively inflexiblepattern of fuel and power use, limiting its adaptability to interruptions inthe supply of any particular form of energy.This problem is perhaps most familiar to electric utilities, whose hundredplusbillion dollars’ worth of power stations represent the largest fixed industrialasset in the whole economy. Past fuel interruptions (the 1973–74 oilembargo, the 1978 coal strike, the 1975–77 Western drought, occasional naturalgas curtailments, generic nuclear shutdowns) have highlighted regional concentrationson one or another fuel. Utility plans for 1989 reflect continuing fuelspecialization of different kinds in virtually every region: over seventy-five percentcoal dependence in the East Central states; over fifty percent oil in theFlorida and Southern California/Nevada regions; over twenty-five percent oilin the New York, New England, North California/Nevada, and Arizona/NewMexico pools; over fifty percent gas in South Central; twenty-five to fifty percentnuclear in New England and in the Pennsylvania/New Jersey/Marylandand Chicago areas; and over sixty percent hydro in the Pacific Northwest. 22This might at first sight look like healthy diversity; but it also guaranteesthat a major interruption in the supply of any of these sources will put at riskthe electrical supplies of at least one substantial region. Utilities in one regionhave some capacity to interchange power with those in a different regionwhose fuel vulnerabilities are different: in recent years, coal power has been“wheeled” to oil-short areas, and during the 1977–78 coal strike, vice versa. 23But this interchange capacity is limited in scope; it does not apply to the wholecountry, since the eastern and western grids connect via only one small linein Nebraska, and the Texas grid is connected to neither. Moreover, interchangeintroduces new vulnerabilities (explored more fully in Chapter Ten).Throughout the energy system, the ability to substitute is limited not onlybetween different fuels but also between different types of the same fuel. Thereare different kinds of coal, for example, whose content of ash varies by up to ahundredfold; of sulfur, by at least tenfold; and of heat, by at least twofold.Conventional furnaces can burn coal only within a specified, often rather narrow,range of chemical and physical properties. On a home scale, most woodstovesare designed to burn hardwood or softwood efficiently, cleanly, and safely—butnot to be able to burn either indiscriminately (without special design features).Oil is refined into an immense variety of products ranging from tar towatch oil. Just among the many grades of fuel oils and of motor vehicle fuels,there is often only a limited range of interchageability for a given use. Even crudeoil comes in many varieties, differing in specific gravity (heaviness), viscosity,chemical composition, and trace impurities such as sulfur and heavy metals.Refineries normally need to blend crude oils of different composition—a