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

Chapter Four: What Makes the Energy System Vulnerable? 39the central supply of electricity requires a continuous, direct connection from sourceto user. Interruptions of central electric supply, having no buffer storage, areinstantaneously disruptive. The grid exposes large flows of energy to interruptionby single acts at single points, and there is only limited freedom toreroute the flow around the damage.Furthermore, centralized supply grids cannot discriminate well betweenusers. Electricity for a water heater, which may be unaffected by a few hour’sinterruption, must bear the high cost of the extreme reliability required for subwaysand hospital operating theaters. And the grid is all-or-nothing: it must beso reliable because its failure is so catastrophic, blacking out a wide area simultaneously.If your heating oil delivery fails to arrive, you can put on a sweater orgo to the next room. If the electric grid fails, there is no unaffected next door:everyone who relies on the electric grid is in the same boat at the same time.Another reason why electrical grids require continuous, meticulous management26 is that they carry electrons in a particular, precisely defined time patternof variation that is synchronous throughout the grid. Departures from synchronismcan seriously damage equipment and can even cause the whole grid tobreak down. The exacting requirement for synchronism raises serious problemsof grid stability which are examined further in Chapters Five and Ten.Natural gas pipeline grids have a requirement of their own that is somewhatanalogous to synchronism in electric grids. While electric grids cantransmit power at levels varying all the way down to zero, gas pipelines cannot,because if pressure falls below a certain level, the pumps can no longermove the gas. In practice, this means that gas grids must keep input in stepwith output. If coal barges or oil tankers cannot deliver fast enough to keepup with the demand, there is simply a corresponding shortage at the deliveryend. But if a gas grid cannot supply gas fast enough to keep up with thedemand, it can cease working altogether. In January 1977, calling on storedgas and adding grid interconnections was not enough to keep up the grid pressure,so major industrial customers had to be cut off, causing dislocations inOhio and New York (as noted earlier).The alternative would have been even worse, because the collapse of gaspressure could not have been confined to the transmission pipelines. Withouta continuous supply of high-pressure gas, the retail gas distribution system toowould have been drained below its own critical pressure. If distribution pressurecollapses, pilot lights go out in innumerable buildings, including vacantones. A veritable army of trained people then has to go immediately into eachbuilding, turn off the gas to prevent explosions, and later return to restore serviceand relight all the pilots. This occasionally happens on a local level, but hashardly ever happened on a large scale. It is such a monumental headache that