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

Chapter Four: What Makes the Energy System Vulnerable? 47An oil pipeline, for example, needs several dispatchers, but they could notunaided keep track of the status of pumps, valves, flow rates, batch locations,schedules, metering, costs, and so forth. 50 This requires a sophisticated networkof computer-controlled instruments and communication devices. In onemajor pipeline system,One small room, in a large southern city, houses the complete … control system(for) … several states.... Forced entry to the computerized center (andlow-technology sabotage) … could suddenly put the entire system back onhand operation. Each control valve, of many hundreds, would have to be visited,but … only a few men are available to run the system. There are norepair crews except contract crews in most cases. 51The Plantation and Colonial pipelines, supplying most of the EasternSeaboard’s refined products, parallel each other and interconnect at many vulnerablepoints; moreover, the control systems for both are in the same building.“A repeat of the University of Wisconsin action (a major bombing of a computercenter in 1970) by saboteurs could do serious damage to these operations.”52 (Colonial has since installed a back-up control center, but most of thecontrol vulnerability remains.) Even the failure of electric power can be a seriousembarrassment—as when, on 18 July 1981, many oil-industry control centerswere blacked out for forty miles around New Orleans, a major pipelineand oil-gathering center. 53Perhaps most dependent on control automation are electric grids, wheretransient events such as lightning bolts or routine circuit interruption oftenrequire action within hundredths of a second to prevent damage. Effectingcontrol decisions throughout the far-flung grids of wires and pipelines requirescomplete dependence, therefore, on computer decisions not first checked byhuman judgement, and on electronic telecommunications links. The disturbingconsequences of this dependence are explored in later chapters.The specialized nature of the control systems, and of the operations neededto maintain both them and the devices they control, concentrates immensepower in few hands. The economic and social cost of energy disruption, letalone the direct financial damage incurred by carrying charges on idle equipment,places “power to the people” in the hands of very small numbers ofpeople who are well aware of that power. Its exercise has already changed thecourse of history: Iranian oilfield workers in 1978 precipitated the fall of theShah by all but shutting down their country’s oil and gas exports, 54 while theircounterparts in the power industry blacked out most of Teheran. 55Such power can also be used to achieve narrower ends. Shortly after a coalstrike had brought down the Heath Government in 1974, an official of the