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

The notes for Chapter 6 appear on page 352 of this pdf.Chapter SixPicking Up the PiecesModern technologies rank among the greatest achievements of engineering.They embody great skill and a considerable investment of scarce resources.Often, to achieve the greatest technical efficiency, they are custom-designedfor unique local circumstances, so that there is no other plant quite like them.For these reasons, it is difficult to stock major spare parts for themSpare partsRecovery from major failures is often limited by the availability of spareparts. It used to be customary for electric utilities to keep on hand extra setsof large generator coils, large bearings, and so forth. But with higher unit costs(owing to larger unit sizes) and greater manufacturing specializations, andwith the added burden of ad valorem inventory taxes and recent high interestrates, spares have greatly dwindled. 1 Only the smaller, cheaper, more frequentlyneeded items are now commonly stocked. 2 Thus replacement of anysizeable item that fails is likely to require a protracted special order. Only afterthe 1977 blackout did Con Ed decide to procure a spare for a phase-regulatingtransformer whose unavailability had contributed greatly to the blackoutand which had previously caused four lesser outages. The spare took over ayear to manufacture.Spare parts may be lost in a major accident if they are stored in vulnerablelocations. 3 For example, when Typhoon Karen struck Guam in November1962 with sustained winds of one hundred seventy miles per hour and gustsup to two hundred seven miles per hour, repair to badly disrupted electricaldistribution systems was “materially lengthened” by the total loss of vitalspare parts which had been stored in light sheet-metal buildings. 4 The propri-59