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

The notes for Chapter 7 appear on page 353 of this pdf.Chapter SevenWar and TerrorismAccidental failures in energy systems randomly hit points of weakness andresources needed for recovery. Deliberate attacks, however, seek out these vulnerabilitiesand exploit them to maximize damage. The trend towards evermore centralized energy technologies creates opportunities for devastatingattacks of a kind and on a scale never before possible. This has long been foreseenby miliary planners. The first American post-Hiroshima strategic reviewrecommended dispersion of industrial facilities as a civil defense measure, 1and the same principle is considered desirable in the Soviet Union. 2 Neithercountry has seriously practiced it.Centralized facilities as military targetsEven when energy systems were considerably simpler than modern electricalgrids, they proved attractive targets in wartime. The Energy and DefenseProject found several such cases instructive. 3 Hitler’s Germany used electricityfor three-fourths of industrial motive power, as well as for all electrochemicalprocesses (arc furnaces, electrolysis, production of synthetic nitrogen and oiland rubber). Four-fifths of the electricity came from central steam plants. Thesewere highly concentrated: in 1933, one and four-tenths percent of the thermalplants provided over half the total output, and five percent of the plants providedfourth-fifths of the output. The Allies, however, mistakenly assumed thatdespite this inviting concentration of generating capacity, German grid interconnectionsprovided enough flexibility of routing that power stations did notdeserve a high priority as bombing targets. Thus power stations escaped substantialtargeting until the vast bombing raids of 1944.Rarely has there been a costlier error in military planning. The Nazis were68