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

70Brittle PowerAt least since then, if not for longer, the People’s Republic of China hasreportedly taken military vulnerability to heart in dispersing energy facilities.For example, a third of China’s rural electricity, a quarter of its hydro generation,and, thirty-six percent of its total hydro capacity in 1981 came from morethan ninety thousand small hydro sets, often generating only kilowatts or tensof kilowatts each 12 —enough to run an American house or neighborhood.Furthermore, seven million small anaerobic digesters (a fifteenfold increaseduring 1975–78) provide fertilizer, and about a third of the units provide reliablesupplies of biogas. This local fuel is used for cooking and lighting, and insome cases for operating diesel generators in the general range of five to fortykilowatts of electric output. 13 To date, the dispersed biogas plants serve onlyfour percent of the Chinese population, but they are not yet widely used in theparts of the country that are climatically most favorable. 14 Chinese planners arewell aware of the military benefits of even this modest dispersion.A similar philosophy of dispersion is apparently applied, so far as practicable,in Israel. Oil and power facilities are carefully divided into relativelysmall, dispersed pieces. It was not lost on Israeli planners that their jetsdestroyed virtually the whole of Syria’s oil installations (and two main powerstations) in a half-hour early in the Six Days’ War because they were so highlyconcentrated geographically. Thus, when Arab sabotage of Israeli powerlines blacked out Negev settlements, Elath was not affected because that cityhad built its own generators as a precaution. 15 But mere dispersion of generatingcapacity is not always enough to ensure resilience—as Israel found out in1979 when a transmission failure cascaded, New York-style, and blacked outvirtually the whole country at once. 16 (Later chapters will diagnose the missingingredients for making a power grid “crashproof.”)Energy in jeopardyRhodesia made the same mistake as Syria—centralized oil depots—and paidfor it when Black nationalist guerrillas blew one up in December 1978 (ChapterNine). Likewise, June 1980 opened with a strong, simultaneous attack on threekey South African plants: 17 the two SASOL synfuel plants already built (whichare planned, with one more now under construction, to provide nearly half thecountry’s liquid fuels by 1984), and the Natred refinery, the smallest of four inthe country. The attack seriously damaged SASOL One. The failure of someexplosive charges to go off (although seven bombs did) 18 narrowly savedSASOL Two, six times as large and just starting operation, from destruction.Millions of gallons at the refinery and its tank farms burned in a fire that wasvisible fifty miles away. The plants, along with the key pipelines carrying crude