on energy systems around the world. Brittle Power documents such attacks in 26 of the United States and in 40 foreign countries. These attacks are now occurring about once every ten days (especially in campaigns by Soviet-trained guerrillas). They are becoming more frequent, intense, and sophisticated. The United States has so far been very lucky. Yet, leading experts on world terrorism doubt this luck will hold. Currently, Federal policies are systematically making the energy system more vulnerable. The devices being promoted as the backbone of America's energy supply for the 21st Century are precisly the most vulnerable ones: offshore and Arctic oil and gas, big pipelines, and huge power plants (especially nuclear ones) linked by long transmission lines. Twenty-billion dollars in subsidies are being offered to build uncompetitive synthetic- fuel plants—a technology so fragile that both times it has been tried (in Nazi Germany and contemporary South Africa) the plants were promptly and successfully blown up. These policies of Strength Through Exhaustion are said to be driven by the need to stop importing oil. To be sure, that is an urgent problem. One saboteur in a dinghy could cut off 85% of Saudi Arabia's exports for three years or more (the time needed to manufacture some key parts of the oil terminals), then repeat the attack. But we have the means to solve the problem of imported oil. Technologies now exist to make cars and buildings far more efficient. Just those two measures could save more than enough energy to eliminate U.S. oil imports within this decade. This is faster than a power plant or synfuel plant commissioned now could deliver any energy whatever. An energy-saving program, too, would cost only a tenth of the money required to build the power or synfuel plants. But reducing oil imports—now less than 10% of America's energy—wouldn't buy much security if our domestic energy supplies remained highly vulnerable. Such "solutions" as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve may offer a false sense of security, but actually are part of the problem. One person in three nights could knock out the three pipelines needed to deliver the Reserve's oil to refineries. The loss of three of the biggest domestic pipelines could indeed be more serious than a complete cutoff of oil imports. Winter damage to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (it has already been lightly bombed twice) could even turn it into the world's largest Chapstick® as 800 miles of hot oil congealed inside. Unfortunately, modern energy systems are so complex that nobody can predict how they might fail, even accidentally. Worse still, designing them to be reliable in the face of predictable kinds of technical failures does not provide, and may even reduce, an even more vital quality—resilience in the face of incalculable failures (such as sabotage). Few energy engineers today have this quality in mind. They therefore design centralized, monolithic systems which don't fail often (at least without help), but when they do fail, they fail big. How, then, can the American energy system evolve toward greater resilience rather than less? How can we prepare for a surprise-full future—one that may hold increasing uncertainty, unrest, and even violence? The answer may be found by examining many kinds of engineering—and above all biology, with its billions of years' experience in coping with surprises—to see how systems can be designed for inherent resilience. Our research yielded 20-odd design principles which could be applied to the energy system so as to make major failures of energy supply impossible. Such a system would be far more efficient, diverse, dispersed, and renewable than today's. The things we should do to save energy and money also turn out to be virtually the same as those needed for real energy security. The most resilience per dollar invested—the "most bounce per buck"—comes from using energy very efficiently. Wringing more work from our energy can not only eliminate dependence on the most vulnerable sources (such as oil from the Persian Gulf), but can also make failures of other sources milder, slower, more graceful, and easier to fix. A key to resilience is gradually to replace centralized energy sources with many dispersed ones, richly interconnected—the strategy of a tree which has many leaves, each with many veins, so that insects' random nibbles won't disrupt the vital flow of nutrients. The value of such dispersion was reproven in the Northeast Blackout of 1965, when the power engineer in Holyoke, Whatever military might has accomplished, then, it has not yet made us truly secure. Perhaps it never will. June/July 1983 RAIN Page 5 Massachusetts, was able to unhook the city from the collapsing grid and hook up instead to a local gas turbine. The money saved by not having to black out Holyoke paid off the cost of building that power plant in four hours. Renewable energy sources can enjoy the benefits of interconnection when you wish but can also stand alone when you need to. Thus, Department of Energy officials in 1980 had just cut the ribbon on a West Chicago gas station, powered by solar cells, when a thunderstorm blacked out the city. That was the only station pumping gas that afternoon. Likewise, a Great Plains farmer who uses windpower recently saw on the TV evening news a report that his whole area was blacked out. He went outside and looked. Sure enough, all his neighbors' lights were off. So he came back in and watched his wind-powered TV some more to see when the neighbors' lights would come back on. Many people would like to be in that position. By a happy coincidence, the efficiency gains and the many kinds of renewable energy sources which, together, are enough to meet essentially all the long-term needs of an advanced industrial economy are also the cheapest energy
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