Brittle Power; Energy Strategy for National Security
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BRITTLE POWER Energy Strategy for National Security Amory B. Lovins L. Hunter Lovins “Americans do not need to be told how frequently ‘things don’t work’. Few … however, realize how vulnerable the nation- al energy system has become … This book explains that vividly.” —Foreign Affairs Published by Brick House Publishing Co., Inc. 34 Essex Street Andover, Massachusetts Production Credits: Editor: Jack Howell Edited by Nancy Irwin Designed and Produced by Mike Fender Typeset in new Baskerville and Caslon 540 by dnh Typesetting, Cambridge, Massachusetts Printed by Book Press; Brattleboro, Vermont New edition copyright© 2001 by Rocky Mountain Institute Copyright© 1982 by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lovins, Amory B., 1947– Brittle power. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Energy policy—United States. 2. United States—National security. I. Lovins, L. Hunter. 11. Title. HD9502.U52L67 1982 333.79’0973 82-4159 ISBN 0-931790-28-X AACR2 ISBN 0-931790-49-2 pbk. Printed in the United States of America Contents Foreword Admiral Thomas H. Moorer and R. James Woolsey ix Acknowledgments xi PART ONE: BRITTLE POWER Chapter One National Energy Insecurity How did we become so vulnerable? 2 Purpose and scope 4 Organization 8 Chapter Two What Can Go Wrong? 10 Natural events 10 Deliberate actions 14 Mistakes 15 Command, control, and communications disruptions 16 Chapter Three How Systems Fail 19 Complexity 19 Many failures from one source 20 Unpredictable interactions 22 Tracing higher-order consequences: an illustration 25 Surprises 27 Chapter Four What Makes the Energy System Vulnerable? 30 Dangerous materials 31 Limited public acceptance 33 Centralization of supplies 34 Long haul distances 35 Limited substitutability 36 Continuity and synchronism in grids 38 Inflexibilities of energy delivery systems 40 Interactions between energy systems 42 High capital intensity 43 v Long lead items 45 Specialized labor and control requirements 46 Potential for misuse of energy distribution systems 48 Chapter Five Case Study: The 1977 New York Blackout 51 A complex, cascading failure 51 Human error and oversight 54 Unexpected complications 55 Mitigation 57 Chapter Six Picking Up the Pieces 59 Spare parts 59 Repair times, facilities, and skills 60 Propagating failures 62 The cost of failure 63 Chapter Seven Wa r and Terrorism 68 Centralized facilities as military targets 68 Protection by dispersion 69 Energy in jeopardy 70 Electronic vulnerability 72 The terrorist threat 74 Insiders and security lapses 77 Terrorist resources 78 A growing danger 83 PART TWO: DISASTERS WAITING TO HAPPEN Chapter Eight Liquefied Natural Gas 87 LNG tankers 91 LNG terminals and storage tanks 92 LNG shipments by truck 94 Analogous hazards of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) 95 The risk from liquefied energy gases (LEG) 98 Chapter Nine Oil and Gas 100 Oil and gas fields and shipping facilities 101 Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf 102 Offshore platforms 105 Primary oil storage 107 Oil refineries 109 Natural gas processing plants 111 Oil pipelines 112 Pipeline sabotage and repair 114 Concentrations of pipeline capacity 116 Arctic pipelines 117 Gas pipelines 119 To tal vulnerability 121 Chapter Ten Power Stations and Grids 123 Power stations 124 Electrical transmission 127 vi Substations and distribution networks 130 Control and communications 132 System stability 134 Instabilities caused by the grid 136 Brittleness is increasing 138 Chapter Eleven Nuclear Power 141 Nuclear terrorism: intentions and incidents 142 The potential for reactor sabotage 150 Other types of attacks on nuclear facilities 154 Other vulnerabilities in the nuclear fuel cycle 156 Military attacks on nuclear facilities 158 Attacking reactors with terrorist bombs 159 Radiological consequences of major releases 162 Logistical and financial impacts 165 Psychological and social impacts 166 Chapter Twelve Forward, Lemmings! 169 PART THREE: NATIONAL ENERGY SECURITY Chapter Thirteen Designing for Resilience 177 Resilience versus reliability 177 Passive versus active resilience 179 Resilience in biological systems 182 To ward a design science for resilience 190 Analogous universes 207 The brittleness of mainframe computers 208 The response: “distributed processing” 210 Chapter Fourteen Rethinking the Energy System 214 The semantics of “decentralization” 215 Centralization: the root of the problem 218 Social “decentralization”? 219 The economics of decentralized energy 220 Can decentralized investments be fast enough? 223 Renewable sources: the dark horse pulls ahead 225 A regional case study 227 Is this a real turning point? 229 Why should small technologies be faster? 231 Chapter Fifteen End-Use Efficiency: Most Resilience Per Dollar 235 The state of the art 238 Micro benefits 248 Macro benefits 253 Economic priorities 257 National least-cost scenarios 259 Efficiency is the key to resilience 262 Chapter Sixteen Inherently Resilient Energy Supplies 264 Sustainable sources 266 How reliable are renewable energy flows? 268 Not all renewable sources make sense 270 vii Simplified versions 273 Quality control 274 System integration 275 Linking to the grid: resilience lost? 277 Technical status of resilient renewable sources 282 Economic status of resilient renewable sources 283 External costs and benefits 284 Built-in resilience 288 Chapter Achieving Resilience (with Alec Jenkins) 293 Seventeen The Federal role 293 Making policy coherent 298 State programs 300 Why act now? 301 What energy dependence costs the community 305 Creating a sustainable local economy 307 Getting started 311 Concerted action 316 Crisis response 320 What local governments can do 322 Financing 323 Energy services delivery 331 Resilience begins at home 332 APPENDICES Appendix One Scale Issues 335 Direct construction costs 338 Operating costs 340 Reserve margin 342 Thermal efficiency 342 Waste heat integration 343 Transmission and distribution costs 345 Construction time and indirect costs 346 Control of residuals 349 Other issues of scale economics 349 What is the net result? 351 Appendix Two Technical Progress in Appropriate Renewable Sources 354 Heat 354 Electricity 363 Interconnection with the electric grid 369 Summary 373 Appendix Three Economic Assessment of Appropriate Renewable Sources 374 Notes 391 Bibliography 429 Index 469 About the Authors 485 viii Foreword The professional fraternity of those who deal regularly with questions of nation- al security has its own language, its own rituals, its own stylized forms of well-worn argument. Most strategic analysts, for example, obligingly sort them- selves out into two herds—those who advocate only an “assured destruction” mission for our strategic forces and those who support a “counterforce” capa- bility. They then find some specific piece of new hardware about which they can conveniently disagree, and they do, interminably—ringing all the changes on a ritualized dispute while the public looks on with a mixture of boredom, fear, and confusion. Look out, fraternity, here come Hunter and Amory Lovins. The authors of this fascinating, disturbing, and—in its own way—hopeful book disrupt this well-worn debate in a number of healthy ways. They insist on taking seriously one of our society’s most troubling vulnerabilities—the extremely fragile nature of the way it acquires, transmits, and uses energy. Because they take seriously a problem which has grown, under our noses, while we have almost all refused to think about it, they will doubtless hear some try to argue that the threats they describe could not realistically become manifest. But the vulnerabilities are so numerous—to the weather, to accidents arising from complexity (“one damned thing leads to another”), to a handful of terrorists, to the detonation of even a single smuggled nuclear weapon—that denying the plausibility of such threats is unlikely to prove persuasive. The authors’ recommended solutions for a more resilient energy system—greater end-use efficiency and redundant, decentralized, simple, and renewable ener- gy sources—thus appear in a very different light than that in which such rec- ommendations have often appeared before. In the hands of the authors, these are not solutions that derive from a desire to take to the hills with a bag of Krugerrands to abandon a decaying society, nor are they steps that resist the use of modern technology or demand special subsidies. The Lovinses seek ix x Foreword rather to persuade us not to resist what the free market and millions of citi- zens and local governments are already doing in their own self-interest. Efforts to stereotype the authors’ approach in terms of the traditional national security debate will prove to be a difficult exercise. In their critique of the false sense of certainty about the predictability of failure and the other dan- gers that accompany excessive centralization of authority and excessive reliance on highly quantified analysis, the authors have much in common with the military officers, Members of Congress, and others who have led the criti- cism of the reigning theology of systems analysis in the Pentagon. The Lovinses face honestly the devastation that could be caused by the use of nuclear weapons and what our society could do to reduce the damage to itself if such a horror should ever occur. In this their thinking has certain common threads with those who take civil defense seriously. (Consequently