that Grid

[pynchonoid]

One or two of you may not be interested, but the Grid
and its social implications are of interest to
Pynchon. Lots of folks in the real-world "Vineland"
are already off the Grid, of course.  This sort of
thinking also finds an echo in GR.

<http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0826-12.htm>

Published on Tuesday, August 26, 2003 by the Bangor
Daily News 

Shedding Light on the Massive Power Blackout 

by John Buell 

 
For want of a nail, a ship was lost. As this tale
suggests, concerns about technological interdependence
preceded the digital age. Amidst war, the loss of a
few sailing ships could end the political rule and
cultural hegemony of whole civilizations. Nonetheless,
massive, unplanned, and often unwanted transformations
in daily life have never been reserved solely for
technological breakdowns. Plagues and famines from the
mid fourteenth through the sixteenth century played a
major role in the transformation of late medieval
society. Nature can exact its own surprises. 

The mid-August blackout throughout the Northeast
reminds us that even daily life in peacetime today is
implicated in dense technological webs and is
vulnerable to small shocks and seemingly trivial
failures. Our technological infrastructure surely
needs a radical reconstruction to reduce our
dependence on far-flung, finite, and polluting sources
of energy and increase our capacity for self-reliance.
Yet we best beware of dreams of a free lunch. Even
"natural" technologies may entail risks and limits.
Our best hope may lie in periodically reminding
ourselves of these limits. 

Though the mainstream media greeted the blackout with
shock and awe, the respected energy analyst Amory
Lovins had commented just a few days before the
blackout: "I am surprised the lights are still on."
Nor were these concerns limited to radical critics
like Lovins. In 2001, the head of the North American
Electric Reliability Council commented, "The question
is not whether, but when, the next major failure of
the grid will occur." 

The collapse of the grid might be seen as one more
instance of a broader problem in American life, the
failure to maintain the "infrastructure" of highways,
bridges, communication, and energy systems on which
all commerce depends. In the case of the electrical
grid, growing deregulation and competition have
created a system where the rules governing the grid
have been reduced to voluntary accords and where none
of the major players have any incentive to maintain
the grid as a whole. 

Yet even if we were to imagine a national utility
given the power and the resources to maintain an
adequate grid, other major problems might remain.
Writing recently in the Globe and Mail, Sarah Wolfe
and Thomas Homer-Dixon point out: "many of our common
networks, such as electrical grids, are "scale-free."
This type of network contains "hubs," which are nodes
with a disproportionately high number of connections
to other nodes in the network... Hubs create...
economic efficiency through organized distribution of
energy, commodities, or information. What Thursday's
power failure illustrated so aptly was the critical
vulnerability of scale-free networks - and that is how
failures of their hubs and key links can cascade out
of control. ... We can take steps to reduce these
vulnerabilities, by loosening the couplings in our
economic and technological networks, by building into
these networks buffering capacity of various kinds
and, perhaps most importantly, by distributing the
production of key goods and services." 

Energy analyst Harvey Wasserman, drawing on the work
of the Lovinses, reminds us such improvements are more
than just theoretical possibilities: "Photovoltaic
cells on rooftops and embedded in windows can produce
grid-free electricity, with battery or fuel-cell
backups. Geothermal power can heat and cool with
nothing but the power of the earth's crust. Methane
digestion can turn waste into usable gas. Basement
generators can use biomass fuels like ethanol and soy
diesel for off-grid self-sufficiency." 

The U.S. economy is at a point where energy
transformations that would increase local and regional
self-reliance and reduce our dependence on fossil
fuels and distant networks would also be more
efficient in an economic sense. The real costs of the
production and distribution of fossil fuels have never
been factored into our pricing system. In addition,
transmitting electricity over vast distances wastes a
substantial portion of the energy. For a fraction of
the government subsidies that have gone to nuclear
power, a range of green alternatives would already be
producing more efficient and less fragile power. 

Nonetheless, nature has never been without its own
unpleasant surprises and difficult tradeoffs. It would
be wise to be wary of any promise that more natural
energy systems can easily and automatically maximize
both efficiency and complete self-reliance. Are we
really sure as to the ecological, social, and economic
consequences of solar panels atop every house and
acres of windmills? Today's grids exit in part because
local businesses and residences with enough capacity
to meet their peak needs at all times will probably
have mountains of excess capacity. 

Perhaps the deepest lesson and question from the
recent blackout should be a willingness to question or
limit our faith that either nature or technology can
ever be made fully to serve our purposes. We best
proceed with caution, ever willing to make adjustments
along life's tortuous journey. 

John Buell is a political economist who lives in
Southwest Harbor, Maine. 

©2003 Bangor Daily News 

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