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Energy Policy Forum > 2002
Articles
What is real security?
Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins
YES! Magazine
Spring 2002
America's security faces many serious threats. Strategic
planners, however, have tended to focus almost exclusively
on the military threat. They have largely ignored equally
grave vulnerabilities in vital life-support systems such
as our energy, water, food, data processing, and telecommunications
networks. And they have likewise neglected to safeguard the
national assets that form the foundation of our security.
In our 1982 Pentagon study Brittle Power: Energy Strategy
for National Security, we found that a handful of people
could shut down three-quarters of the oil and gas supplies
to the eastern states, cut the power to any major city, or
kill millions by damaging a nuclear power plant. Such hazards
remain real today. Between April 25 and May 11, 2001, for
example, infiltrators accessed the computer system of the
California Independent
System Operator, the agency that operates
California's power distribution network, potentially gaining
the capability
to black out whole cities, and cause physical damage to equipment.
Reliance
on fossil fuels and their extended pipelines contributes
to our insecurity. Even where fuel is extracted from politically
stable regions, it must be safely transported via accident-prone
ships, trucks, rail, or pipeline. On October 4, 2001, a drunk
shot a bullet through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, shutting
it down for 60 hours and spilling 285,000 gallons of oil.
Previously, the pipeline has been shot at on over 50 occasions.
A disgruntled engineer's plot to blow up critical points
then profit from oil futures trading was thwarted by luck
two years ago.
How, then, can America become less vulnerable
to attack and more resilient to mishaps that do occur? How
can we prepare
for a future that may hold increasing uncertainty, unrest,
and even violence? The answer may be found by basing engineering
on nature. Natural systems are efficient, diverse, dispersed,
and renewable, hence, inherently resilient.
The most resilience
per dollar invested comes from using energy very efficiently.
Minimizing energy waste both eliminates
dependence on the most vulnerable sources (such as oil from
the Persian Gulf) and makes energy failures milder, slower,
and easier to fix. Efficiency is also the cheapest way to
meet our energy needs.
During 1979-85, energy savings enabled
GNP to rise by 16 percent while oil use fell 15 percent and
Persian Gulf imports
fell 87 percent. This was primarily achieved by making cars
more efficient. Just making cars about three miles per gallon
more efficient could eliminate all Persian Gulf oil imports.
Did we put our young people in 0.6 mile per gallon army tanks
because we did not put them in 32 mile per gallon cars?
Another
key to resilience is to replace centralized energy sources
gradually with many richly interconnected dispersed
ones. This is the strategy of a tree that has many leaves,
each with many veins, so that the random nibbling of insects
won't disrupt the vital flow of nutrients. The value of dispersion
was proven in the Northeast Blackout of 1965, when a power
engineer in Holyoke, Massachusetts, was able to unhook the
city from the collapsing grid and connect 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.
More recently, in Sacramento, citizens suffered none of the
power shortages or price spikes that other Californians faced.
About ten years ago the city voted to shut down the troubled
nuclear plant that provided nearly half its power. Instead,
Sacramento invested in efficiency and a diverse supply mix
emphasizing renewables and distributed generation. These
investments boosted county economic output by $185 million
and added 2,946 employee-years of net jobs. Efficiency plus
a diverse, often decentralized, supply portfolio kept electricity
supplies reliable and constant-price during California's
power emergencies.
As the Sacramento example shows, dispersed energy systems
don't cost more; indeed, they're already winning in the marketplace.
Major homebuilders nationwide expect to enjoy a marketing
edge by providing hundreds of grid-connected rooftop-solar
systems on new housing developments; indeed, five Sacramento
projects already offer solar power as standard equipment.
Central power stations, no matter how well engineered, can't
supply really cheap electricity and simply cannot be made
secure. The power lines that deliver the electricity cost
more than the generators and cause almost all power failures.
On-site and neighborhood micro-power is cheaper and eliminates
grid losses and glitches. Rooftop photovoltaic systems, fuel
cells, or biomass-fed microturbine or engine generators can
be built on site to provide power for individual buildings
or neighborhoods. When such systems fail, the effect is small
and localized. If several small systems are interconnected,
one failure may hardly be noticed. Widespread disruption
of such a network would be difficult because it would require
too many agents and too much coordination. Dispersed systems
are even more reliable when they use renewable energy sources.
Thus, Department of Energy officials in 1980
had just cut the ribbon on a West Chicago solar-powered gas
station when a thunderstorm blacked out the city. That was
the only station pumping gas that afternoon. Manhattan's
CondÈ Nast office tower recruited tenants at premium
rents by offering the two most reliable known power supplies,
fuel and solar cells, incorporated into the building.
The
importance of energy resilience to national security may
hold wider lessons. First, focusing exclusively on centralized
military planning to counter overt military threats may
create costly frontal fortification while the back door stands
ajar.
Indeed, there are many back doors. The average molecule
of food is shipped some 1,300 miles before an American eats
it. Damage a few Mississippi River bridges and easterners
will soon starve. A malicious PC user could probably crash
the whole financial system. There are doubtless other key
vulnerabilities not yet discovered, and security experts
are only now starting to think about how to reduce them.
Whatever
military might has accomplished, then, it has not yet made
us truly secure. Perhaps it never will. The
roots
of real security go deeper than armies and missiles alone.
The parable of energy security reminds us that real security
in its widest sense begins at home and is strengthened
by self-sufficient, decentralized, sustainable communities.
Even more basic in our quest for real security, we should
understand the role of our nation's strategic assets.
These include a geography that shields us against physical
invasion
from overseas; a freedom of expression that shields
us from ideological invasion by exposing concepts to the
critical scrutiny of an informed public; an ecosystem
much of whose
once unique fertility can still be rescued from degradation;
a diverse, ingenious, and independent people; and a
richly inspiring body of political and spiritual values.
To
mature within these outward strengths--strengths more
fundamental
and lasting than any inventory of weaponry--will require
us to remain inwardly strong, confident in our lives
and liberties no matter what surprises may occur. This
in turn
will demand a continuing American revolution that expresses
in works a sincere faith in individual and community
effort. It was this faith that inspired our Republic,
long before
strategists became preoccupied with the narrower and
more evanescent kinds of security that only a faraway
government
could provide. It is that faith today, the very marrow
of
our political system, which alone can give us real
security.
Hunter and Amory Lovins founded and lead Rocky Mountain
Institute, www.rmi.org, a nonprofit applied-research
center that fosters
efficient and restorative use of resources to help
make the world secure, prosperous, and life-sustaining.
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