The World’s Biggest Machine is Breaking Down
by Jason Godesky
Many of the so-called “alternatives” to fossil fuels rely on the electrical grid. We have seen the problems that nuclear and photovoltaics will face even delivering on their production promises, but even if they were to somehow solve those problems, there is still the problem of the grid itself. Most of the energy sources offered are simply means of generating electricity; this is applied to necessities like transportation through innovations like hydrogen batteries or electric cars. Even so, the electricity itself must be transported from the nuclear power plant, PV cell, or other means by which it is produced, to the car it will power, or the home it will heat, or whatever other task the energy is needed for.
That transportation is provided by the electrical power grid. Sometimes called “the world’s biggest machine” by engineers, most of the energy “alternatives” proposed will require it to not only continue supplying us with the energy we use now (and the energy we’d need for economic growth anyway), but additionally to also carry the energy load we will need to replace our fossil fuel usage. This will be an impossible feat, since the current load alone is already breaking down “the world’s biggest machine” under the weight of its own complexity.
First, we must establish some basic physics about electricity in order to understand why this giant “machine” is breaking down. Most importantly, electricity is an event more than it is a “thing.” Electricity is the movement of electrons; to send electricity over some distance, it must propogate itself, with each electical charge causing more electrons down the line to move. Every object has some amount of conductivity for electrical current; copper is especially good at this, which is why electrical wires are typically made of copper. However, every object also has some amount of resistance: even travelling through copper, an electrical charge diminishes the farther it travels. This is why booster stations are necessary—this also means that the more electricity has to travel, the more energy must be generated simply to overcome resistance.
The second thing that must be understood is the result of this: the electrical grid is a graph. This is a term used here in the mathematical sense: a collection of nodes, connected by edges. The nodes here are both power plants and the various places where electricity is consumed (though electrical power companies differentiate between the long-range “transmission” and the short-range “distribution” of electrical power). Edges can have weights (and in this case, they do—the resistance that must be overcome to transport electricity along that line). This means that the “world’s biggest machine” is a gigantic graph.
The various gigantic graphs that have lately attracted notice share other properties besides sheer size. In particular:
They tend to be sparse. The graphs have relatively few edges, considering their vast numbers of vertices. In a graph with n vertices, the maximum number of edges is n(n-1)/2, or roughly n 2/2. (I consider here only “simple” graphs, as opposed to multigraphs, where more than one edge can join a pair of vertices.) In large real-world graphs, the number of edges is generally closer to n than to n2/2. For example, the Hollywood graph has 13 million edges connecting its 225,000 vertices. That sounds like a lot, but it falls far short of the 25 billion edges in a “complete graph,” or “clique,” where an edge joins every pair of vertices.
They tend to be clustered. In the World Wide Web, two pages that are linked to the same page have an elevated probability of including links to one another. Likewise among friends, if two people both know you, there’s a higher-than-normal chance they also know each other. Thus the edges of the graph are not distributed uniformly but tend to form clumps or knots.
They tend to have a small diameter. The diameter of a graph is the longest shortest path across it, or in other words the length of the most direct route between the most distant vertices. Diameter is finite only for connected graphs—those that are all in one piece. A connected graph must have at least n-1 edges, and its largest possible diameter is n-1. At the opposite extreme, a complete graph, with n2/2 edges, has a diameter of 1, since you can get from any vertex to any other in a single step. Graphs nearer to the minimum than the maximum number of edges might be expected to have a large diameter. Clustering could increase the diameter further still, since edges used up in creating local clumps leave fewer edges available for long-distance connections. Nevertheless, the diameter of the Web and other big graphs seems to hover around the logarithm of n, which is much smaller than n itself.
Graphs with the three properties of sparseness, clustering and small diameter have been termed “small-world” graphs, after the familiar cocktail-party experience of making a new acquaintance in a distant city and discovering you have a friend in a common. The name was introduced by Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz of Cornell University, whose 1998 paper in Nature discussed the Hollywood graph and several other examples.1
As a result of this, not every edge is created equal. Eliminating a key edge may cause cascading failure that will break the entire grid. What is more, in a complex graph, it may be difficult or even impossible to know which edges these are.
In August 2003, a tree branch in Ohio caused the largest blackout in North America’s history, for a fairly simple reason: the electrical grid is so complex, and running so close to capacity, that even small problems can cascade into catastrophic breakdowns. As with most problems of complexity beyond the point of diminishing returns, the question of what finally pushed the system over the edge is much less important than the question of what made the system of complex that it became vulnerable to something so small in the first place.
Prior to deregulation, which began in the 1990s, regional and local electric utilities were regulated, vertical monopolies. A single company controlled electricity generation, transmission, and distribution in a given geographical area. Each utility generally maintained sufficient generation capacity to meet its customers’ needs, and long-distance energy shipments were usually reserved for emergencies, such as unexpected generation outages. In essence, the long-range connections served as insurance against sudden loss of power. The main exception was the net flows of power out of the large hydropower generators in Quebec and Ontario. …
In 1992, the economic rules governing the grid began to change with passage of the Energy Policy Act. This law empowered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to separate electric power generation from transmission and distribution. Power deregulation—in reality, a change in regulations—went slowly at first. Not until 1998 were utilities, beginning in California, compelled to sell off their generating capacity to independent power producers, such as Enron and Dynergy.
The new regulations envisioned trading electricity like a commodity. Generating companies would sell their power for the best price they could get, and utilities would buy at the lowest price possible. For this concept to work, it was imperative to compel utilities that owned transmission lines to carry power from other companies’ generators in the same way as they carried their own, even if the power went to a third party. FERC’s Order 888 mandated the wheeling of electric power across utility lines in 1996. But that order remained in litigation until March 4, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court validated it and it went into force.
In the four years between the issuance of Order 888 and its full implementation, engineers began to warn that the new rules ignored the physics of the grid. The new policies “do not recognize the single-machine characteristics of the electric-power network,” Casazza wrote in 1998. “The new rule balkanized control over the single machine,” he explains. “It is like having every player in an orchestra use their own tunes.”2
In order for most “alternative energy” solutions to work, the electrical grid will need to carry a far greater load—yet it is already straining to carry its current load. The electrical power grid is reaching the practical limits of complexity; brute force efforts to increase its capacity simply will not work.
And it turns out that you can’t solve everything with new power plants. It’s important to recognize that while in many cases you can either have power plants or new transmission lines, there’s a limit to how much you can just rely on new power plants, and we have crossed that limit. And we have, therefore, lowered the reliability of the grid.3
Moreover, the complexity of the grid makes it incredibly susceptible not only to accidents, but to attacks, as well.
The implication is that an carefully prepared simultaneous attack against 10-20 substations of the right type could take 60% of the US end-users offline for an extended period (potentially weeks). If exploited by additional well planned attacks, this damage could be extended indefinitely.4
In order to make electrical power secure, it must be low-scale and relatively local, eliminating the need for an expansive, complex grid to deliver it.
Our results suggest that distributed generation close to end-users may significantly increase the robustness of electric power grids. This is true in terms of decreasing spikes in operational costs due to system failure, delaying the onset of undersupply to cities, and slowing the progression of undersupply as edges are removed. While other authors have speculated that this would be the case, it has not previously been demonstrated. (Trancik, et. al, 2005)
Of course, this does little to avert collapse, since this small-scale, localized approach is a collapse from the greater complexity of the international North American power grid. Photovoltaics and other renewable energy sources may play a role in the future, but they will not save civilization, for the simple fact that these energy sources are only viable on a local scale. By shifting the patterns of energy, one also shifts the patterns of control and power.
Historically, patterns of energy useage can effectively predict, and are a useful tool in understanding societal structure and hierarchy. Ancient China and Egypt, home to the earliest and most centralized/despotic civilizations, can be explained in terms of an energy-dependence dynamic. The energy that drove both these systems was control of the periodic flooding of the nile and yellow rivers, used to irrigate the agricultural systems of the respective societies. The individual land control of farmers in both societies has mystified many historians as to why such despotic political systems were allowed to develop. This can, however, be easily explained by the fact that it required huge, often 100,000+ man work details to keep these “hydraulic” (see Wittfogel) agriculture systems functioning—something that could only be accomplished by a powerful, centralized authority.
Conversely, tribal political structures, epitomized by autonomy and individual freedom (if not material wealth) are examples of highly de-centralized energy systems—mainly firewood gathered by individuals at a sustainable rate.5
If “alternatives” force us to turn to localized energy, then they are not “alternatives” at all. Without domination of the energy one requires in society to survive, who would submit to a despotic political system? Without centralized control of energy, civilization collapses as local, sustainable cultures emerge to provide freedom and prosperity for their friends and kin. The complexity of the electricity grid precludes any of the “alternative energy” schemes from providing any actual alternative for civilization—though they may well provide creature comforts for human beings who will enjoy a new freedom rooted in their local landbase.
Works Cited
Trancik, J., A. Gilmore, J. Reichardt, and C. Tiazzoldi. “Efficient and Resilient Electric Power Networks: A Chinese Case Study.” Complex Systems Summer School Final Project Papers, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, 2005.
Excellent, excellent, excellent.
I think this is the single best argument against alternative energy sources that I have ever heard. It’s so elegant - we can’t just use a different source for electricity, because we still have to move it from place to place, in addition to moving all the electricity we used before.
Well done, man!
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 12 January 2007 @ 1:58 AM
Then again, I can imagine a future where the grid is expanded using non-traditional instead of traditional techniques (i.e. additional powerlines and booster stations). Some non-traditional techniques include what people are already doing - grid inertie photovoltaics that add to the grid when not taking, micro-hydro and microwind. These systems supply power directly to the user making a larger grid unneccessary. They utilize the grid when they need more (no sun, wind, etc.) and they also supply power to the grid when they don’t need all that they create but in the long run they all for complete cutoff from the grid as long as the user can be happy with what the energy of the day gives them. This doesn’t stop the problem of the grid growing too large to be sustainable but it eliminates it’s need to grow in terms of transmission by increasing the spread of small, direct generators utilizes the grid more as insurance then as a necessity.
This still doesn’t solve of course the issue of new lines will need to be built (even if just internally in a house or plant) and at some point the availability or price of copper will make this impossible. I’m still somewhat skeptical of complexity killing itself. It seems killing the host organism is a greater reason (i.e. running out of resources such as copper or people who want to be labeled as “American” or “civilized”).
Comment by SF — 12 January 2007 @ 11:33 AM
Thanks, Chuck.
That is the traditional way of doing it—and that just increases the complexity of the system, which makes it more fragile, not less.
These feed power into the grid, which actually is part of the problem we’re talking about here: the grid is too complex, and thus too fragile, to bear the load it’s already carrying. Adding more load makes that situation worse, not better.
That scenario’s quite like the example studied in China—but as I mentioned, that’s localization. You’re moving from a large, complex grid, to a much more localized, much less complex system, and it’s a move motivated by the fact that all that complexity isn’t working for you anymore. That’s collapse.
Historically, very few complex societies have collapsed due to a lack of resources. In fact, that answer is a non-starter, since managing scarce resources is one of the primary reasons humans submit to complex societies in the first place. The greater question is why they fail in their very reason for existence.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 January 2007 @ 11:43 AM
I’ll just add my usual comment: the solution (which results in a “solution” that, as Jason pointed out is a form of collapse) is to look at our power useage from the perspective of hierarchy. Electricity really only makes sense because it can be centralized, and therefore the people at the top of the hierarchy can profit and be empowered through its control. To the extent that electricity is used to generate heat or cold, it is horribly inefficient. The use of electricity par excellence is in communications, but this function (internet, phone, etc.) is actually already running in a separate, parallel system to the “power grid” and is itself a symptom of the information processing burdens demanded by our massive hierarchy. The solution to the grid is, in my opinion, to collapse back to localized production (as mentioned above), but to never use the intermediary of electricity in the process. When sufficiently localized (and by this I mean far more localized than most ‘localization’ advocates who would like to see state-centered localization or city-centered localization) the fuel or energy source used to create the needed heat or cold can be used directly without an intermediary (as in high efficiency wood stoves, passive architectural features, etc.). These forms of “alternative energy” will work very well, I think. However, if our imagination for “alternatives” only stretches so far as to what we can best use via the intermediary of a centralized electrical grid, then as Jason pointed out, we really haven’t found an alternative to the most problematic machine in our system.
Also worth pointing out that such centralized grids are extremely vulnerable to John Robb’s concept of “global guerrillas.” Theres a book called “Angle Iron” (terrible, terrible writing–please don’t take this as a recommendation) that advocates for the destruction of the US electrical grid–there really is great vulnerability here…
Comment by Jeff Vail — 12 January 2007 @ 12:27 PM
Another thing worth mentioning: Ever since Buckminster Fuller’s recommendation, one plan to “solve” this problem has been to invest further in complexity and make the electrical grid truly global. While this may seem crazy, it has gained serious traction lately with the threat to traditional “national” grids from the depletion and cost of fossil fuels and the rise of interest in photovoltaics. The plan is basically one of two variants: a) north-south shift where equatorial photovoltaic generation is stored in pumped-hydro batteries in the wet north (or south), or b) east-west shift where photovoltaic generation in the part of the earth where the sun is shining is transmitted to the rest of the world (and this continues to shift along in phases as the Earth rotates and new photovoltaic fields are exposed to the sun). People advocating these “solutions” should consider investigating the problem of diminishing marginal returns on investments in complexity…
Comment by Jeff Vail — 12 January 2007 @ 12:36 PM
Good article, but you kind of lost me with all that graph stuff. And since I’m no dummy, it might be kind of hard for those who are not scientists, engineers, or mathemiticians to wrap their minds around all that.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 12 January 2007 @ 1:45 PM
Collapse to local power production does not necessarily lead to further collapse all the way to the stone age. If alternative energy sources facilitate creation of many local mini-grids, technological complexity can still be maintained.
Comment by _Gi — 12 January 2007 @ 5:39 PM
Sigh. Gi, I thought you’d understand this by now. Jeff already hinted about the general uselessness of electricity for the tasks it’s usually employed; why, without the need to supply a massive grid, would anyone be motivated to maintain the effort for it, when there are such easier means of supporting it?
Of course, to get to the real issue, we need to deal more in theory. As John Michael Greer explained in his theory of catabolic collapse:
Furthermore, all aspects of complexity are interrelated. Tainter:
That means that “many local mini-grids” is the beginning of collapse, but it is not a stable configuration in complexity descent. It’s a point we’ll doubtless see, but only on our way down to still lower levels of complexity.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 January 2007 @ 5:51 PM
There’s much, much more to Buckminster Fuller :-
http://memeticdrift.net/bucky/eik_session_01Alt.html
and he sure seemed to have the universe well sussed out.
Comment by Scot Galego — 12 January 2007 @ 8:17 PM
> “Jeff already hinted about the general uselessness of electricity for the tasks it’s
> usually employed”
Jeff is wrong. Or you’re woefully misquoting him. But “less efficient” and “useless” are worlds apart.
Especially when you consider that “thermodynamic efficiency” may not be the type of efficiency people will wish to optimize. If energy X is half as efficient at a task but is four times as easy for a person to obtain, then it’s more efficient in terms of man-hours.
And you’ve got to admit that - at a local level - installing solar panels is pretty man-hour-efficient over a 20-year span.
> “why, without the need to supply a massive grid, would anyone be motivated to maintain
> the effort for it[?]”
Your argument appears to be:
1) Electricity is not the most efficient energy source for things like heating.
2) Thus, nobody would generate electricity unless forced to by centralized authority.
3) Thus, local control of energy will lead to the collapse of civilization.
That, of course, is nonsense.
If you’re mystified as to why people might want to expend the effort to keep generating substantial amounts of electricity, consider the notion that most people see a collapse of civilization as not only undesirable, but non-inevitable, and might feel motivated to prevent it.
Why do so many doomers remind me of suicidal cultists? Get some perspective, man, and keep in mind that there might be a reason most of the world disagrees with you that isn’t “they’re all sheep.”
Comment by Anonymous — 14 January 2007 @ 3:30 PM
The power industry has been very reluctant to invest in infrastructure over the years since the great inflation of the 70s. Computers and power electronics have made it possible for the same physical grid to accomodate more traffic without building more lines. This approach certainly creates problems: it could be argued that the grid is more fragile and vulnerable because it is run closer to its physical envelope. On the other hand, if that’s true, there is at least one straightforward way of increasing reliablity is available: build more lines. Of course we might act like a cartoon character and just stand there as the safe hurtles down on us. I expect we won’t, though.
Incidentally, the utilities have taken notice of the possibility that drastic unreliability may be an emergent property of the chaotic behavior of sufficiently big and complex systems. When you analyze power outages, however, the causes are typically faulty equipment, bad planning, and human error—nothing fancy or occult.
Comment by Jim Harrison — 14 January 2007 @ 3:38 PM
“In August 2003, a tree branch in Ohio caused the largest blackout in North America’s history”
Wrong. he article is great up to this point. The problem lies in confusing the proximate cause with the underlying cause. Tree branches knock down power lines all time, but only very rarely do widespread blackouts result. Why?
Because only a few “nodes” in the graph are at critical. The problem is that we can’t determine easily which substations are at the physical limit, nor can we predict how the failure will cascade, because you also don’t know which nearby nodes are at the point of physical collapse, and worse, you don’t know how the computer control will react, grafted onto the grid well after the fact.
The grid wasn’t built yesterday. IT has been growing and spreading for nearly a hundred years.
It is very easy to suggest that things will collapse, because there is so much that could go wrong so easily it seems a safe bet. And yet things don’t collapse. Sometimes there are problems, sure, nothing is perfect, but collapse is anything but inevitable.
Comment by Pastabagel — 15 January 2007 @ 1:24 AM
Jeff Vail wrote
“To the extent that electricity is used to generate heat or cold, it is horribly inefficient. ”
Wrong. Electricity is, in fact, an excellent and efficient generator of heat. The coils of an electric stovetop are little more than wires with high resistance. Electricity (AC) also does a fantastic job of doing work via motors.
Electricity sticks at generating light (light bulbs put out more heat than light). You centralize power generation because it benefits from incredible economies of scale.
Comment by Pastabagel — 15 January 2007 @ 1:38 AM
Jeff commented : “People advocating these “solutions” should consider investigating the problem of diminishing marginal returns on investments in complexity.”
Well - that includes me - however I view a highly interconnected grid with a vast number of renewable energy sources tied into it as one that is much more resilient to problems than the relatively localised grids in place now connecting a relatively small number of generators in a basically hierarchical fashion down to consumers.
Bucky’s global energy grid is the future !
I think it depends on what you view as “complexity” and if highly redundant, highly interconnected networks are more or less “complex” than the current grid (which probably depends on which aspects you are considering).
And wrt to the last comment there - sure, incandescent bulbs suck - but they are on the way out - LED’s will be much better at lighting than heating…
Comment by Big Gav — 15 January 2007 @ 2:21 AM
It was near 100 years ago and the quote went ” if I can’t put a meter on it I wont finance it”.[westinghouse] How can an thread devoted to this topic not mention tesla and the solution of wireless transmission he proposed and constructed?
Comment by Anonymous — 15 January 2007 @ 7:13 AM
What concerns me is that when I did a search for the word / tag “environment” in this post or the subsequent commentary, I got a 404 error. In other words, 0 search results for a concern about environmental impact however distributed energy resource integration is achieved. That, as we say old chap, is a sticky wicket.
Comment by jcwinnie — 15 January 2007 @ 12:02 PM
I would seriously suggest you don’t use italics for body copy ever again. Either use a different font or different weight or color. Italics work great on print not so great on the web.
My eyes feel like they are going to bleed out of my skull.
Comment by gracerx@gmail.com — 15 January 2007 @ 3:48 PM
decentralized power, not local but individualy produced, is not only the model for electricity but also for government. this is not wishful thinking but a fact of the historical record. centralized power distribution has only been in effect for a short period, while central governmental control is far older. As we can see political independence is growing on a global scale. democracy, as effective as it may or may not be, is at least an improvement over the whims of kings and despots. the claiming of human rights and the growth of global awareness is similar to the path that may lead to a world where each human can enjoy all the advances of the speices.
Comment by Anonymous — 15 January 2007 @ 6:59 PM
Pastabagel-
Here’s a look at the problems of generating heat via a centralized electricity grid:
http://www.jeffvail.net/2004/10/energy-society-hierarchy.html
Electricity works just fine for generating heat–but we actually have relatively little need for pure heat, and sometimes it is quite a problem. The problem, as I noted previously, is that the centralized electrical grid system is terribly inefficient at meeting our actual energy needs. If you still cannot muster anything more convicing than saying “wrong” to this remark, then you should look more closely. There is little problem in converting electricity back into heat (in the rare case that this is exactly what we need). The inefficiencies come from the inefficiency of producing the electricity in the first place combined with the dramatic cost extracted by distributing that electricity from the point of centralized generation (don’t forget to include the amortized cost of the grid infrastructure in these calculations). Heat (and its derivative cold, via airconditioning) is only the tip of the inefficiency iceberg. Our socieity (America) uses electricity primarily for cooling, heating, lighting, electronic appliances, cooking, transportation, and communications (in that order). Electricity is only efficiently transformed into heat (ignoring the critical losses at generation and distribution)–but even in this role it is primarily used to force air (through a fossil fuel flame, for example), a task at which it is very inefficient. Cooling, our number 1 use, is a terribly inefficient use of electricity–the conversion of heat via the refrigeration cycle into forced cold air is terribly, terribly inefficient. Do some investigation if you don’t believe me. Lighting, as was mentioned above, is also quite inefficient. This inefficiency has a beneficial byproduct of heat in environments where heat is needed (though it is generally inefficiently directed through lighting), but it creates an added penalty in climates where cooling is needed. Electronic appliances and communications are uniquely suited to the use of electricity (often impossible without it), and in this role I think electricity has found its proper role in our society. Electricity for cooking is reasonably efficient, but not nearly as much so as the pure generation of heat because much of the heat is misdirected due to poor design–but this is a problem that can be solved relatively easily if energy prices were accurately accounted for to incentivise better design. Transportation is also an inefficient use of electricity–it only looks efficient when compared to other forms of locomotive energy such as the internal combustion engine–and is mostly a problem created by modern zoning laws, etc. What is really happening here is a general unwillingness to consider non-electrical alternatives to our current electrical (and fossil fuel) energy demands. For most people this is simply too far outside the box–they just don’t get it. Passive heating, cooling, reducing transportation demand via changes in economic localization and zoning, daylighting, vernacular/low-embeded-energy materials, etc.–this is where our energy future lies, not in a global electrical grid. Just my opinion, to be sure–if you feel like investing your savings or livelihood in the opposite approach, be my guest. Go take out a loan and buy a grid-intertie solar system (or similar) and put your money where your mouth is–in time we’ll see how well this works out for you. I’m not saying that you ARE wrong, or that it IS a bad idea–just that in my reality tunnel it doesn’t seem like a very wise idea.
Comment by Jeff Vail — 15 January 2007 @ 9:54 PM
That’s what I think the world will look like in the future. Amish people with the internet.
Comment by Anonymous — 15 January 2007 @ 10:35 PM
Aside from the problems with farming… how would people who lived like the Amish get the internet? No electricity, remember?
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 15 January 2007 @ 11:58 PM
Last year I took the tour of Dinorwic, a pumped storage station in North Wales and a marvel of engineering. The guide explained cheerily,
‘When it was built, Dinorwic was designed to smooth out peak power demand so as to reduce the stress on the Grid and improve its efficiency and reliability.
Now, however, the price of a unit of electricity is adjusted minute by minute by a computer, and Dinorwic is turned on whenever the sale price of a unit of electricity is high, to make the operating company a profit.’
She said it like it was a kind of beneficial progress. But clearly, it was all bollocks. In essence, the design intent of the station had been forgotten and it had become a simple slave to the machine. And the aim of the machine is of course to run the system as close to capacity as possible - anything else would be waste, right?
Electricity is indeed a poor source of domestic heat, because the fuel is burned remotely and only some of the energy released reaches one’s home.
Electricity is, however, a very high quality power source. Once you’ve got electricity, then you can run motors etc. very efficiently.
Generating electricity from burning fuel is best done by the use of gas turbines, which with present technology are large centralised installations. Distributing electricity from such stations is, however, subject to loss (and the other issues in this post).
Solar electricity is great, but the plant has a very slow ROI, energetic or otherwise.
Comment by speedbird — 16 January 2007 @ 9:14 AM
What someone thinks of collapse is quite irrelevant. There may well be attempts to maintain more local, and thus more robust, electrical systems; I would even go so far as to say it’s almost certain. We will build these precisely because so many think of civilization as a wonderful thing that must be preserved. But what is it that these more localized electrical systems will be used for? Television sets that no longer have any channels (since there are no more high-density population centers that can be reliably fed to produce such things)? Perhaps a radio? These are entertainments that pale quickly in the face of a living oral tradition, a pale imitation we invented because we lacked for the former. Shall we use it for heat, or cooling? The heat energy we use to boil water to turn a turbine to create an electrical current to power an electrical space heater could be used to heat a house directly—through passive solar and other elegant uses of technology. And yes, the same methods can also be used for cooling—even to the point of making ice in the desert. We’ll likely waste our efforts on building localized electrical grids, and many such groups will perish for such waste, but those that don’t will eventually realize that it’s useless—there’s nothing it provides that cannot be more easily provided by a more direct method. Electricity is useful because it is provided on a massive scale. If it must be scaled down to the local level, then it loses the very advantages that made it economical in the first place.
Well of course there is. Humans enculturate very, very deeply. We have to; that means we don’t change easily. People rarely starve for lack of things to eat; we starve rather than challenge our culture. That’s how deeply enculturated we become. It’s not because we’re “sheep,” but precisely because we’re human, and absorb the culture we’re brought up in so deeply as part of ourselves, that makes collapse so scary for so many people.
Of course, another part of it is the fact that most people have wildly inaccurate notions of uncivilized life—that it is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short,” or other Hobbesian nonsense. So we certainly can’t discount the impact of simple, sheer misinformation.
This gets also to Big Gav’s point of building in more redundancy, and there’s a simple, systemic reason why this solution cannot go very far. If the grid is not running very near capacity, it is judged to be a bad investment; after all, they could’ve done the same job with less investment. Anyone who wants to outcompete the rest of the industry can do so easily—by putting forth less investment into the physical grid, and running it closer to capacity. This undermines the security of the system, but it allows the upstart to prosper in the short term—long enough to eliminate its rivals. In that sense, it is essentially a microcosm of civilization itself: a system incapable of providing for its own long-term existence, but providing enough power in the short-term to eliminate everything else. So long as that remains true (and greater regulation would merely move this competition to the international level, rather than the intercorporate, so it’s difficult to see how it would be possible to have a civilization at all without it), the power grid will always become more and more fragile, until it breaks completely. That is what makes collapse inevitable.
It’s a shame you didn’t continue reading, since immediately following that comma, in the very same sentence, I continued: “…for a fairly simple reason: the electrical grid is so complex, and running so close to capacity, that even small problems can cascade into catastrophic breakdowns. As with most problems of complexity beyond the point of diminishing returns, the question of what finally pushed the system over the edge is much less important than the question of what made the system of complex that it became vulnerable to something so small in the first place.”
That’s what I spent most of the article on—though we’re really talking about critical edges here, rather than nodes.
Again, please read the article. Collapse is inevitable, because a lack of resiliency means an escalating probability of breakdown, so we can only continue to cut down our resiliency so long before such a breakdown occurs. To say that collapse of our society is not inevitable is akin to suggesting that you might play Jenga forever, without the tower ever collapsing.
Heat is generated to boil water; water turns to steam; steam moves generators; generators convert mechanical energy into electrical energy; electrical energy is transported through copper wires; the electrical energy is then used to generate heat.
At each point along this transformation, some amount of energy is lost. Not all the heat is boiling the water; some radiates out to the sides. Not all of the steam’s energy is used to move the turbines. Not all of the turbines’ motion is converted into electrical energy. The copper wire resists some of the electrical current. Not all of the electrical energy is put towards producing heat. The end result is that the heat produced in the end is only a fraction of the heat used to generate the electricity, and you could have had much more heat if you’d simply used that source directly, rather than wasting so much of it in the pointless conversions to turn heat back into heat.
Even in the best case scenario, if no energy transfer every lost any amount of energy, and there existed a perfect electrical conductor, and various other physical laws were suspended, you would still not be able to generate any more heat at the end than you used in the beginning to generate the electricity in the first place without violating the law of conservation of mass/energy. So right off the bat, you know it’s going to be less.
Complexity is far easier to determine than many people believe. There’s no opinion involved in it. Something with more elements is more complex. To be more resilient, your grid must be more complex. Of course, your model would be quickly outcompeted by a less resilient, more fragile grid that runs closer to capacity and has saved costs through less redundancy. It will eventually break down from those compromises, but not before it’s pushed your solution out.
If no one is willing to finance the creation of a system, then that’s a very systemic barrier to its creation.
This article is about the fragility of the grid itself. Since you mentioned tags, you should check our tag page for “ecology” (I tend to avoid the term “environment,” as I find it to be far less meaningful—what isn’t part of the environment, after all?). Also see “The Other Fossil Fuel” and “Splitting the Atom,” in this energy series, which are both more concerned with the environmental impact of the energy sources considered. This article, however, does not consider any particular energy source, but rather the grid itself that delivers the energy produced.
This is part of the movement away from civilization, towards collapse to tribalism.
I think he’s suggesting that they would have electricity, but live more along the lines of the Amish. The “Little House on the Prairie” scenario you might find in Kunstler, correct? Giuli mentioned the problems with farming, and it should also be noted that the Amish’s own need for expansion is satisfied with tourism. Without a possibility for expansion, this way of life is simply not possible. Without fossil fuels for fertilizers to continue the Green Revolution, agriculture will cease to be possible. Dropping to localized power distribution with renewable resources will be something we’ll see, but it won’t be a stable configuration—we’ll continue to collapse, well past that, into a new stone age: the only level of complexity that our modern civilization has left the resources for.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 January 2007 @ 1:19 PM
>If the grid is not running very near capacity, it is judged to be a bad investment…
>If no one is willing to finance the creation of a system, then that’s a very systemic barrier to its creation.
I feel this is worth emphasising. The argument here is framed in financial terms. Throughout history - even the 30-odd years of my own memory - the degree to which such thinking has clouded collective judgement has varied. At present, the ’systemic barrier’ is as strong as I can remember it - and, as you point out, is leading to collapse. My point is that the systemic barriers may not be immovable.
Comment by speedbird — 17 January 2007 @ 7:05 AM
in our historical record change has been most common when the need is greatest.
what seems unprofitable now [financially] may be weighed in a different coin [practically] when faced with desparate or enlightened circumstance.
growth to new orders of organization are not necessarily a “collapse”.
Comment by Anonymous — 17 January 2007 @ 11:00 AM
What you say is superficially true, but all the more misleading for that, because it misses the crucial details of why that happens—and why it’s not happening here. It speaks also to the problem in speedbird’s analysis above.
Look at the historical examples where a crisis led to a new technology. When Bronze Age societies were on the verge of collapse, they switched to iron, an all-around inferior alternative, but one that eventually became preferable as bronze continued its downward slide. The alternative was already on the table; it wasn’t an alternative that would normally be embraced all on its own, but it was a perfectly workable alternative.
Again, there was the timber crisis in Europe that led to the widespread adoption of coal. Coal was an all-around inferior alternative, but as the cost of timber grew, it was grudgingly accepted. It was not preferred, but it was a perfectly workable alternative.
Herein is the problem with speedbird’s analysis: financial considerations are, generally, the most accurate proxy we have for measuring the energy in, and the energy out, of a system and its overall costs, since fierce competition keeps all parties very close to their actual cost. True gouging is extraordinarily rare. Because of this, such financial considerations are a systemic barrier, and not at all negotiable. No system can last if it costs more than it generates.
Which is an important point to remember when we look for what alternatives are ready and on the table, if less preferable, that might allow us to repeat our “just-in-time” trick. This series has examined many of the alternatives that have been proposed, and found that none of them are workable, the way that iron or coal once were. The most important reason that keeps coming back, again and again, is scale.
This is rarely a simple matter of investment. Not all solutions scale up. Some only work at small scales, and they break when they move to larger scales. The promise of coal or uranium is made at current levels of consumption, but of course, to fulfill those promises the level of consumption would need to increase remarkably, and that would mean that they would be exhausted much more quickly.
The electrical grid faces a similar problem. It cannot scale up much more. The problem is the essential problem of civilization—a Prisoner’s Dilemna that pushes all parties to compromise the long-term good for short-term gain. To make the electrical grid a viable delivery mechanism for all of our civilization’s energy needs, rather than just the fraction it currently delivers, would require massive infrastructure investments: not only more nodes to increase the amount of load on the graph, but also significantly more edges to make the graph more dense (thus, more resilient, and less susceptible to cascading collapse).
That means that the most significant investments must be in the edges, which are only useful when things break down. Not only will the number of edges need to be increased significantly in the existing grid, but the number of edges to be installed per node must be increased. What this means is that the cost of complexity (the cost of new nodes and edges) is rising more quickly than the benefits (the electricity going through the grid). This is the very definition of diminishing marginal returns.
So you see, we run our electrical grid so close to capacity for a very good reason. The financial aspect is not an illusion, but a reflection of the most real and essential balance involved: the cost of how much energy you put in, versus how much you get out.
You’re right that growth to a new order of magnitude of complexity is not a collapse; it’s quite the opposite. Collapse is when an established order of complexity is destroyed in a swift manner. More localized grids would be a collapse; bioregionalism would be a collapse. Wiring everyone into a more dense electrical grid would not be a collapse at all. What it would be is a significantly diminished marginal return on society’s investments in complexity.
Humans are a “just-in-time” species, as Toby Hemenway once put it, but we make those dramatic leaps to viable alternatives that are on the table and workable. This impression is largely an illusion of history; in fact, it is more often an example of natural selection. We try many things, frantically, and it is the thing that works that is remembered. As collapse progresses, we will try all of these things. My prediction is that they will fail, for the reasons I’ve outlined in this series. Many will try to simply increase the density of the electrical grid. This will fail because people will recognize, on some level, that they are getting a higher marginal return on a localized grid. I doubt many will see it in those terms, though; more likely, most will simply see that the price of electricity is going up (since the electrical companies will need to pay for all the new infrastructure, and ultimately pass those costs along to the consumer), and switch either to using less electricity, or generating their own. With a declining customer base and mounting costs from their infrastructure investments, the electrical companies will go under, one by one. Of course, the smaller, more localized grids will also go out of commission, because electricity does not scale down terribly well. Again, this will be recognized more often than not as people realize that their grid costs them significantly, but provides them with little that they cannot provide more directly and more cheaply by other methods.
Each step along the way, people are guided by what’s best for them. At the end of the Bronze Age, iron was adopted because bronze had become so difficult and expensive that iron was a better choice. In Europe’s timber crisis, coal was used because timber had become so expensive. Where no workable alternatives are on the table, this same drive leads to collapse, as people begin to understand that complexity costs more than it’s worth. Collapse is an economizing process.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2007 @ 11:42 AM
> The financial aspect is not an illusion, but a reflection of the most real and essential balance involved.
See, I don’t believe this, which is why I’m usually only a lurker here not a commenter. I’m not denying the inevitabilty of collapse, but I do maintain that the way in which it happens will depend on the lens through which we see it.
I also don’t follow the argument about the superiority of bronze… please elaborate?
Comment by speedbird — 17 January 2007 @ 1:23 PM
If not from me, then perhaps Jeff Vail’s treatment is more thorough. Can you provide a reason that price would not reflect EROEI balance?
See Richard Cowen’s chapter from Exploiting the Earth on “The Age of Iron.” For instance:
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2007 @ 2:28 PM
” financial considerations are, generally, the most accurate proxy we have for measuring the energy in, and the energy out, of a system and its overall costs, since fierce competition keeps all parties very close to their actual cost. True gouging is extraordinarily rare.
case for the war for oil? the GREED and short sightedness of few is and escalating an illusionary system of need for financial profit. This factor alone questions the validity of “accurate proxy”
is trillions monthly, spent on war and the ideological machine to drive it, not an example of why “No system can last if it costs more than it generates” is not always applicable?
granted no system “lasts” but some stay longer than a fair market would allow.
the idea of “competion breeds the best results” relies on fair competion: the inability to fix an artificial level. The ability of, and willingness to engage in monpolies and legaslation to prevent this is the factor most likely to skew balance. it is currently not a system working in balance . eg. enron’s insider advantage was bush administration driven.
but public memories are short and the maccarthy years seem to be a repeating cycle of ignorance and fear. hopefully the idle typings of the self- indulgent academia will be fuel for changing global policies and stir more than syntax.
Comment by Anonymous — 17 January 2007 @ 3:28 PM
in this last paragraph i include myseflf
Comment by Anonymous — 17 January 2007 @ 3:31 PM
You’ve taken my thesis farther than what I stated. I did not say “competition breeds the best results.” I said that competition keeps prices very close to the actual cost. Notice that evidence of actual price gouging in last year’s oil prices is scant. Price was genuinely set by the balance of supply and demand.
Resource wars might be characterized as driven by greed, but they can just as reasonably be characterized as wars to save civilization itself. They are waged precisely because they are worth the cost; when the cost grows too large, the wars will stop. Why is the price of petrol in Europe superficially so much higher than in America? Because so much of the American price of petroleum is paid in taxes that fund military ventures to secure the supply. It is an unrecognized, hidden cost, but it is there, nonetheless. If you want to see when that balance will tip and the cost of resource wars outweighs the value of the resource, simply watch and wait for when Americans give up their cars and begin walking or riding bikes or using public transportation because oil costs too much. All of these costs and factors find their way into the price at the pump.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2007 @ 4:45 PM
there is no need to gouge in a market where no competion exists to those who own and control the resourses. include the fed and all the agencies whose task it is to keep the slaves in line and where is fair market?
Comment by Anonymous — 17 January 2007 @ 7:28 PM
there is no need to gouge in a market where no competion exists to those who own and control the resourses. include the fed and all the agencies whose task it is to keep the slaves in line and where is fair market?
who can compete when the bat and ball are confiscated. the rules changed, as soon as the other team’s big hitter comes to the plate.
no wonder sport is so popular. when the important rules of life can be changed or ignored at least you can count on baseball!!
Comment by Anonymous — 17 January 2007 @ 7:33 PM
Competition does exist, though. Shell, BP, ExxonMobil—these are not arbitrary divisions. They each live or die at the expense or benefit of the others. The resources may be controlled by a small class of people, but the members of hat class are competing viciously amongst themselves. This is a fundamentally wrong assumption that far too many people make, and repeat far too often on this site. It shows just how little contact such speculators have had with the upper classes. They are not working together for the benefit of their class; they have no such solidarity. They backstab, betray, and maneuver around one another constantly.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2007 @ 7:34 PM
A lack of competition from smaller operations does not mean there is a lack of competition, though. The large corporations are ever at one another’s throats. Competition is quite