The preceding series of post cleared away some mental clutter so that I could get to the point I wanted to make. As noted in Another Pinhole the thought began with a post at Heliophage: It really is about the energy

Smart grids strike me as being a bit like just-in-time manufacturing, on which David Brin and James Fallows had some wise words recently. Great system if there aren’t external shocks and you’re sure there never will be; but when Toyota itself is getting less JITty, you know that its not a system to emulate exactly in an absolutely vital modality like energy transmission (and that is before you factor in the possibility that some smart grids might in fact be smartest-guys-in-the-room grids). . .

There’s also, to me, a secondary moral/political reason for concentrating on energy. Alex’s post is stuffed full with the first person plural — what we want, what we should do, and so on. That use of “we” assumes a set of values. The same is true of the Berry piece and the way Tim writes about it. But no-one defines the “we”, and its significance floats. Sometimes it’s we = me-and-you-the-reader, sometimes it’s we-the-right-thinking, sometimes it’s we-americans, sometimes its we-humanity. Sometimes it’s a we-of-reporting — a real group. Sometimes it’s a we-of-exhortation — an imagined community invoked for rhetorical purposes.

Such writing feels slippery. It’s almost as though it is trying to lead the readers away from a key point – there is no “we” with united standards and agenda that can act independently and decisively. Allied to this, in a way I should analyse more closely at some point, is the sense that “we” take “ourselves” to be not merely right, but also good. Doing as “we” say is not simply practical. It is also moral.

The moral discourse in environmental discussion always worries me. Given its preoccupation with the natural, environmental thought of a moral character runs head on into the issues of the naturalistic fallacy, basing what ought to be on what “is” without looking in sufficient depth at the rather contingent character of our concept of what is natural. Making the green movement a matter of a particular type morality also means that some people feel and to some extent are excluded. Indeed I am one of them . . .

Speaking of external shocks . . .

The problem begins with the electric power grid. "Electric power is modern society's cornerstone technology on which virtually all other infrastructures and services depend," the report notes. Yet it is particularly vulnerable to bad space weather. Ground currents induced during geomagnetic storms can actually melt the copper windings of transformers at the heart of many power distribution systems. Sprawling power lines act like antennas, picking up the currents and spreading the problem over a wide area. The most famous geomagnetic power outage happened during a space storm in March 1989 when six million people in Quebec lost power for 9 hours:

According to the report, power grids may be more vulnerable than ever. The problem is interconnectedness. In recent years, utilities have joined grids together to allow long-distance transmission of low-cost power to areas of sudden demand. On a hot summer day in California, for instance, people in Los Angeles might be running their air conditioners on power routed from Oregon. It makes economic sense—but not necessarily geomagnetic sense. Interconnectedness makes the system susceptible to wide-ranging "cascade failures."

To estimate the scale of such a failure, report co-author John Kappenmann of the Metatech Corporation looked at the great geomagnetic storm of May 1921, which produced ground currents as much as ten times stronger than the 1989 Quebec storm, and modeled its effect on the modern power grid. He found more than 350 transformers at risk of permanent damage and 130 million people without power. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with "water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on."

"The concept of interdependency," the report notes, "is evident in the unavailability of water due to long-term outage of electric power--and the inability to restart an electric generator without water on site."

Some of this natural EMP attack by the sun is considered in the various smart grid proposals, as are the unnatural kind that enemy nations or even stateless terrorists might launch against us, but all of these efforts may just increase the fragility of the system and the scope of failures when they occur. A smarter grid would be an improvement in various ways, but it wouldn't eliminate this type of exposure, and might make us more vulnerable to other failures we haven't thought about much yet.

I'm not arguing against interconnectedness, I'm arguing against dependency of such systems to enable otherwise inadvisable infrastructures such as inherently intermittent energy sources in remote locations (wind. solar etc.). A more distributed system would be more robust and have less transmission loss as well. Intermittent sources in remote locations would be better used as the energy for interruptable applications. A simple and very old example is the use of windmills to pump water into holding tanks. When the wind blew they pumped but there was (almost) always water in the tank that could be drawn down during periods of calm. An updated version of that might be to crack the water into useful gases such as hydrogen and perhaps do further work to turn the hydrogen into ammonia. All it takes is air, water and energy.

If we ever get reliable energy storage systems - super batteries or capacitors - then intermittent supplies will be less of a problem. Storage could be local and be built up when intermittent sources were online. There would still be havoc when an EMP event occurred, but not as much as would be the case for a smart grid solution to intermittency.