security and insecurity

>>Also, PV panels typically generate heat and so would melt the snow off
>>of them.
> Which tropical paradise do you live in again? PV panels absorb energy,
> they don't "generate" it. No sun shining on them, no heat.

A PV panel converting 10-20% of sunlight to electricity dissipates the
rest as heat, which helps melt falling snow. Some PV panels have
integrated solar hot water heating units, which can be run backwards to
melt snow. Really, one would thing a society that can potentially build
space habitats should be able to deal with now and PV panels. :-)
One can also just put a heater below it if that is a big recurring
issue. Or try something else:
http://www.arttec.net/Maine/1-2-02/Jan2.html

>>SSPS+Grid something that in twenty years is still
>>inherently insecure
>
> This security issue is preposterous.

See the 1980s book _Brittle Power_ or related documents:
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid533.php

You live in the USA? I do, and I'm amazed how nonchalant people are here
about this whole continuous total preventive "war" thing the USA is into
now big time.

My parents lived through WWII (some relatives did not, including one who
starved to death in front of my Mother during the Netherland's "Hunger
Winter") so maybe I take war more seriously, I don't know.
See for example:
http://isd.usc.edu/~anthonya/war/hunger.htm
"The strike of the Dutch railworkers infuriated Seyss-Inquart. So
infuriated was the Reichskommisioner that he decided to take revenge on
the Dutch in a most nasty way. What he did was to issue a degree
prohibiting the transport of food into the areas of the country still
under German control. This would have particular adverse effect on the
cities of densely populated of western Holland--Amsterdam, Rotterdam,
the Hague, etc. Because of German exploitation, food had already become
a scarce commodity in these areas, and now a bad situation became even
worse. Rations were cut and were cut again. After six weeks
Seyss-Inquart did rescind his degree and food could once again be
brought into the cities, but now the damage had been done and it was too
late. In their five years of occupation the Germans had so gutted the
Dutch transport infrastructure that it was difficult to get food into
the stricken cities. Worse yet, the fall/winter of 1944-45 was already
manifesting itself to be the most severe in many years. Barges could not
make their way through the frozen canals to bring in food. By January,
1945 the food situation was catastrophic. In Amsterdam the daily
allotment of calories was reduced to 450. People began having to eat
tulip bulbs (and in some cases) their family pets. The misery was
compounded further by the immense cold. By 1945 there was no coal. There
was no electricity. There was no wood. There was no running water.
Sewers did not work. The authorities closed down the schools and the
factory owners put their employees on indefinite leave. The factories
were too cold and besides, they had no materials of which to make
anything. Public transport had virtually ceased. People had long dug up
streetcar tracks to get their hands on wood. And people began to die,
particularly the very old and the very young. The elderly froze in their
unheated apartments and the children succombed to diseases unknown in
modern Holland. Before the War Holland had been one of the best fed and
healthiest countries imaginable, now in five short years Holland was one
of the most mesirable places on earth. "

Can this happen again -- and in the US? And obviously Germany has
rejected that government style and has come a long way since then, which
gives me hope for the US someday (starving half a million Iraqi children
with sanctions, etc.).
http://www.counterpunch.org/theprice.html
"Stahl: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean,
that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price
worth it?"
Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price we think
the price is worth it.""

Just for a start, the USA is currently fighting two major foreign wars
(Afghanistan, Iraq) plus a couple at home (drug war, million+
imprisioned from class/race war related to the drug war and poverty,
etc.) plus the US just backed down from a trade war over steel, and the
US has been busy stirring up trouble with China, North Korea, Iran,
Syria, Cuba, and so on in various ways ("axis of evil" and "crusade"
comments, trade wars, etc.) and is fighting an indefinite worldwide war
against "Terrorism" which is defined as "You're either with us or
against us" -- or in other words, as a political cartoon I saw recently
put it "Unless Bush is elected, the Terrorists win" :-), plus on top of
that the US has declared a doctrine of preventive warfare (i.e anyone
can be attacked by the US at any time for any reason, maybe Britian next
if they cross us?), plus there are still tens of thousands of nukes on
the loose (some unaccounted for, possibly backpack sized ones intended
as land mines). This doesn't sound to me like an ideal national security
situation for the US (or the world), especially projecting it forward
into a Bush second term (I hope not). If we're so inherently secure in
the US, why does the US have to spend half a trillion dollars a year on
the military just to prop up the US infrastructure and hegemonic
economic system? If we were really tough, we'd be like the prize fighter
who can go in the ring and just take it, wearing down any opponent until
they fall over from exhaustion, without striking a blow. [Like if Bush
had said, "we'd rather have towers fall every day than give up on
liberty and compassion as our way of life".] But the US can't just take
it in terms of reduced energy supply -- as the oil crisis of the 1970s
showed. So, "you're either with us or against us."

In short, if the US is not going to have many friends (through IMHO bad
and inhumane political and economic strategy), then the US needs to at
least a robust energy infrastructure which can take serious directed
malicious damage or neglect and still keep going. SSPS will never be
such an infrastructure because only one ground or orbital laser cannon
could make short work of the entire generator system (unless space is
militarized etc. which creates other risks). While it is true much of
the animosity around the world right now is directed to the US
government and not the US citizen, I think as a matter of compassion it
makes sense for US citizens (as well as citizens of all other countries)
to have a reliable energy infrastructure come what may. But, let's hope
I am completely wrong and a "Hunger Winter" including power failures
never visits the US (or anywhere else).

> Terrorists have never blown
> up any major utility plant;

Two 911 flights flew right over a nuclear reactor (close to where I was
living at the time in Westchester).

According to this fascinating article:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/120803A.shtml
"There were many terrorist attacks that were stopped during the Clinton
presidency. There were planned embassy bombings. There was a whole
series of attacks on the scale of September 11 that were stopped around
the Millennium."

So, we are looking at realistic scenarios of widespread mayhem. That
will include the grid. In Iraq, oil pipelines and power grid systems are
being destroyed on a daily (or near daily) basis right now. So power
systems are targets. Despite the urgings of many people, including Amory
Lovins, but also many people opposing big centralized nukes, the US
energy infrastrucutre has been built to maximize profits, not to
maximize security. And the US government IMHO is negligent in not
regulating this better and insisting on an inherently secure energy
infrastructure.

> they have certainly been destroyed in military
> operations - but if your country is being attacked by a major military
> power or insurgency you have worse problems than lack of electricity.

That is exactly the point. A resiliant energy infrastructure survives as
best as possible multiple sorts of attacks -- even widespread nuke hits,
plagues, EMP, etc. (EMP I don't know about for PV).

It is foolish from the point of view of civil defense to build a
civilization around electricity and then not work to ensure local
electricity supply. It may make economic sense to monopolies who can
control monopolized energy supplied, but it makes no national (or
personal) security sense.

> Even if they blow up one major dam or nuclear plant, THE PURPOSE OF
> THE ELECTRIC GRID is to distribute load and generation so loss of
> one or a few plants doesn't cause loss of electric power anywhere,
> in general. The grid is far more reliable than any single
> electric generation approach; it is certainly true that, IF YOU USE
> THE GRID to spread load and capacity around, the more power plants you
> have, the more robust a system.

This is a nice sentiment, but it can't work if the grid is already at
capacity, which it more or less is.

I'm not a grid expert, but it seems, as the recent North East blackout
showed , that any major loss of generation capacity during peek demand
time and the grid can't keep functioning. [Coincidentally when the gird
failed I had just finished watching a long documentary on 9/11 and the
WTC collapse from the firefighter's perspective in the New York State
Museum in Albany
http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/wtc
and was staring at a wrecked airplane landing gear from one of the
planes -- you can guess what was on my mind when I saw power was out
everywhere, not just the museum -- worse I had to find my wife in
another building at some distance away with cell phones having failed.]

What you say might apply if there was significant and continual excess
capacity -- but the economic cutbacks by power monopolies to increase
profits have not produced that excess capacity needed for security. See,
this fits in with the law of "free" markets (despite being monopolies)
and external costs -- the external cost of reliable quality power has
been passed onto the consumer (why computer using people have hundreds
of dolalrs of UPSs for example). But why should energy monopolies care
about energy security? Do you see any trillion dollar punitive fines
being levelled against utilities or their shareholders for a blackout
leaving hospital operating theaters in the dark or creating billions in
economic losses or putting people's lives in jeapordy without traffic
signals? Nope. So where is the deep incentive for power companies to
care about grid failures? If the public relations heat gets stronger,
it's just chepaer to hire a PR firm and convince everyone that grids
naturally fail and electricity would be too expensive it it was reliable
and to legally buy politicians who will go along.

> We already have something like 1,000
> interconnected power plants here in the US - if the idea is to split
> the country up into 1000 local distribution areas with a million or
> more electric generators for the same sort of level of robustness,
> you are becoming MORE vulnerable to local disturbances (a storm,
> or EMP attack, for example) and you've INCREASED the volatility
> of load by having 1000 times fewer customers to spread it over.

I'm not saying grids can't be useful. Maybe this might even work if
mainly used to power cities and large factories:
"Synergistic Supergrid Could Meet Nations Energy Needs In 21st Century"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030320073732.htm
[Personally I doubt it can stop the long term economic grid failure
described in my previous post -- it will if anything just add to the
price of grid power... Thugh the Hydrogen part of it is neat.]

I agree that in general networks can be more reliable than isolated
systems when properly designed and maintained. But that is in general.
In this specific case, without excess capacity, the whole grid system is
at risk through domino effects. See for example:
http://www.rmi.org/images/other/MR_PR_NEPwrOutage14Aug03.pdf
And, on top of that, the grid isn't like a pipeline -- it all needs to
be syncronized in time with phases of power generation -- a touchy
operation.

In short, grids don't help if there is not enough capacity. (The best
you can hope for is probably rolling blackouts like in California.)

> For space solar power as for on-the-ground generators (which
> would seem to any rational person to be far more vulnerable
> to military/terror attck),

Why? I can't see the local power plants from where I live, but SSPS will
be visible to everyone all the time. And what is visible can get hit
with a laser, from just about anywhere on Earth or the sea. And we are
hypothesizing a developed space infrastructure needed to make SPSs,
which means ready access to many people of the capacity to physically
harm them from space. (Or use computer networks to hack them.) SPSs are
big targets. And they are not obviously in sovereign space (like in the
US airspace). So, a whole set of jurisdictional issues about how they
are protected... Even TangoMan admitted in the end they would need some
sort of weaponry to protect against sea launched missiles or space
launched work pods with explosives.

> size of each power plant will be
> determined by some optimum economic compromise between stability
> and efficiency of operation; in many proposals solar power satellites
> are larger than the typical on-the-ground generator (5 GW vs 1 GW or so),
> but that's not a necessary feature of the power option.

Well, I follow the first point, but the economic compromise I feel
people will be looking at in twenty years is more like between 3 to 10kW
(not GW!) cogeneration (heat and electric) for the home. :-)

> SPS's will surely
> be built by many competing companies and by national power corporations;

I still don't see this. It keeps getting trotted out. People are talking
about arranging one big investment in R&D and launch for habitats to
make SPSs. Now you are saying competing companies will own SPSs (and
habitiats?). So multiple redundant investments in R&D for habitats --
but that has got to reduce the profitability of them greatly. Or will
the one investment in habitats lead to a corporation that makes SPSs and
sells them? Why? Why not just keep them and sell the power? And even if
multiple companies or countries own SPSs, why won't there be an OPEC
like OSPEC? (Organization of Space Power Exporting Companies?)

While it is true that in theory the US is strong enough to break up
monopolies and cartels (like with breaking the Standard Oil Trust
temporarily or hobbling IBM for a while) and that is one thing I think
governments need to do (protect the citizen against foreign and domestic
"Powers" even if they are corporate governments like Disney or Exxon)
the USA seems to have abandoned that role (or worse) of late (slap on
the wrist for Microsoft or mutual fund and stock inflating financial
corps, even extending copyrights for Disney, etc.) and so I won't hold
my breath for a future US to regulate such energy cartels. (And besides
they will be international in scope, so will the US even be able to
regulate them?)

Essentially, if the US or the world puts all its eggs in the SSPS
basket, the SSPS authority will be the government, depowering any person
or organization at will. Likely as not, then PV etc. will be made
illegal ("matter of public safety") -- like Hemp in the US is illegal in
large part due to the efforts of other monopolists.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1999/348/348p24b.htm
"For thousands of years hemp has been used as a food, to make clothing,
as a medicine and as a drug. It can be turned into plastics and made
into petroleum without producing sulphur, thus reducing CO2 in the
atmosphere. Until 1883, 75 to 90% of all paper in the world was made
from hemp. ... The United States was the first country to introduce laws
to destroy hemp plants, regardless of their intended use. That law was
the result of political pressure exerted by the forestry industry and
the Dupont corporation, which had just patented oil and coal based
plastics production. Dupont's chief financial backer, Andrew Mellon, was
US President J. Edgar Hoover's secretary of the treasury. He appointed
his nephew, Harry J. Anslinger, to a position in the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs."
Or:
http://www.hhs.net/~greggb/page/fact.html
"Trees had become the number one paper source during this time. Hearst,
in addition to owning a nationwide chain of newspapers, also owned every
bit of timber used to make them. The new threat of cheap hemp meant that
trees would no longer be the cheapest source of paper. DuPont had
patented the process for producing synthetic nylon from oil and coal as
well as a new improved sulfate process to make paper from wood pulp. If
DuPont would have had to compete against environmentally-friendly hemp
products, his business would have suffered."

So, to make SSPS work despite security flaws, and to prop up the aging,
failing, and expensive grid that the SSPS vision needs, once again,
wealthy advocates making the investment in it will have to follow these
tried and true methods and convince everyone that local (as opposed to
space based) renewables are evil, a public safety menance, and should be
curtailed. And TangoMan is doing a good job. :-)

> local "rectenna" operators add another layer beyond the current 3-layer
> electric market (generation, transmission, and distribution) which
> should make for a vibrant and healthy commercial economy, once
> we get on-the-ground electric markets figured out better anyway.

Again, you can't get past the $0.05 / kWh for grid delivered costs of
home users. So, anything below that and local renewables will win long
term (and home wind energy is already below that cost in some
situations). See my other post on the incipient economic failure of the
grid as people abandon it and the sunk costs force enwrgy monopolies to
charge ever more for grid delivered power.

Also, when you consider that oil may cost $2 per barrel or less at the
pump, but sell for $25+ a barrel at the destination, you see the
incentives cartels have to mark up power. So, why should the SSPS cartel
not just charge $0.25 per kWh for power that costs them $0.02 to
produce? After all, they have TangoMan's onboard defense lasers and
particle beams to blast the competition (literally). :-)

--Paul Fernhout