Keeping some of the Lights on: Redefining Energy Security

Today’s link is from Low Tech Magazine. I like this magazine because it challenges my assumptions on what kinds of technology is harmful and what kinds of technology is necessary. A throughline of the magazine is that it takes a low tech angle on various topics, informed by the goal of environmental sustainability. The article I want to talk about is called Keeping some of the lights on: Redefining energy security.(sidenote: Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240101140756/https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-lights-on-redefining-energy-security/¹ )

The titular energy security isn’t universally agreed upon, but the common thread is that energy should always meet demand and supply should be constant and uninterrupted. The goals in energy politics today is to have power that is 1) limitless and uninterrupted, 2) affordable, and 3) environmentally sustainable. The article presents two big problems with these goals.

First, even if there is more than enough energy in the sun’s rays and in the wind, the materials required to build the infrastructure to harvest enough energy to meet all of the demand makes it unsustainable both economically and environmentally.

The second, and to me more interesting point, is that an energy system that has a highly reliable energy supply becomes less resilient to changes. This is because increasing the reliability generally also increases the dependence. In an environment where power can be counted on to always be on there is no need to design machines or maintain skills so that you can handle power outages gracefully. As more functions gets handled by machines that can’t handle outages, the potential damages of a sustained outage increases.

This points to a need to redefine energy security as something that “is not just about securing the supply of electricity, but also about improving the resilience of the society”. Of course, this rules out fossil fuels, as those are making the environment less fit for human civilization. It also rules out the goal of limitless uninterrupted supply, as that makes society more susceptible to changes in availability of energy. Paradoxically, decreasing the availability of energy increases resilience.

The conventional definition for energy security assumes that energy demand is disconnected from supply, but that is not true — they are interlinked. A society with low reliability (for example in affluent countries: off-gridders) relies less on energy and has a lower demand. This is because there are skills and technologies that makes energy less important. Better isolation in housing and in refrigerators is one illustrative example. For a more thorough exploration of that, see this article: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/

As climate change progresses the environment will become less predictable and extreme weather phenomena will increase. This means that increasing the resilience of our societies will become more and more important, and for that this article argues, we need to decrease power supply and demand.

Read the full article for all the details: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-lights-on-redefining-energy-security/