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<p align="left"><font face="Arial"><strong><small>About The Author:<br>
<br>
</small></strong><span lang="X-NONE" style="color: black"><font size="2">
ROGER FELDMAN, Co-Chair of Andrews Kurth LLP Climate Change and Carbon
Markets Group has practiced law related to the finance of environmental and
energy projects and companies for 40 years. In particular, he has analyzed
and executed a wide variety and substantial value of project financings. He
chairs the American Bar Association’s Committee on Carbon Trading and
Finance, serves on the Board of the American Council for Renewable Energy,
and has been a senior official in the Federal Energy Administration. He is
a graduate of Brown University, Yale Law School and Harvard Business School.</font></span></font></p>
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<img src="../images/feldman.gif" alt="Washington Viewpoint by Roger Feldman" border="0" width="375" height="75"><p align="left"><b><u><br>
August 2007</u></b></p>
<p align="center"><font size="6"><b>Green The Bloody Butterfly</b></font></p>
<p><strong>by Roger Feldman --
</strong><b>Andrews Kurth, LLP</b><strong><br>
</strong><font face="Arial" size="2">(<em>originally published by PMA OnLine
Magazine: 2008/01/26</em>)<br>
</font><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Palatino; color: black">
</span></p>
<div>
Summertime and the living is easy. Air conditioners pumping and the
icemaker’s working fine. And yet, now too is the summer of our
discontent, made torrid by fears of war and terrorism. It sometimes
seems to sensible hardheaded people (in which group most of us number
ourselves) that to confront those issues holding the green palms of
renewable energy is almost a little effete, distracted by
environmentalism from the blood and iron realities of the day.<p>I felt
somewhat that way when I began reading former CIA Director Woolsey’s
invocation of the “Butterfly Effect” as something in any way linking
energy policy and renewable energy. The butterfly effect -- the notion
that when a butterfly flutters its wings on one side of the world, our
complex ecosphere can, given its interconnected complexity, create
unpredictable results such as cyclones on the other side of the world.
Or, to take a more tangible example related to our amazingly complex and
yet fragile energy system, the fall of a tree branch on a transmission
line in Ohio can take 50 million people off the electric grid for a
couple of days throughout the North American Northeast. Here is the
connection, as Wolsey has put it most graphically:</p>
<dir>
<dir>
<p>[T]errorists are a lot smarter than tree branches. They could
go after the vulnerable parts of the electricity grid
intentionally, just as they went after the cockpit doors on
9/11. They can think their way toward finding the most serious
vulnerabilities . . . </p>
</dir>
</dir>
<p>In the past, that has led would-be hard headed and sensible
proponents of distributed energy solutions to focus on the possibilities
implicit not only in multiple locations of back-up energy sources
(conventional as well as renewable) which were not dependent on the
grid. While the military in its effort to “harden” bases has seen some
merit in this concept, there has not been a wildfire adoption of this
solution, even when linked by sophisticated information systems.
Certainly utilities have not proved staunch advocates of reducing
reliance on large scale central generation with its lower production
cost, nor of major transmission expansion not paid for by the customers
benefiting from same.</p>
<p>Leaving aside economic reasons for this, there seem to be two major
precepts embedded in the national psyche which have dismissed the
possibility of conscious ninja-like emulation of the butterfly effect by
the “bad guys.” One is simply that it “can’t happen here”; obviously
part of the shock of 9/11 was that, evidently, it could. The second is
that whatever threat America faces can be dealt with by highly
sophisticated technological means, if we put our minds and hearts to it,
whether domestic or international . . .</p>
<p>Which is where it becomes extremely pertinent to consider the
congressional testimony of Scott Sklar, a noted energy consultant to,
among others, the National Defense University. Sklar points out that the
Achilles heel of many of our high tech security devices is the
vulnerability of their power supply. He focuses on three areas:</p>
<dir>
<ul type="disc">
<p><b>Detection</b> <br>
low power sensors, cameras, motion detectors and chemical
sniffers;</p>
<p><b>Prevention</b><br>
hardening infrastructure and buildings with means such as
sensors, uninterruptible power, and power quality;</p>
<p><b>Offensive and Defensive Preparations and Actions</b><br>
scanners, electric fences, enhanced communications, and
emergency preparedness.</p>
</ul>
</dir>
<p>One feels better just hearing about these devices and systems: mind
over crazed efforts to crush matter. But in industrialized countries,
most of these are still interconnected with the electric grid (whose
wires can be cut) and backed up by the use of diesel generators
(sometimes unreliable, utilizing vulnerable fuel tanks, easily subject
to disabling and fuel combustion, susceptible to flooding) or by battery
banks (which run down).</p>
<p>Which is why experts like Sklar have urged the use of remote
renewable energy sources, either on their own or to provide greater
reliability and robustness to systems. This is not squishy, unpragmatic
thought: it is a direction of research and implementation by the Defense
Department in its increasing role of terrorist-control activities
overseers. At the macro level, for example, last August the Marine Corps
General in al-Anbar province requested the Pentagon send more solar and
wind renewable energy systems to bases and outposts, thus reducing
dependence on fossil fuels, reducing fuel convoy requirements, and
thereby saving lives. A reverse-mini-butterfly effect, if you will.</p>
<p>More prosaically, first in theaters of war, but certainly adaptable
to a variety of situations, renewable energy can enhance the likelihood
that our “walls” will stand firm. The higher and harder to reach any
sensing and detection equipment is placed, the harder it is to disable.
PV, mini-wind and micro-fuel cells all have great capacity to be located
with these devices and hardened themselves appropriately. There is great
value in blending renewable and conventional sources, so that valuable
redundancy in sensing, communicating, and powering can be obtained.</p>
<p>In short, it is not Brownie that will save us from dangerous
security-disabling brown-outs; it is the green net of renewables. Those
who fight wars know it more than those prattling about homeland
security. And it is up to proponents of renewables to bring home the
story of the bloody butterfly.<br>
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text-align:left"><font face="Arial" size="2">
<span lang="X-NONE" style="color: black">ROGER FELDMAN, Co-Chair of Andrews
Kurth LLP Climate Change and Carbon Markets Group has practiced law related
to the finance of environmental and energy projects and companies for 40
years. In particular, he has analyzed and executed a wide variety and
substantial value of project financings. He chairs the American Bar
Association’s Committee on Carbon Trading and Finance, serves on the Board
of the American Council for Renewable Energy, and has been a senior official
in the Federal Energy Administration. He is a graduate of Brown University,
Yale Law School and Harvard Business School.</span></font></p>
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