I got a good lesson in the wages of complacency on a cross-country flight from my base on the East Coast en route to a weekend of skiing at Squaw Valley in California's rugged Sierras. I was flying one of Uncle Sam's A-4 Skyhawks–the beloved "Tinker Toy" whose diminutive size disguised an awesome potential for wreaking havoc on unfriendly targets–and decided to let down from altitude and make a low pass over the ski resort "to check out the snow conditions," I assured myself.

Nose steeply down and airspeed coming up rapidly on the redline for carrying external fuel tanks (570 knots, or something slightly in excess of 600 mph), I found that I would overshoot the chalet unless I made a rather substantial thrust reduction — which of course I did.

Perhaps it was the rapid change in altitude and high dynamic pressure loading on the face of the engine, or maybe the abruptness with which I retarded the throttle, but whatever the cause, the effect was an immediate, bone-chilling silence as I slammed forward against my harness straps. Oops! I was caught absolutely unprepared, a situation that became more ominous with each passing second as I struggled first to comprehend what had happened and then what I was going to do about it.

First off, let me offer the assurance that you cannot believe how quickly you use up excess energy when you level off from a high-speed dive with a dead engine. Add to this the fact that low-level high-speed flight surrounded by a bunch of white-faced granite takes more than a minor amount of concentration, and between them you should be arriving at about the same conclusion I was — that I was in deep trouble.

Luckily I had a couple of things going for me: (1) some energy I could convert to altitude (or more to the needs of the moment — time) and (2) the foresight of some engineer at Pratt & Whitney who decided to incorporate a manual metering system within the engine's fuel control module. The two fortuitous elements were just enough to allow me to relight the engine and regain sufficient thrust to claw my way out of the valley.

After I landed and the enormity of the situation smacked me full force, I realized how stupid it was to have your options fall into your lap rather than in hand ready to use. As my flying experience grew I recognized that as a flight progressed, option after option fell by the wayside, necessitating the creation of new options to take their place. Complacency may be comfortable, I decided, but as a killer it was without peer.

That's flying, you say, but what does that have to do with Disributed Energy?

A lot as it turns out. It lay behind the vision I had even as wreckage from the World Trade Center Towers rained down on New York streets. Similar to me that day over Squaw Valley, we in the United States were so steeped in complacency that when we were blindsided by unforeseen events, we were shaken to the core not so much by their immediate consequences as by their long-term significance. We are vulnerable–terribly so–and that is a condition we find difficult to reconcile with our fundamental belief in the strength of our institutions.

As I agonized through the situation and its possibilities, I saw as chief among our most pressing vulnerabilities our reliance on an electrical grid system that could be brought to its knees in any number of ways. Even more ominous is the strength of our complacency in the face of incontrovertible evidence of the grid's severe shortcomings in withstanding the impacts of natural and unnatural disasters. We may "see" it, but we have yet to "get" it.

Because of our marvelous technologies, we have been able to distance ourselves from what for many others in the world are the realities of day-to-day existence and in doing so we have constructed for ourselves in many respects a house of cards through which we run the danger of becoming not a second- or third-world country, but something far worse — a nation whose basic coping skills have atrophied through lack of use.

We are not likely to voluntarily renounce the technologies implicit in our present lifestyle and return to a more bucolic existence, but we may find ourselves without a choice if we don't recognize the pressing need for reform in the distribution of electrical energy and its underlying resources. Onsite power is not just about meeting isolated events, but part of a broader approach to a national crisis sorely in need of options — as many as we can get.

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DE - March/April 2005