If I take the power plant for example, let’s imagine you want to build a hardened geothermal power plant in some kind of significantly sheltered (maybe underground) environment as part of the citadelle concept. So you want a 40mwh power plant to support @30k people in the refuge. Well in normal times—that power goes straight into the grid and earns back revenue. Yes, it’s probably cheaper to build a field of solar, but not that much cheaper, Dinorwig Power Station was built in the 70′s in a mountain and that’s still cost effective today even though it’s slightly harder to build. This is where the paradox of scale economics comes into play, the more you do something at scale, actually the lower it costs and the more simple it becomes. It’s like using rare minerals—the more you use, the greater the demand, the more get’s found in new reserves.
I do agree that you have a valid point regarding the mobile phone vs. simple radio analogy. I wonder if there’s principle that could be adopted to beat this complexity problem though—what your essentially saying is the goods produced by the modern world value chain are ill suited to a disaster scenario due to their dependency on components that could be impossible to source in a different context. Maybe a principle along the lines that any goods used in the refuge must be able to be 100% fabricated in the refuge by materials available to the refuge. The Mormons have been doing something fairly similar for decades and it seems to work quite well for them.
If I take the power plant for example, let’s imagine you want to build a hardened geothermal power plant in some kind of significantly sheltered (maybe underground) environment as part of the citadelle concept. So you want a 40mwh power plant to support @30k people in the refuge. Well in normal times—that power goes straight into the grid and earns back revenue. Yes, it’s probably cheaper to build a field of solar, but not that much cheaper, Dinorwig Power Station was built in the 70′s in a mountain and that’s still cost effective today even though it’s slightly harder to build.
This is where the paradox of scale economics comes into play, the more you do something at scale, actually the lower it costs and the more simple it becomes. It’s like using rare minerals—the more you use, the greater the demand, the more get’s found in new reserves.
I do agree that you have a valid point regarding the mobile phone vs. simple radio analogy. I wonder if there’s principle that could be adopted to beat this complexity problem though—what your essentially saying is the goods produced by the modern world value chain are ill suited to a disaster scenario due to their dependency on components that could be impossible to source in a different context. Maybe a principle along the lines that any goods used in the refuge must be able to be 100% fabricated in the refuge by materials available to the refuge. The Mormons have been doing something fairly similar for decades and it seems to work quite well for them.