When the Electricity Goes Out
By Alan Caruba
A few weeks ago, the electricity in my sector of town failed. I was in an elevator between two floors of my apartment complex when it happened, and I spent a half-hour waiting until the building manager and a fireman showed up, opened the outer door and pulled me out.
We never give any thought whatever to the availability of electricity - until it ceases to exist. While Americans remain fixated on the prospect of terrorism, the fact is this nation is astonishingly vulnerable to a shutdown of vast, regional proportions, because our electricity transmission system has been neglected for years, rendering it comparable to Third World nations.
When I say “shutdown”, I mean everything that depends on electricity to function. It takes electricity to pump gasoline. No gas means you’re not going anywhere. The loss per hour of downtime would be $2,580,000 for all credit card operations. No credit card means you’re not likely buying anything. Brokerage operations would lose $6,480,000 per hour. Even if you could get a ride to the airport, there would be no flights.
In May, a US News and World Report article, “When the Lights Go Out”, noted that summer is the time of highest vulnerability for what is generally called the North American grid, the actual transmission wires that distribute electricity.
Much depends on Mother Nature, in terms of whether storms knock out sections of the grid, or whether it gets so hot that air conditioners and other appliances are running full out. In 2003, a great swath of the Northeast lost electricity because some tree limbs in Ohio set in motion a cascade of failures affecting fifty million people. That’s how big the threat of failure is.
Jason Makansi has written Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It Means to You ($27.95, John Wiley & Sons). This is not likely to be your reading choice for a day at the beach, so I have read it for you. It is useful to keep in mind that, at $700 billion, the power industry is the largest enterprise in the nation.
The author, a consultant to the power industry, writes that, “In some ways, a weakly interconnected grid may be beneficial when it comes to (national) security. Disconnected systems cannot all fail together. However, the Y2K studies revealed that there are a handful of major substations in our ‘national grid’ that, if taken out, could likely cause the entire Eastern or Western parts of the U.S. electricity system to falter.”
Surely, the federal government and the various elements of the electricity supply industry are aware of this? Yes, they are, but anyone who recalls the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or the general way that federal and state bureaucracies function, also knows that not enough is being done to address this critical problem.
Specifically, utilities have generally resisted sinking money into upgrading the transmission systems for electricity. The 2003 cascade generated demands for new rules and, among them, are fines up to $1 million a day for companies that violate mandatory reliability standards. These days, energy insiders think that we should get through this and other summers okay, but they worry about Southern California and parts of Connecticut. Major upgrades, however, will be needed coast-to-coast.
Then there’s a factor to which few pay any attention. For decades, the environmental movement has done everything in its power to thwart the development, expansion, and ability to secure the raw sources from which electricity is generated. Instead, Americans have been fed a steady stream of nonsense about solar or wind power, both of which are heavily subsidized, and neither of which provides barely more than one percent of the nation’s electric power needs.
So while “Greens” are fighting against the building of coal-fired utilities in Texas, nuclear facilities in California, or against the prospect of long transmission lines that require right-of-ways through “pristine” areas, the need for more electricity grows, and the ability to provide it slows.
As for the sources of power, coal, natural gas, oil, uranium, environmentalists have opposed access and extraction in the United States and throughout the world. Makansi, who has been involved with the power industry for twenty-five years, says, “As long as I can remember, we’ve been ‘running out.” During that time, we’ve had a ‘ten-year supply of natural gas’, “a 250-year supply of coal’, a ’30-year supply of petroleum.’”
Energy resource availability is not the problem. The Earth is not ‘running out’ of energy resources, but the global warming hoax is entirely based on deterring the use of energy in any form, anywhere, and limiting existing use by claiming that greenhouse gases emitted threatens the very existence of the Earth. The simple truth is that, if the Earth should either warm or cool, the entire process is caused by the Sun.
However, we are running out of time when it comes to building new facilities and transmitting electricity throughout the nation. We are running out of time to find a new generation of engineers and others to run our electricity industry. We are facing growing competition for the raw materials of electrical power, from China and India where one-third of the world’s population live - and whose economies are growing at 7% to 15% annually, while ours barely tops 3%.
Coal, uranium, and natural gas account for 90% of the electricity generated in the United States. Electricity isn’t created from air. Its raw materials must be mined and drilled for extraction. Oil is primarily used for transportation needs. In all cases, we are increasingly dependent on sources that are far away from our shores.
The environmental movement and politicians in Washington, D.C. have successfully stymied the ability of “Big Oil” to access vast quantities of energy resources that exist just offshore of our vast coastlines or in “pristine” places like Alaska.
Meanwhile, the aging transmission system has been seriously neglected for too long, and when the lights go out next time, they may not come back on in an hour, or a day, or a week, or any time soon enough to save the economy from sinking into a very deep, black hole.
When that happens, the terrorists won’t have to lift a finger to harm us. We will have done it to ourselves by being ever so “green”, by believing the lies about “global warming”, by not permitting our energy industry to provide the electricity upon which our lives depend.
See biography for Alan Caruba
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