Since I don't much like talking about myself, I'll keep this brief. If you know me, you might recognize some of these columns as ones I wrote for Southbridge Evening News in Massachusetts*; I'll splice those in occasionally among new things exploring energy, ecology, local and world politics, science & scifi, nuclear weapons & power, history, maps, and pretty much anything else that comes to mind... If you don't, I'm a farmer, journalist, locally-active citizen, unabashedly Green and communitarian, somewhat luddite, anarchist and what I'd call an "optimistic realist" -- I know we CAN solve the problems we face (and there are many), but I'm not sure we WILL.
We'll get into all that in due time. for now I'll dive right in ...
(*In this post's case, I'm writing it here first, but it'll appear in the SEN this Friday.)
Gus
Blackout, 10 years after
Over the last few days, NPR and various
other media have been revisiting the great blackout of August 2003,
where around 50 million people across the Northeast and parts of
Canada lost power. Some lost it just for a few hours, some for
several days, although New England itself was largely spared.
As might be expected from the
mainstream outlets, there's a fair amount of talk from the people who
run the current system about the changes they've made to avoid a
similar system crash going forward. To them, that means spending
millions, even billions, to implement the "smart grid,"
based largely on electronic metering that sends household energy use
data to the utilities every hour or so and more electronics that
measure the flows within the system itself. On the government side,
the blackout prompted a push to give the regional transmission
organizations (non-profit corporations overseeing the grid; ours is
ISO-New England) greater authority.
Sounds great, right?
Sounds unnecessarily complicated to me.
Leaving aside the claims of health
effects from the meters (which I'm not convinced about) and potential
privacy concerns (which could be a problem), this approach only makes
the underlying problem WORSE, not better. Yes, it puts more eyes in
place to watch and prevent problems. But it still strengthens the
centralization of the energy system, and therefore its overall
vulnerability, when the real need is to promote a huge increase in
distributed generation and storage, with local ownership by
communities or private coops, and the like.
To some degree, there has been
investment there, too -- but not enough. That's largely due to strong
opposition from the established utilities, fossil fuel firms and
their campaign contributions in Congress and at other levels. Here in
Mass., there has been a bill languishing in the Legislature for some
time that would make it easier for towns to create their own power
companies, and that would help if passed (if it's funded).
Unfortunately, there's also one (S.
1600) that seems, based on my reading, to give existing private
utilities monopolies in the name of "competition." It
states firms serving areas on Jan. 1, 2013, will have "exclusive
obligation to provide distribution service to all retail customers
within its service territory, and no other person shall provide
distribution service within such service territory without the
written consent of such distribution company." It calls for a
competitive bidding process to procure power source "not less
than every 15 years" but specifically excludes any company or
subsidiary that's "regulated by the department," saying
those firms cannot "be allowed to use the distribution system of
another electric company" without a state "restructuring
plan." Later, that bill seems to exempt municipal light
plants from having to be part of this arrangement.
None of this goes in the right
direction. As we saw in 2007-8, the "too big to fail"
mentality -- which is as rampant in the energy sector as in banking
-- is a guarantee of big trouble, and should be treated as "too
big to be allowed to live." For our own long-term well-being, we
need to get away from "big energy" and re-learn how to tap
the local energy supplies using companies that are democratically
owned.
True energy independence will greatly
vary from place to place, and won't look at all like what the giant
oil firms blather regarding making us "Saudi America."
While some areas DO have good supplies of oil and gas to support
themselves, the worldwide use of them is screwing up our climate. By
contrast, almost anywhere can make solar work well -- Germany gets
around 20 percent of its power from solar despite having less
sunlight than even New England does -- but the panels themselves
require rare earths and other materials with a significant energy
cost to mine and construct. If they last, logic says they'll make up
the difference over time, although I can't claim to know how long
that takes.
For that reason and others (local
geography, for one), it might be better to invest instead in wind (if
you're in Wyoming, say), tidal power (Nova Scotia and many
seacoasts), or small hydro. As history shows, the latter is ideal for
New England with our numerous small rivers, and with modern
technology, we can use smaller, more efficient turbines that don't
require the dams and river disruption the old mills had. A big plus
is that it's nearly impossible to centralize -- the hydro network we
have encourages local ownership.
What gets in the way today is a complex
state and federal approval process that costs millions, putting it
out of reach of the people who most need new power sources. Such
facilities should be sited carefully to protect the rivers and serve
the community well, but I suspect the process is cumbersome
specifically because it discourages independence from the big energy
firms. "Energy independence" has never been about
independence for you and me or the US as a nation, but about
ExxonMobil, National Grid and similar giants being rich enough to
ignore our real needs.
It's time we declared our independence
of such manipulation and the risk of future energy crashes it all but
guarantees.
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