Grid woes...

 

 

"Sure would be nice if this were true. That our power would be there for us 24X7/365..."

Sure is nice to get up in the morning. Love making coffee, turning on the TV to watch the news, turning the light behind my chair to read the newspaper. Getting water to make coffee, going to the bathroom, everything I do in the morning (and for the most part, the rest of the day), involves using power. Electricity. "Juice". And every day we run the risk of having it all go away.

Today in the paper was a story which was very illustrative of where we stand today on power. A small manufacturing company in a city just northwest of town decided to put in solar panels on their roof. A ton of bucks were spent to do the install on these panels. The owner of the company did this to "do his part to help global warming" (please...). However, the job has been done for a while - and to this day, not one smidge of electricity has been generated from this pricy new install.

So what gives? First off, the blame game. The manufacturer of the panels is blaming the electric company for dragging its feet in getting it hooked up to the grid. The electric company is blaming the panel manufacturer for not doing integration planning correctly. The real problem is much larger than this pointing contest. We continue to have zero energy policy. It is willy nilly at its best. Our electric grid continues to be held together with spit and gum. We are one event away from brown outs and/or black outs and/or total catastrophe.

It seems like our golden days of power innovation died along with Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. With Edison and Tesla, we developed both DC and AC electrical current. Those two discoveries were game changers. Without them, I would not be typing this on a laptop. But ever since then, we have not done spit. Nada. Tesla would roll over in his grave if he could see the condition of our nation's electrical grid. And to fix it would not really take much. We have the technology to make our gird not only "smart" but also robust. Robust enough to withstand an EMP event. But we do not have the national will. And now maybe not the money. 

As long as we have our current Administration, with Dr. Goofy as our Energy Secretary, we will continue to live on the edge. No plan, no planning. We will continue to have useless wind turbines built. We will continue to have solar panels which are hooked up to nothing. We will continue to pay more for electricity as we shut down more and more coal powered plants.

The saddest part of not having a coherent energy policy is most people do not have a clue what life would be like should the power go off. It would not be amusing at all. People would suffer. Some people might die. If the power stayed off long enough, our country would devolve into something almost primeval. It would survival of the most fit and most prepared. Life would look like the final chapter in a dark, dystopian novel.

Remember this issue in the run up to the 2016 election. When the door knockers come around, ask what his or her vision is for our nation's power future. If you get some goofy answer like "reusable, renewable, sustaining", be polite as you slam the door. We need real people coming up with real solutions. Time to dig up Nikola Tesla to see if we can reanimate him...