Mother nature demonstrated in brutal fashion last week the dangers of perpetuating a centralized electrical grid system. Ice storms in the Northeast took out power to more than a million residents when trees and branches fell across power lines and began a cascading series of catastrophic failures.
Given the country’s current obsession with national security it is hard to reconcile the stubborn adherence to this old centralized paradigm. Most assuredly, power blackouts are a threat to the welfare and safety of every citizen whether the failure was caused by nature, human error or a well-placed improvised explosive device.
Estimates of the cost of repair will start pouring in soon and economists will begin calculating the losses to business and commerce as a result of the blackouts. The numbers will be staggering just as they were in previous wide spread electrical blackouts and we can only hope that the final death toll will be low.
In Vermont, Green Mountain Power President Mary Powell said, “Whenever you get this kind of ice accumulation, there’s just nothing from a utility perspective you can do to protect your customers from devastating damage.”
Despite the qualifier, ‘from a utility perspective’, Powell’s statement is simply not true. Utilities can opt to decentralize power production and develop distributed energy micro-grids that are proven to be more efficient, cleaner and above all, more reliable. Factoring in the lives saved it seems almost criminal not to decentralize.
So why, in the wake of one massive blackout after another, and during an era of such fear of terrorism that the US launched a pre-emptive war are we still tethering our electricity distribution to this antiquated system? The answer may in part be ‘power’.
With the privatization of electricity generation and the subsequent successful push to deregulate the industry, the need to generate quarterly profits supersedes providing reliable essential services and investing capital in maintenance. In the end it is the bottom line that matters and the customer pays the price not only in increased electric rates but also lowered reliability.
Centralized banking and deregulation led to the Wall Street meltdown and allowed the deregulated railroad industry to save money on maintenance causing some massive derailments. In the end, what centralizing does is focus control or power into the hands of a few. The current state of the US economy should be a clear indicator that the free market does not police itself very well. When that market includes essential services like electricity or transportation, the drive for higher profits can turn deadly.
The Enron collapse brought to the public attention the transformation of the electrical grid into a commodities trading market where Enron actually ‘gamed’ the grid with artificial shortages to raise wholesale electric prices. Decentralizing and developing micro-grids, particularly if locally owned, wrests control away from centralized power brokers and both figuratively and literally puts the power back into the hands of the people.
