There has been a lot of speculation about the causes of the extended blackouts on the east coast that left up to 1.4 million without power, some for more than a week. The unprecedented heatwave following the freakish derecho storm that toppled trees and power lines over a 700 mile swath that includes the nation’s capitol and killed 26 people is being blamed on global warming. Union busting and only half as many full time linemen is named as a possible culprit for the agonizingly slow eight days before power was restored. “International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1900 members claim the failure to restore power outages is due to chronic understaffing and Pepco’s shift from hiring union utility workers to non-union temporary contractors.”
Global warming and corporate cost cutting are definitely major contributors to the disaster but the prime cause of these failures is the power industry’s adherence to the centralized model of electricity generation and distribution. The centralized grid is an 18th century concept designed to support the burning of fossil fuels to boil water to in turn produce steam in order to spin a turbine connected to copper coils and magnets controlled by profit conscious investor owned utilities (IOU). The centralized grid is a kluge of wires and transformers and switches dating from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that serve primarily to centralize control of electricity into the hands of the very few that can afford the capital expenditure to build a multi-megawatt power plant.
Even if the IOU centralized model had not forsaken infrastructure investments in favor of quarterly profits and reinvested those gains to maintain and upgrade the grid, it would only served to perpetuate dependence on a wasteful 19th century adaptation that burns two thirds of its product before it ever reaches the consumer.
Practically, it is hard to imagine a technology that wastes 2.2 kilowatt-hours for every single kilowatt-hour produced is surviving into the 22nd century. Let’s hope it doesn’t; it simply isn’t sustainable. We should be imagining that next century now — one without a crisscross labyrinth of ugly transmission lines, one with thousands of independently functioning renewable energy microgrids.
The price tag just in lost productivity for this recent blackout is still being tallied but the American Society of Civil Engineers warns in a 2011 report, Failure to Act: The Economic Impact of Current Investment Trends in Electricity Infrastructure, that without an investment of $673 billion the grid could suffer catastrophic failure by 2020 and the economic impacts of not addressing energy infrastructure will be devastating.
If future investment needs are not addressed to replace and upgrade our nation’s electric generation, transmission, and distribution systems, then costs will be borne by both households and businesses. These costs may occur in the form of higher costs for electric power, or costs incurred because of power unreliability, or costs associated with adopting more expensive industrial processes. Ultimately, they all lead to the same economic impact: diversion of household income from other uses and a reduction in the competitiveness of U.S. businesses in world economic markets.
It is astonishing that after all the empirical evidence, not to mention deaths of energy dependent consumers, that the centralized model is fraught with problems, no consideration is given to doing away with it altogether. Instead of investing billions in upgrading a 19th century construct we should be moving into the 22nd century and a more elegant, redundant and therefore more reliable distributed model where power is produced from multiple renewable sources right at the point of consumption.
