New Zealand Celsias

The power blackout   in San Diego, California (and points south and west) that took place on September 8 is over.

Or is it?

Utility officials for San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) said repeatedly, before the event, that they had enough local power online to meet demand.

But did they?

In fact, SDG&E’s system is stretched so thin that blackouts may become a recurring thing. This isn’t so much the result of inadequate electricity generation, however, as it is a consequence of a swelling customer base and a deteriorating global climate thanks to a century of burning fossil fuels – a conflagration that is now producing killer heat waves.

The California blackout also took out parts of Arizona and Mexico. Arizona Power Company officials blamed a single individual   in a power plant, for replacing a crucial part at an equally crucial time.  

But since when are utility electricity generation and delivery systems so vulnerable that changing out a single part can bring one down? Not since 9/11, that’s for sure.

So how did we get here? The story is one of greedy for-profit utilities, ineffectual government oversight, and a United States electricity infrastructure so old (many parts dating back to the 1930s), in such ill repair (most of the money earned going to utility executives and shareholders), and so overburdened by rising populations in the most vulnerable areas – big cities – that it’s often a wonder that much of the U.S. doesn’t go dark after an especially hot day.

The reason utilities don’t fix things is that they are businesses, vested in making money, not spending it. Spending on things that don’t immediately show a return (or profit, as is the case with investments in transmission or distribution lines, substations, or transformers) is very bad business indeed, and the U.S. government has never resolved its conflict over the rights of individuals versus the rights of corporations (the latter seeming the clear favorite in most instances, even when people are dying of heat or cold   as a result).  

How do I know this? Consider the case of the U.S. Environmental Protection 
Agency (EPA) delaying greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations  , even though this will cause it to miss critical targets, just because utilities are as usual whining about costs.

Or take the December 8, 1998 blackout   affecting 350,000 Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which has been blamed on a single substation being out of service and then put back in without operators alerted.

This is also exactly what happened on August 10, 1996   when nine western states and part of Mexico went dark, affecting 4 million people and lasting for 4 days in some locations.

Lastly, consider some words of wisdom from none other than the premier economic magazine of the 21^st Century, the Economist, whose blogger Babbage call the San Diego blackout a case of “institutional neglect  .”

I’ve cited three proofs, but there are many more  . And – while the reasons given for the outages are myriad and varied (dare we say almost mythical at times) – the usual and unmentionable causes are inadequate equipment, rising populations, and climate change. Though nowhere does that climate seem to be changing for the better.

Instances are particularly noticeable during hot spells, which are bound to increase in the Western states of the U.S. as global warming extends it reach even into cool Northern Pacific states like Oregon and Washington. Other precipitators, also related to climate change, are storms, which are also bound to increase as earth’s climate deteriorates from a century of indifference.  

The only way to prevent future blackouts – other than spending about $50 billion (the cost to repair   same is $3 billion per year) – is to curb human combustion of fossil fuels like coal, oil, natural gas and gasoline or diesel, whose burning creates vast amounts of GHGs like carbon dioxide, the gas most often implicated in warming. But even when that is accomplished, accumulated greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide will continue to run the engine of global warming for at least another 50 years.

Still, soonest begun soonest done, which means replacing fossil fuels with solar, wind, geothermal and biofuels, an abundance of which could serve the power needs of the entire planet. The only trick is creating (and tying together) that abundance before the earth’s atmosphere is unbreathable or its climate intolerable.

It may mean some sacrifices. It may even mean changing the way we think about electricity.

Are we, or the utility companies, ready? Probably not.