Will Brownouts Return to America?

Back in the 1970s and 80s America experienced what was referred to as "brownouts". It was not a blackout of electric service, but it heralded an era of possible shortages of electricity to power our energy intensive civilization. Brownouts occurred on days and during hours of high demand for electric power primarily to run all the air conditioners people had become accustomed to and dependent on.

As with all impending crises the a/c was not the sole culprit when the power became short. The brownout occurred when too many users demanded too much power from the grid that the voltage dropped below the acceptable 110-volt threshold. Incandescent bulbs would dim. Compressor motors would strain to stay running to pump the heat out of our houses, officers and apartment. Many commercial HVAC systems had under-volt protection so the motors did not overheat and become damaged. Lesser systems merely strained until they failed.

The utility companies were faced with the prospects of building another generation plant at a cost of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Even with funding available, it would take years and even decades to bring a new plant online.

As mentioned above, it was not merely the A/C demand that browned-out the grid. It was all the dishwashers, laundromats, 100-watt bulbs and refrigerators all plugged in and pulling power at the same time. There arose an alternative to building more capacity which would be less expensive and faster to market. That idea was conservation.

The utility companies devised marketing campaigns to limit electric demand during peak hours and days. The appliance manufacturers (under pressure from the EPA and other Federal government agencies) increased the efficiency of their products. Incandescent lightbulbs were replaced first with Compact Florescent bulbs (later LEDs) which consumed far less electricity. Homeowners were encouraged to wash dishes and laundry at night when other demand was lower. The strategy worked because spending $10 million on conservation marketing campaigns to save 10% of use eliminated the need to spend $100 million or more for 10% increase in capacity.

Today utility companies have Internet-connected metering to record how much electricity a customer uses during each hour of the day. Pricing is time dependent.

Using a combination of persuasion and heavy-handed regulations we as a nation averted the brownout crises and now have fewer days and times when the power is not sufficient. This short-term remedy cannot continue indefinitely. There is a mathematical limit to how much less electricity we can use. Along the way toward balancing the demand with the capacity we even had the time to better insulate our dwellings against heat migration in and out thereby lowering the energy demand of the millions of dwelling in this country.

But now, three trends are making an uptick in electricity demand. More houses/apartments for a growing population, more appliances left connected and using electricity and the popularity of electric automobiles. All of these items make conventional electricity generation even more a problem for the environment. Coal and gas fired plants make additional CO2 loading in the air which then leads to hotter weather and an increased need for electricity to run A/C systems. This is called a "feedback loop". The cause leads to the effect which in turn exacerbates the cause. Hydro-electric plants require a massive commitment of land and must be located where there is a river of sufficient flow and a deep valley in which to impound the water. Nuclear reactors need the river water flow for cooling and they produce massive amounts of 10,000-year toxic wastes. They take decades to build and bring online.

  

This is the Before picture

This is the After picture

Each of these primary sources of electricity have a massive downside with which to contend. By comparison, solar PV and wind turbine fields do not produce ongoing quantities of toxic wastes. They can be upgraded in stages, unit by unit, as better technologies emerge. They can be located on land which is otherwise underutilized or sitting unused at all. Most of all they can be relocated over time as needed and desired.     

Construction times for Wind and Solar fields are also much shorter than for any other method of generation. The styles and configuration of Wind and Solar installations are likewise evolving and are able to keep ahead of the demands and the aesthetics of the system.

We can coast along denying that man is responsible for the melting of land-bound ice, the acidification of the oceans, heating of the atmosphere and wait for the ultimate outcome to manifest itself. Or we can do everything within our capabilities to forestall that bleak result. Even if some celestial event, or geologic process turns back the clock on climate change, that too will be a factor of climate change with which we will have to address. Getting colder or getting hotter is equally detrimental for us and tens of thousands of species on this Earth we all share.

A Man Hears What He Wants to Hear

This song lyric has never been truer than it is today.

"A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest." ~ Paul Simon, The Boxer

There is indeed a segment of the electorate who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election because his rhetoric matched their own wants and desires, hope and fears. He said he'd Make America Great Again and the people wanted to be on the great side. He altered the phrase to be "Safe Again" and they wanted to be safe. The only thing is America has never been any more or less great than it is today nor is it any less safe than it has ever been. Trump's rhetoric implies that foreign nationals are a significant threat to American's safety even though zero refugees have committed a serious crime against any Americans. Comment below if you have facts to challenge that assertion.

The anti-gun safety lobby and their NRA followers love to point out that automobile drivers kill more Americans than anyone with a gun. No argument there. They love to point out that Cheeseburgers are far more deadly than a gun with the annual death toll counted in the hundreds of thousands. Again no argument. Even hospital stays kill more than 400,000 people every year due to sepsis. This post is not a gun legislation debate but one to point out that Legislators and Chief Executives typically focus on the wrong aspects of an issue. They do it because the misdirection gives them a better position.

Voters heard the cry of the desire to bring back jobs to Americans. While that is an admirable goal, the part that was not heard was those jobs would be paying less than the living wages needed to live in the United States. GOP-controlled Legislatures are adamantly against the minimum wage or increasing it from $7.35 per hour. They are strongly against organized labor which could help workers get better pay, health insurance and necessary time off. They want to make it legal for a business to discriminate against employing certain people due to an alleged religious basis. All those jobs will be no better and sometimes worse than being on the welfare rolls.

They heard the hue and cry that "government regulations were crippling small business". The Trump Administration remedy is to repeal two regulations for every one new one. What they fail to see is that those government regulations were actually protecting them in their home and on their properties. Consider the chicken farmer who finds that treating the chicken manure is too costly. Without regulations he merely flushes the chicken crap into the local stream and leave it up to the downstream neighbors to deal with it.

Cutting environmental regulations is paramount to the GOP Legislatures across the nation. But each of those regulations has previously brought us back from a cataclysmic degradation of the air, land and water. Every one of the existing regulations lowers the cost of cleanup that must be borne by the taxpayers as the result of allowing a profit making business to neglect his wastes and dump it in his neighbors' yards.

In short, every call to limit a "bloated big government" is dog whistle for making it easier to foist the cost of doing a profitable business onto everyone else in the name of a "thriving economy." Everyone can drive twice as far on a tank of gas if they are not planning to return home. 

Cutting immigrants from SNAP (aka Food Stamps) sounds like a great cost savings until you consider that one, immigrants don't get Food Stamp, and two the food Stamp program is less that 1.55 of the national budget. Drug testing recipients of welfare funds get the knees jerking but previous implementation proves the cost of testing exceeds the savings.

Securing the vote is what Republican voters heard to keep non-citizens from voting but the practices put in place actually stopped upwards of 7 million qualified voters from casting their ballots legitimately.

None of the misleading rhetoric was a mistake. It was all part of the PLAN, the Plan to get more GOP led states contrary to the diminished population of voters and constituents who need government assistance to challenge the hurdles put before them by business interests who want the money for themselves. 

Trumpian Wrecking Crew

Here is my considered opinion. During the campaign run up to the 2016 Presidential Primaries both major parties sought to put their better foot forward. The DNC decided that Hillary Clinton was their strongest hope of maintaining a Democratic Administration. They threw everything they had at her and marginalized Bernie Sanders who seemed to have quite a following. Whether he could have won over Donald Trump will forever be a matter of political debate by minds greater than mine. At the time, the candidacy of Donald Trump was far from certain.

With in excess of 16 nationally recognizable Candidates to choose from, the RNC threw all the candidates against the wall to see who sticks. The one who was al dente was Donald Trump. For better or for worse, HE was their man.

All throughout the whittling down of the pool of also rans, the Republicans were only looking for the man who could beat "Evil Hillary". They made sure that their 25-year War on Hillary continued with the most outlandish fabrications ever to be devised in the annals of American politics. Mudslinging and Muckraking were not unknown to our forefathers, but the machinations of the Conservatives in this election would have made the lot of them gag and avert their eyes lest they be drawn in and squashed too.

Donald trump acted like a man on a suicide mission or a one-way trip to Mars. He would go. He would be hailed as a hero. He would face near indomitable odds. And though he may land on the Red Planet, he would die there. All along his journey Mr. Trump burned all his fuel in reckless abandon on the outbound trip knowing that he needn't hold any in reserve for a return trip. And when the tank was empty he would coast on his mighty momentum until he hit the wall, an asteroid or the ground at the end of his ballistic trajectory.

I am reminded of the Ballad of Poncho and Lefty where "all the Federales say, we could have had him any day. We just let him go so long. Out of kindness, I suppose." The Republican "federales" have a purpose for the "useful fool" as a one-man wrecking crew to dismantle everything they hate and want to dispose of without fear of the backlash for proposing it in the first place. It is one thing to try to dismantle the ACA, Medicare and Social Security, but all together another if the actually do it. President Trump can gut all the regulations, programs and governing oversight with the stroke of his pen while leaving the GOP untarnished.

Donald Trump has served his purpose. He used the most vulgar approach to win his office for the GOP over Hillary. He has set in motion the dismantling of multiple safety net programs, the EPA, USDA, FDA, Free Press, BLM and many more. He has placed completely incompetent and unqualified appointees in high office where each of them can scuttle their departments in favor of privatization and shareholder value. Consider the placement of Steve Bannon in the role of Presidential Adviser. His stated goal is the dismantling of the American governmental system. But in order for the GOP to have any hope of dodging the ire of the electorate they must put an end to the tyranny engendered by President Trump. They will have to move to impeach and then remove him from office for the good of what remains of US Democracy.