Preface. Blackouts are more and more likely in the future from fires, hurricanes, natural gas shortages and more. Below is an account from a friend who had to evacuate due to a wildfire.
Blackouts in the news:
2021. Texas Was Seconds Away From Going Dark for Months.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity
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This is a letter from a friend about his experiences when PG&E cut his power off (and 2.5 million others).
Last Saturday around 2 pm we received notice that our area was under an evacuation warning owing to the huge Kincade fire that erupted on Wednesday evening (which we watched in terror and awe from our front porch). At 6:30 pm the order became mandatory. In the end, nearly 200,000 people, or about a third of the population of Sonoma County, were evacuated.
This was our first experience having to plan and prepare to leave on a moment’s notice. We found refuge with a friend in San Francisco, where we stayed until the order was downgraded to a warning on the following Tuesday. The experience highlighted a number of lessons for us.
First and foremost, do not ever evacuate without taking your dog’s favorite toy with you. This oversight necessitated a trip to a pet store to find the item in question. Having a dog certainly helped us keep focused and calmer, although I know she sensed that we were quite out of sorts for days.
Second, we discovered that fuel disappears quickly. We went out 15 minutes after the initial warning was issued, and the closest gasoline station already had 7 of 8 pumps taped closed. The second station had fuel, but long lines coming in from each direction. Of course, once the power went off, there was no fuel to be had at all.
Third, having PV was useless. Although Sonoma County is one of the most heavily PV’d counties in the state, nearly all is grid-tied and thus rendered inoperable in a blackout. And EV owners were out of luck and had to head to SF or the central valley to find electricity.
Fourth, it completely reinforced my understanding that “you can’t do just one thing”. Our power utility (PG&E) in October started implementing what they termed PSPS or “Public Safety Power Shutoffs,” or plainly, power blackouts, to avoid sparking additional fires if the high winds (which did reach up to 103 mph in gusts on Sunday) blew trees into energized lines starting new fires. But after the power went off Saturday night to nearly 2.5 million people, it started a cascading series of failures of complex systems. The county’s largest cable and internet provider failed, and even the copper-wire landline went dead (we keep a land line because of frequent winter blackouts), and neither was restored until a day after the power returned 5 days later. This led to a huge range of consequences, including the near-complete shutdown of commerce, and mundane problems such as repair shops unable to release vehicles to owners because state law requires an invoice, and the invoicing system is cloud-based. We also discovered that the battery backup on our garage door (now state-mandated for new houses) which we got after 5 people died in the 2017 fires from not being able to get out of their garages, died since it requires a trickle charge and goes offline after 2 days without power. And most critically, in my region of the county, nearly everyone relies on a well, so without power, there is no water. Fortunately, we didn’t lose any crops on our drip irrigation, though some were were quite stressed from lack of water.
Fifth, evacuations and firefighting are very energy intensive. With 200,000 people leaving the county, that probably involved 75,000 or so cars, trucks, and RVs on the road, and people headed north to Eureka, inland to Sacramento, and south to San Jose. CalFire deployed 10 Super Huey helicopters, 445 fire engines, 41 dozers, and 64 water tenders in addition to the airtankers and the Global Supertanker, a modified 747 with retardant tanks. Air and ground assistance came from as far away as Montana. We saw fire trucks from Fullerton and Santa Barbara in southern California and some from Oregon, all of which drove to the fire zone. To then turn the power back on, PG&E had to deploy over 600 trucks and numerous helicopters to inspect every mile of every distribution line in the county for damage.
Without even speculating on what this means to the viability of living in California, it hardened my belief that folks are completely delusional in their efforts to design “resilient and sustainable cities” with programs that rely heavily on cloud-based sensors reporting traffic, home appliance usage, and requiring big-data crunching to work. I know I’m going to be even more of a gadfly at meetings where this comes up in the future. It just won’t work.
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When PG&E told us the power would be out for two days, here are a few things we did: freeze as many water bottles as possible, stores sell out of ice over a day ahead of time. Put some frozen bottles into a cooler and all of the ice in the ice maker or it will melt and flood the floor. Add refrigerator food for the next 2 days to the cooler so that you don’t ever have to open the door. Better than candles are battery lanterns. Charge laptops, phones, kindles and a battery to recharge them. Be sure to have matches to light the natural gas burners on the stove. I bet those of you who get hurricanes could add a lot to this list of how to cope!
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