Texas: Beginning of the End
Things are getting hot in Texas. Pixabay
Rolling blackouts in Texas will bring down the economy of Texas.
[Ed.: this week we’re doing #ClimateCrisis stories leading up the the March to End Fossil Fuels on September 17th. Join us there!]
I recently spent five years in Cape Town, South Africa (well, almost five years). I had heard about the ‘loadshedding.’ Loadshedding is when Eskom, the electric power facility in South Africa, switches off the electricity for a certain area for a particular amount of time.
So, the heart of the business district might find that it is without electricity for four hours in the middle of the day. Stores and restaurants would have to close. Naturally, it affected business somewhat negatively. The situation is, apparently, now much worse. Currently, that is up to 6 hours at a time.
For some time now, I have been warning that climate change will destroy the electricity grid, and once the electricity grid goes, that is the end of modern civilization. There is no way that millions (never mind billions) of people can survive without the energy that electricity produces. It is inherent in every aspect of our civilization.
There are several ways that climate change, and the resulting weather patterns, will incapacitate the electric grid. They are, as follows:
Storms and hurricanes will take them down. At a certain point, after repairing them thirty times in one season, electric companies will run out of money and resources.
In times of extreme cold and extreme heat, insufficient electricity will be generated to enable the economy to survive. As this happens, the electricity will go down.
Texas
So it comes as no surprise that, as things have heated up in various states in America, the electricity grid is being threatened with dire dysfunction. Texans are being warned that their electricity grid, despite being America’s greatest supplier of energy, could fail its people.
Then, again, Hurricane Harvey (2017) knocked out quite a bit of Houston electricity, and it was cold. Very, very cold. My daughter was in darkness, without any sort of electricity for three days. She had no heat, no light, and no stove to cook on. She survived by huddling up in blankets, recharging her phone in her car, and eating tinned food from her pantry.
I can’t recall the exact details, but if I remember correctly, the keymasters of the power grid did invest in wind turbines. Only, it never occurred to them that it could get so cold in Texas that the wind turbines could fail due to not being made to withstand cold temperatures. Thus, the wind turbines failed as well.
And so Texas joins third world South Africa in having mandatory rolling blackouts of electricity.
Hot weather and aircon
For those of us who have lived in places where the thermometer has topped 105 degrees Fahrenheit, we know just how awful it is. I recall those temps in Spain a decade ago, and there was no aircon. Instead, everything shut down at lunch time and everyone went ‘siesta.’ Things opened up in the late afternoon when it was cooler.
This is not what happens in the US. What happens is the aircon comes on. No doubt, if you’re living in Houston, you might make use of the underground passages which ties together much of Houston city. However, most cities do not offer shaded places.
They switch on the aircon.
At a certain point, there is just too much of a draw on the electricity grid, and then it fails. So then, everybody loses power. It’s not a pretty picture, and when there is a threat of that happening, then electric bosses decide on rolling black outs. It is a protective measure to keep the electric grid safe. It might, of course, put other lives in dire danger.