WWO: Life Is At The Center
May. 22nd, 2007 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyIn a World Without Oil:
You've heard from a lot of alarmists now that gasoline and diesel prices are so much higher. People are talking about the grid falling apart, the sky falling, etc. It's just not so.
I personally have been involved in two incidents that were fairly shocking: an idiot transporting gasoline in the passenger compartment of his SUV; and an attempted tanker hijacking from a pipeline facility in which four criminals were killed and a security guard and police officer each seriously wounded. These were exceptions, certainly not the general rule.
I want to be very clear about this. Life is going on. In the heart of the Silicon Valley economic engine, one could almost pretend that things are normal.
People have had to change their comfortable habits. People have to think about where to go to shop. You just don't get in your car and go for a cruise around the block. You have to think and plan. You do your errands, those few that can't be done from your computer, as part of your commute. You budget carefully. Corporate travel is less popular. Vacations are more likely to be taken at home. Long commutes equal job changes.
What has really been affected is the tourist communities, the small towns, the independent gasoline dealers and small stores and businesses, the nomadic RVers, the owner-operator truckers and commercial fishermen . . . they are hurting, let there be no doubt.
They are marginalized, further off the map. Only through the Internet are some of their stories being told. However, the Internet is bringing these small towns a dose of practical advice and a bigger dose of hope.
I have to wonder a bit. Did the "Powers That Be" create this oil crisis specifically to achieve this objective -- to tighten up the rural / urban divide, to create a disparity of poverty between the Oil Haves and the Have Nots?
A 50% to 100% increase in oil prices honestly isn't much for the Great Center. We'll deal. But when you're barely scraping along, whether you're working poor or a poor community . . . it's a harsh hit. Not to mention places utterly dependent on HVAC, either the frigid North or the humid South. California's weather is comparatively mild. What is this winter going to be like for the East Coast? Or this summer for places uninhabitable without A/C?
This is the silent media story. We hear constantly about incidents here, incidents there, fear mongering and panic and what-if scenarios. What we don't hear about is what Heinlein called "the quiet desperate struggle for survival that takes place in every home in the land." Everyday people trying to get by, and getting squeezed. Tighter every week.
But to question the rightness of this is to question the underpinnings of American economics. Capitalism and the free market. Is the energy market truly free? Clearly it is not, with so much regulation and price supports and emerging technologies sometimes pushed and sometimes handicapped.
We need to do for energy what the Internet did for information. Create a medium of exchange more efficient than 90% loss electrical wires and 30% loss fossil fuels. Instead of depending on your wall sockets to work, make your own power and store it and be efficient with it. From biodiesel and ethanol to DC and solar and windpower . . . the tools are out there.
Just some musings to distract from my day job. Making the world safe for capital.
You've heard from a lot of alarmists now that gasoline and diesel prices are so much higher. People are talking about the grid falling apart, the sky falling, etc. It's just not so.
I personally have been involved in two incidents that were fairly shocking: an idiot transporting gasoline in the passenger compartment of his SUV; and an attempted tanker hijacking from a pipeline facility in which four criminals were killed and a security guard and police officer each seriously wounded. These were exceptions, certainly not the general rule.
I want to be very clear about this. Life is going on. In the heart of the Silicon Valley economic engine, one could almost pretend that things are normal.
People have had to change their comfortable habits. People have to think about where to go to shop. You just don't get in your car and go for a cruise around the block. You have to think and plan. You do your errands, those few that can't be done from your computer, as part of your commute. You budget carefully. Corporate travel is less popular. Vacations are more likely to be taken at home. Long commutes equal job changes.
What has really been affected is the tourist communities, the small towns, the independent gasoline dealers and small stores and businesses, the nomadic RVers, the owner-operator truckers and commercial fishermen . . . they are hurting, let there be no doubt.
They are marginalized, further off the map. Only through the Internet are some of their stories being told. However, the Internet is bringing these small towns a dose of practical advice and a bigger dose of hope.
I have to wonder a bit. Did the "Powers That Be" create this oil crisis specifically to achieve this objective -- to tighten up the rural / urban divide, to create a disparity of poverty between the Oil Haves and the Have Nots?
A 50% to 100% increase in oil prices honestly isn't much for the Great Center. We'll deal. But when you're barely scraping along, whether you're working poor or a poor community . . . it's a harsh hit. Not to mention places utterly dependent on HVAC, either the frigid North or the humid South. California's weather is comparatively mild. What is this winter going to be like for the East Coast? Or this summer for places uninhabitable without A/C?
This is the silent media story. We hear constantly about incidents here, incidents there, fear mongering and panic and what-if scenarios. What we don't hear about is what Heinlein called "the quiet desperate struggle for survival that takes place in every home in the land." Everyday people trying to get by, and getting squeezed. Tighter every week.
But to question the rightness of this is to question the underpinnings of American economics. Capitalism and the free market. Is the energy market truly free? Clearly it is not, with so much regulation and price supports and emerging technologies sometimes pushed and sometimes handicapped.
We need to do for energy what the Internet did for information. Create a medium of exchange more efficient than 90% loss electrical wires and 30% loss fossil fuels. Instead of depending on your wall sockets to work, make your own power and store it and be efficient with it. From biodiesel and ethanol to DC and solar and windpower . . . the tools are out there.
Just some musings to distract from my day job. Making the world safe for capital.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 09:22 am (UTC)"Energy losses in the U.S. T&D system were 7.2% in 1995, accounting for 2.5 quads of primary energy and 36.5 MtC. Losses are divided such that about 60% are from lines and 40% are from transformers (most of which are for distribution)."
Interesting. I was told, as if it was axiomatic, that when Southern California bought power from as far away as Canada and Colorado, that the losses approached 90%. To hear that the sum total losses in the system is only about 7% . . . my bad.
Still, that's an awful lot of power.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-24 01:17 am (UTC)I still say that the right answer should have been for the state of California to spend all of that money giving out free fluourescent light bulbs door-to-door, which would've saved more power than the largest shortfalls during those years. Combine that with radically increased power bills on "brownout days" (days so hot that air conditioner power use was browning out the distribution network), and you've got a reasonable prescription for stopping the energy profiteers in their tracks.
And it would've been a heck of a lot cheaper, and a heck of a lot more environmentally sound, than buying the power at those rates was.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-26 03:51 am (UTC)In theory, the obvious thing to do is to build another power plant. But getting the permits for, raising the money for, and then constructing another power plant is insanely expensive. So the question was, briefly: what if it would actually be cheaper to just plain give away enough high-efficiency electrical appliances and light bulbs to bring demand back below supply than it would be to build another power plant? So there was a short-lived movement to make it possible for utilities to use ratepayer money to "buy negawatts," to subsidize lower energy consumption.
It went away because it became politically more feasible to encourage utilities to buy excess power over the long-distance transmission lines from utilities that weren't maxed out yet. But eventually that strategy hits the wall; if demand keeps rising, then eventually you either have to build another power plant. What the industry has long been planning to do when that time came was to wait until both of the US's projected liquified pressurized natural gas (LPNG) terminals were online, buy ultra-cheap natural gas from Venezuela and elsewhere to supplement US supplies, and pipeline it directly from the LPNG terminals to natural gas turbines all over the country, because natural gas turbines are an elegant technology: scalable, cheap to build, fairly high efficiency, and very low on smog emissions (unless you count CO2).
Except that Katrina wrecked one LPNG terminal (although I think it's fixed now) and the second one never got built because people in coastal communities have been afraid to live next to stockpiles of LPNG that high, so natural gas prices ended up going way up instead of way down. So now the industry is kind of painted into a corner; much of what you're seeing the last couple of weeks is the slow, painful process of an entire industry having to change course because one of their universally held key assumptions turned out to be false, or at least not true in time.
But there's still some legs in the "negawatts" concept, even if it doesn't end up getting funded through your utility bills. Because long before Americans would ever get to the point of changing our whole way of life, there's a lot more we could be doing to reduce consumption without having to change a single thing about how we live, with just some borrowing-financed up-front investment.