Electricity Apocalypse Soon?

mindriot writes "Heise's awarded online magazine Telepolis has published a nice article (English / German) discussing the ongoing series of power blackouts (after the U.S. blackout, London, Scandinavia, and other incidents, the most recent victim being Italy). 'The blackouts bare the Achilles Heel of our "information society" ,' the article states, and sees the recent events as a precursor to a possible massive on-line blackout. As society becomes more and more dependent on information and power networks, the failure of a single wire or the interruption of a satellite uplink can become a major issue and form a great vulnerability. As the article explains, market liberalization, globalization and plain ignorance could endanger our infrastructure to a very discomforting extent." Free markets cause power blackouts?

Comments

Re:DR for the home

[o1d5ch001]

Power blackouts affect even those living off-grid. I assume that these people pay taxes that are used to prop up businesses and people affected by the blackout and covering some private losses with public money. But this is a side issue to growing power demand and use.

To me, a centralized system will never be able to keep up with demand. People assume that it is a tap that you turn on without really having to think about where this power comes from and how much energy is really needed to power even a modest number of homes. If people are serious about this problem, which I don't think most people are, there needs to be a number of steps made to force people to change thier power-use behavior.

1. Power is too cheap and is still subsidized too much. Stop subsidizing large captial expences and capitalize individuals to replace all appliances with super low use appliances.

2. Capitalize decentralized generation for alternatives. Once the subsudies for coal and natural gas are gone, the alternatives will start to look much better: solar, wind, tidal, and other localized power generation systems.

3. Build a strategic plan that includes some centralized power generation. There will always be a need for shared resources for hospitals, government buidlings.

The current infrastructure is failing. It is failing because the basic engineering tenants of managed service and growth have been undercut by neo-free market economics. Until we have built new principles of how power is generated, we are going to continue to have blackouts and other issues. Welcome to the third world.