There is such uncertainty about our electricity next year. So perhaps it will go down; hopefully not. But if it does and stays down for even a few weeks; or if the coal and oil supply is lost to the power plants...how are they ever going to get it going again? It seems to me that if more than a little shit hits the fan there isn't going to be a recovery.

-- Sand Mueller (smueller@azalea.net), June 29, 1999

Answers

Please explain why Not!!

-- treading litely (rs@marketwatch.com), June 29, 1999.

If of any consolation, as far as I know, no Y2K aware power expert is predicting a complete loss of power for weeks on end. (The ol' Gary North power-down-for-60-days=collapse-of-western-civilization possible scenario -- and even he is not saying that it will happen with any certainty.)

Back in February, I attended a presentation by Rick Cowles, a pretty pessimistic Y2K/power expert (his web site is www.euy2k.com). His expectation is that 2000 will be plagued with serious electric utility problems, but it may be more likely that we will have a "third world" type power scenario -- maybe you will have utility power from midnight to noon, then maybe I will have it from noon-midnight, because there is just not enough "juice" to go around.

But the bottom line, as in all things Y2K, is that Nobody Knows. And it is for that reason that I have purchased a 15kw diesel generator, a supplementary battery/inverter system, and am in the process of stockpiling diesel fuel. You pays you money and you takes you chances.

-- Jack (jsprat@eld.net), June 29, 1999.

If we go down because of lack of fuel, we can come back up when fuel (finally) arrives. But we are an island with a single (oil-fired) generating plant and a few secondary biofuel and hydroelectric plants. Even in a 10, we should maintain some international shipping. The question is, how much? And will we, as an island, have enough money to pay for the oil and shipping?

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), June 30, 1999.

It is a system: fuel to electricity to fuel to electricity. How we got here is not how we are today and therefore we are vulnerable to a situation in which if we break the chain we may have a very hard time restarting it again.

Innovations are build with the prior technologies. When innovations become standard then prior technologies are slowly replaced. You get to a point where you can't go back very easily and if you do you lose a tremendous amount of energy in the system (economy) because the prior infrastructure is not there so you have to go back to rebuilding it in order to restart the second or third generation infrastructure.

Let's think about a total shut down of the power grid, plants cooling down and no fuel flow. How do you restart?

Well, you've got to start with the little hydro dams and route that electricity directly to the oil pipelines and refineries. Once the refineries are producing you have to transport that oil to the smallest fuel oil fired generators and the divert all that electricity to other parts of the infrastructure such as chemical plants which supply refineries, etc. Eventually you may get alot of the oil fired plants on line again and could focus on manufacturers who directly support the electrical, oil and chemical industries. (of course this means doing it all without getting 'paid')

That all would be OK if the plants themselves had no significant embedded chip/system problems, if there was some kind of centralized command and control with a plan in place and troups in the field who knew what in the world they were doing, if there was some way of routing the electricity to the right place AND people didn't mind waiting a *real* long time for you to do all these things while they experienced the first real privation in two full generations.

My spouse and I were down in Florida this past winter and I noticed how all the train tracks went through population centers. I thought about that for a while. If people who were really hard up en masse saw trains going by (or trucks for that matter) with coal, gas, food, etc how long would it take before some wild eyed guy tried to 'highjack' one? And if they derailed a train or closed off a road then you have a true situation on your hands which really fouls things up and slows things down.

-- ... --- ... (dot@dit.dash), June 30, 1999.