Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
rent. Natural disasters, sabotage, social breakdown, and economic collapse could have knock-on
effects (some too circuitous to predict) that would imperil continued, reliable delivery of elec-
trical power.
What has to go
right
in order to avert grid breakdown? In many respects, this list is a mirror image
of the previous one:
• Successful massive investments in grid upgrades. As discussed above, these are far from being
assured.
• A rapid, successful conversion to alternative energy sources. Again, as mentioned above, this is
a long shot at best.
• Averting of international conflicts that might go nuclear. So far, so good. . . .
• Averting of grid breakdowns due to natural disasters, etc., or rapid recovery from such problems.
Society has been able to do this for decades: even in the cases of hurricanes, earthquakes, and
wars, recovery was usually rapid. But increasingly crises are becoming synergetic.
The breakdown of electricity supply systems is not just a matter of theory. In about a hundred na-
tions around the globe, supplies of power are already problematic. Consider just one example: the
nuclear-armed nation of Pakistan. Here is a quote from an article posted a few years ago on the
website
All Things Pakistan:
While rolling blackouts or load shedding as it's locally known has always been a staple of
daily life in Pakistan, the problem has become acute in the last couple of years. In the second
half of December, the situation got so bad that WAPDA & KESC [power generation entities
in Pakistan] resorted to draconian levels of load shedding. The power cuts during this time
amounted to 20-22 hours a day in most small cities and even cities like Karachi were seeing
18+ hours of load shedding.
9
Pakistan is a poor, politically unstable country; surely nothing like this could ever happen in a
wealthy industrial nation! Yet consider the situation in Britain: a 2009 article in the
Telegraph
was
headlined, “Britain Heading Back to the Dark Ages: The UK is facing a tipping point over the next
few years in its ability to generate enough power to satisfy an ever-increasing demand.”
10
The art-
icle notes: “Over the next 10 years, one third of Britain's power-generating capacity needs to be re-
placed with cleaner fuels, as a result of European laws on pollution. By 2025 the situation is expec-
ted to worsen. . . .” Another article, this one from the BBC, is titled, “Britain Could Face Blackouts
ment energy advisor, as saying, “The scale of building required [to avert blackouts] is absolutely
enormous.”
Generating electricity is not all that difficult in principle; people have been doing it since the
19th century. But generating it in large amounts, reliably, without both cheap energy inputs and
secure availability of spare parts and investment capital for maintenance, poses an increasing chal-
lenge.
To be sure, here in the United States the lights are unlikely to go out all at once, and perman-
ently, any time soon. The most likely scenario would see a gradual increase in rolling blackouts
and other forms of power rationing, beginning a decade or two from now, with some regions better
