Comment by matthewdgreen
4 months ago
Depends if we intend to reboot after a major geomagnetic event or a war that destroys electrical infrastructure.
4 months ago
Depends if we intend to reboot after a major geomagnetic event or a war that destroys electrical infrastructure.
Sure.
I mean: I've got some MREs in the pantry along with some other shelf-stable food, and I've got some water stored (primarily to fill empty space in the chest freezer for various practical reasons, but it exists). I keep some basic first aid and survival stuff in the car (bandages, space blankets, stuff to catch fish with, stuff to cook with). I've got my camping gear, including a small off-grid solar power system, stored in organized totes that can be loaded up very quickly. And I try to keep a minimum of a couple hundred miles worth of fuel in the gas tank at all times.
I do these things just in case. The bulkiest items see frequent use. None of this cost me very much to buy, or to maintain. And none of these things can replace the lifestyle I've come to expect, but they might be able to buy me some time.
Can we afford to have a spare copy of the hard-to-produce parts of the electrical grid sitting in a warehouse?
Would we even want to rebuild the grid in the same shape if the shit really hit the fan and we had to start it over from scratch?
Even if it's not exactly the same, the expertise in making transformers seems important to not become forgotten.
It is important. We must not forget how to make transformers.
But the knowledge is already being preserved. Unlike the singular army tank plant (which smells like a combination of despair and naphthalene), there are a plurality of transformer factories in the US...and they are always operating at 100%.
As long as that continues to be the case (there's no sign that it will change), then the expertise is actively being employed, refined, remembered, and transferred.
So even if we do nothing, we're good on that front.
We just aren't keeping up with present-day demand. (Hence, the article.)
We're not talking about starting over from scratch, we're talking about replacing a bunch of parts after a major geomagnetic event or something similar. Yes -- we would very much want to do this. And hundreds of millions of lives would be at stake if we delayed longer.
Covid demonstrated that can't even successfully rejigger the distribution of toilet paper to adjust for a change in where people poop during the day. During the Great Bog Roll Shortage of 2020, the mills that make toilet paper didn't shut down, people didn't use the toilet any more than usual, and the hoarders and scalpers (while both present and despised) were a mostly-insignificant factor.
But yet: The store shelves were empty while the janitorial and institutional supply chains had a surplus. We were incompetent at moving things from Pile A and putting them into Hole B.
So, sure: In the event of an unprecedented geomagnetic event destroying big chunks of the grid, we're hosed. I agree. And people will die. It will be awful. If I'm sure of one thing, I'm sure that we'll somehow manage to completely fuck this up.
So maybe we should focus less on stockpiling a bunch of ludicrously-expensive parts that we hope to never have a use for. Instead, maybe we should focus more on making the grid less reliant on centralization, and instead comprise it of smaller parts that that can be operated more-independently.
Both things are very expensive.
One of them is a reactive solution to a problem we've never had -- and that we hope to never have. The other is a proactive solution we can start using immediately, and also into the future.
(An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say.)