Comment by matthewdgreen
4 months ago
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.)