Please forgive me, in advance, for not giving the topic at hand the comprehensive treatment I think it deserves (or for not responding to comments). You see: I live in the California northstate - Nevada City more specifically - and along with potentially a million other Californians am about to lose my power for the next two to three days. And I need to go shopping for essentials: batteries, ice, food that won't spoil without a fridge.
As you may have heard, this is the second consecutive wildfire season in California which our utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, has resorted to shutting off the power of customers in order to prevent their aged equipment and poorly maintained lines from sparking potentially catastrophic wildfires.
And people in northern California are angry - very, very angry. This includes me.
First, as a point of reference, much of the American electrical grid and equipment apparently dates back to the mid twentieth century (something acknowledged to my brother in law over drinks with a PG&E exec recently). But even among negligent, for-profit utilities PG&E seems to be an outlier.
I grew up in Thousand Oaks, CA, which was and still is serviced by So Cal Edison. Between the age of three and eighteen, I could count the number of total outages on two hands. I went to college in the New York metro area: never, even during blizzards and noreasters, did we lose power. I lived in Seattle, which has a public utility - Seattle City Light - and even during months of torrential rains and frequent winds, we never, ever lost power.
But I also lived in San Francisco - a PG&E city - and there were times, on windless, 70 degree summer days, without a cloud in the sky, the lights would go off. And this was of course the so-called technology capital of the world.
Meanwhile, here. Even before the "public safety power shutoffs" (which I put in quotes largely because at present there is not even a gentle breeze here, let alone raging winds - the stated reason for the forthcoming shutoff), we lose power on average at least a dozen times per year. The worst time, about a decade ago - after a snow storm - lasted a good two weeks. I lived outside town then, which meant that not only did I have no lights, but no hot water, or even running water. Before the roads were plowed, I walked nearly twenty miles to town and back to get groceries.
I live in town now, which means I'm on city water, and at least have an ignition-less water heater (which means hot tap water and showers). But I also have an electric stove and oven, which means the only way I can cook or even heat water is on the grill. Also: I live in a condo complex, and the HOA forbids generators (unless you have a life-saving medical device). I wish I could say that in the midst of this pandemic and recession I could afford a portable solar array and battery system, but I can't.
Mercifully, this is only the second outage of the season for us. (They lasted several weeks last year, and while PG&E has this time kept the power on in more business districts, even gas stations were open, and there multi-hour lines at the ones open. I wish I had the time to link to it, but one of the Nor Cal public radio stations had what could best be described as a horror story about Lake County - California's poorest county - during last year's outage: young mothers with infant children, and the elderly, going for days without being able to get food or have running water, with a quarter tank of gas and not knowing where or how far the closest open gas station was.) But the first one happened in the midst of this summer's epic heat wave, and wildfire season: the several days without power meant it was both too hot to stay indoors, and the air quality too bad to be outside.
This, friends, is climate change - up close and personal.
And yes, personal. I'm just one guy. But I want to speak to how this impacts me, and to suggest that it is impacting people by the many thousands in ways that are difficult to imagine.
As a teen and young adult, I was a cocaine and methamphetamine addict - largely the result of self-medicating over childhood abuse. Following an overdose, and related near-breakdown, I developed chronic insomnia, and began drinking myself to sleep at night. This lasted years, and years. I'm in recovery again. And in addition to family, friends, and my recovery community, what literally allows me to sleep at night (and maintain my sobriety, and sanity, in other words) is a simple server cooler that keeps my bedroom cool in the summer, and whose white noise helps to sleep year round.
Without it, I'm a mess. And tonight, and tomorrow night, at least, I'll be without it.
I'm a lifelong Democrat, and can't speak to the particulars of PG&E's epic greed and negligence, and the extent to which the California Public Utilities Commission has been in the proverbial bed with the very companies they're tasked to regulate - that takes a kind of reporting that is sadly too rare these days. Nor can I speak in a genuinely informed way about whether PG&E should be turned into a public utility, or broken up, or something else (although it is telling that even our conservative Republican state senator openly supported breaking the company up last year).
But the people of this state deserve, at the very least, answers from both our elected and appointed officials, and PG&E itself. We deserve to know how long - how many years - we should expect the shutoffs to continue, if only to be able to decide for ourselves if we want to continue living in a region that literally can't keep the lights on.