You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 168 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
For when the power goes out
Reaction Guidelines for Energy, pt. 1: Immediate Needs
This is a resource for when energy stops flowing into SF. The goal is to have procedures you can pick up off the shelf and start putting in place when it’s too late to avoid disaster.
Glossary of terms used
battery
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a device that captures and stores energy to be released for use at a later time
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generator
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a device to convert energy from one form to another, often electricity
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gravity battery
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an energy storage device that converts available energy into gravitational potential energy through displacement of mass (such as a block of concrete or pumped-storage hydroelectricity)
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grid
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a physical network used for moving electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s needed
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megadrought
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a prolonged drought lasting two decades (20 years) or longer
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PM10 and PM2.5
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particulates that are 10 and 2.5 micrometers in size and, when breathed in, penetrate deep into the lungs, increasing cancer and respiratory illness rates
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pumped-storage hydroelectricity
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a type of gravity battery where water is pumped uphill then released through water turbines when energy is needed
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steam turbine
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a device that converts pressurized steam into rotational motion, often used in generating electricity
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SF’s energy system is vulnerable
SF gets 27% of our energy from large hydroelectric projects, and about 2% from small hydro. When the water’s gone, that power will be gone, too.1 ~7% of our energy comes from burning methane, a strong greenhouse gas. An additional unknown amount of energy, especially in winter, is produced by burning wood (used for heat in some homes, and by restaurants and industries). 44% of our energy comes from nuclear power.2 The majority of our energy and the grid are controlled by PG&E.
Nuclear power plants are especially vulnerable.
Nukes depend on power to operate. If the grid fails, nuke plants have backup diesel generators and batteries that are designed to work for weeks, perhaps up to a month. However, multiple nuke power plants have failed in significantly shorter times (cf, Fukushima and Chernobyl). The more complex a system, the more things that can fail or go wrong; nuclear power plants are among the most complex machines humans have ever made.
What are our immediate local energy sources in an emergency?
GENERATORS: We have some generators. They run on diesel. Diesel generators produce greenhouse gases, noise, and particulates (PM10 and PM2.5). They have limited fuel tanks and will need to be resupplied often. They are unevenly distributed, found mostly at hospitals and emergency responder facilities. Without fuel sources, they will not produce enough energy for even the most important functions after 5 days, and will be polluting the city the entire time they are running.
BATTERIES: SF has some larger batteries that store power. They are generally found at private homes and businesses. If they are being charged by solar, they will be useful for longer periods.
SOLAR: A very few buildings are net zero (the Exploratorium) or have independent solar power. Roughly 6000 households in SF have solar panels that supply varying amounts of their electrical needs.
How long will these local energy sources last?
San Francisco doesn’t currently produce or store enough power in SF to survive longer than a week or two when the power system fails.
What happens to water if the power is out?
The water system depends on electricity almost every step of the way.
Can we get imports of power?
It depends. Any energy we can get (assuming the grid is intact and there is energy available elsewhere) will likely be produced by burning fossil fuels or by nukes, and it will cost us, in money, reputation, and political sway. Additionally, this energy likely won’t be dependable or inexhaustible, and the grid is not sturdy now and getting less sturdy all the time.
How can SF immediately get more power?
Really, we can’t. The options are either awful or would require a big immediate effort from a lot of people.
The awful options include: letting people die, burning things (garbage, trees, buildings) for temporary power via steam turbines, and mass exodus to some place with power.
The big effort options include rigging a bunch of buildings on the water’s edge to operate as gravity batteries (using tidal and/or wave action to hoist masses), finding and installing every solar panel around, and moving people into places where there is energy (abandoning single family houses and small apartment complexes) so we can best use the few resources that are available.
Rationing will be vital, obviously. And that means developing a hierarchy of delivery, better done before a disaster than during a disaster.
Where was Moses when the lights went out?
In the dark. Reacting, instead of planning, only gets you so far.
FOOTNOTES
1. Chelsea Harvey. “Western ‘Megadrought’ Is the Worst in 1,200 Years”. Scientific American. 15 February 2022. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/western-megadrought-is-the-worst-in-1-200-years/.
2. We can have a long discussion about nukes in another letter, but the short version is that the waste is deadly for tens of thousands of years, the mining of the radioactive isotopes required is deadly, massive amounts of pollution — also deadly — are created in building nuke plants, the technology is easily used to make nuclear bombs (deadly: see Iran), and there isn’t enough time to get online even a fraction of the plants needed to produce enough energy to keep civilization from crumbling. Fission nuke power is a grift, a con, and a theft from the future who have to deal with the aftermath.