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Five Days without Power, and I Wonder…
Some terrific storms blew through the Midwest this week, with more to come today. Many areas have seen more dramatic devetastation, like the house in Wisconsin that literally floated away in a flooding lake, but Michigan’s storms meant power outages across the region. Our local energy provider, DTE Energy, has been unimpressive in their effort to restore power to the 320,000 or so customers who lost service during storms over the weekend. By Friday, there are “only” 30,000 left without power. Unfortunately for us, we’re in that number, with our restoration estimate just bumped to Saturday at midnight. I’m writing and posting this from my office, which never lost power.
It occurs, as I sit in my nice electrically air-conditioned office, typing on my electrically powered laptop, and about to post this story, that if I relied electric car, I wouldn’t have been able to get to work today. Not after five days without a source at home for recharging the car.
Some have hope that electricity is a large part of the answer for vehicle transportation in a world of $4-plus gas and environmental concerns, on top of all the other things we rely on electricity for, with lots of interest in plug-in hybrids as well. While serial hybrids like the Chevy Volt would stand a chance in this situation, because it can use the gasoline engine for motive power and for recharging the electric motor, but what happens if you can’t recharge your Tesla?

Along with being irritated at being without power for so long, the situation illustrates how much we rely on electricity. I’m also struck by the inadvisability of putting all (or the overwhelming majority) of our energy eggs into one basket. I’m glad that we actually use a couple of energy sources for our household needs, and I’m glad that my transportation uses a different energy source from that which powers my home. Our hot-water heater uses natural gas; power is out, but I can still take a hot shower. Can’t use the electric hair dryer afterward, but I need not risk hyperthermia from a freezing shower. Our stove is electric, but we’ve got a propane-fueled Weber grille (with a side burner) and can cook meals there. We’ve borrowed a gasoline-powered generator from my brother-in-law, which we run just enough to keep our refrigerator cold enough that we don’t lose a couple hundred dollars’ worth of food. There’s no air conditioning, tolerable because the 90-degree temperatures early in the week broke for a couple of days. In winter, we could use the generator to power the electric blower on our gas furnace, or huddle around the fireplace in our living room and under blankets. And our vehicle fleet runs on gasoline.

When the lights go down in the citay…
If my personal fleet depended on an electric vehicle, not only would my home have no power, we would be stranded. And, watching our local electric company fumble and stumble this situation reminds me again that our infrastructure is not prepared for meeting stronger demand. Several years after a three-day August blackout took out most of the northeast, our local company can’t get everyone back on the grid in a week. Granted, the causes of power outages were different, one being a failure in the grid and the other downed trees, but our electric infrastructure is not robust enough to handle catastrophe.
There is no real expectation that we’d all switch to electric cars, but using several sources of energy to meet all my power demands seems a much safer and realistic choice. Being without power for a week hasn’t destroyed my life, but it has left me feeling very vulnerable to external forces. No energy option we have is perfect, they all pollute somewhere down the stream and have inherent dangers, they’re all expensive in one way or another, and demand for energy and power is ever increasing. But in looking to one source, or one source to handle almost everything, makes us much more vulnerable to supply issues as well as to cost fluctuations.