Yesterday I asked:
Why has a well off industrialized country an electricity system which breaks down for a million people due to a simple regular sized storm?
That was a serious question. Unfortunately it didn't get any serious answer but polemic accusations of Schadenfreude towards the people hit by the storm and by the partiality breakdown of the U.S. electricity distribution system. The question was serious and I have yet to find out why it was taken differently.
Here are my thoughts towards answering my question.
The electricity systems in well off industrialized countries were build within three historic-political frames. The people that built and run it maximized profits (not necessarily monetary ones) within these frames.
The political frames consisted over time of three major historic themes and what followed from them:
- In the emerging 20th century there was popular public demand for comfortable universal access to this new thing called electricity. This despite the fact that providing electricity everywhere is not an economic optimum. Some difficult to reach places are, in total, cheaper to heat and illuminated with other forms of energy. But politicians followed the populist call – see FDR's Tennessee Valley Project or Lenin's claim that "Communism is power of the committees [soviets] plus electrification."
- After World War II all industrialized nations recognized that military application of nuclear energy could be an essential part of their national power. They promoted civil programs to use nuclear energy for providing electricity to further their military nuclear programs as means of national power. Civil nuclear energy programs are only cost efficient if they use very large power generation stations. This led to a an electricity system where power generation is concentrated and often quite far away from the usage point. Before nuclear energy was used electric power generation for a city usually took place within that city's boundaries. Now it is usually far away from it and requires long vulnerable supply lines.
- Generation and providing of electricity was long seen as a public task which allowed for subsidizing reliable access to electric energy even to outlying places. Politically the optimal target was providing electricity everywhere on equal terms. That changed with increasing political corruption furthering the trend towards privatization of even natural monopolies. The result was Enron and generally the neglect of reliable distribution structures due to profit maximization of private entities in monopolistic positions.
These three points: electricity access seen as a public right, centralization of power generation due to nuclear energy promotion and optimization of privatized profits instead of reliability in monopoly positions led to the situation where a storm or some unfortunate system effect can suddenly take out electricity for a lot of people for a relatively long time.
There are ways to prevent future incidents like this by healing the excesses of the above mentioned policies.
- Electricity access is not a human right. If you decide to live on an Appalachian mountain top or in the middle of a desert do not expect that the general public will provide you with subsidized reliable electric energy. You'll have to make it yourself.
- Localize electric energy generation to where that energy is needed. This eliminates vulnerable overland lines. Unfortunately the "green energy" folks do not get that point. They want wind farms out on the seas even where the major consumption areas are inland and far away from the wind-farms. They repeat the mistakes of nuclear energy. It would be much better to further efforts to find ways for generating energy locally (solar, geothermic, bio, fossil etc.).
- Do not privatize natural monopolies. To lay an electric energy line to a house usually only pays off in the frame of several decades. That payoff time frame is too long to make a second line and thereby competition profitable. Privatized networks means that everyone gets stuck with a private monopoly provider which has no incentive to adopt its prices to its real costs. This is a state where things are better (cheaper for consumers) when in non-profit public than private hands. Natural monopolies like electricity-, water-, sewage- and telecommunication networks should be kept in public ownership and maintained with more weight towards reliability than profits.
If those preventive points would have been policy the recent storm would have had, in my estimate, less negative effects.
What is your take on the issue?