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There’s been a lot of dramatic weather this year, in fact more records than in recorded history — I would like to take a moment to consider their impact.
Many, many people suffer, and much property was damaged or destroyed. These extreme weather events are all consistent with the predictions of climate change. Let’s go out on a limb, for a moment, and consider a world that has, with increasing frequencies, climate events like these. This isn’t going far out on a limb, because this kind of weather instability is one thing climate scientists have been predicting, correctly, as a result of climate change.
What climate change scientists predict are resulting in some downstream impacts, which I tend to think are likely to be the most immediate threats to our “first world” ways of life. (more…)
Demand for electricity is highest on hot days in the summer, mainly because people, and businesses turn on their air conditioners. Increased demand is pretty easy to predict using a weather forecast.
When you turn on your AC, some generator, somewhere has to work a tiny bit harder — it happens almost instantly and automatically. All of this is entirely invisible to you.
But, in the aggregate, when lots of people turn on their AC and this happens at scale, three things can occur:
- The generator (power plant) revs a little higher and produces more power, unless it’s at it’s capacity, then
- The power plant operator ramps up one of the “operating reserve” plants, unless they have already put all the spares online, in which case
- There’s a brown-out, or black-out
But actually there’s another option: consumers of power could just use less. But how do we know to use less — it’s invisible.
And, would we do anything is we know we were getting to the edge of capacity? What’s interesting is that some customers agree to unplug voluntarily. This link is to a story in the New York Times. It doesn’t surprise me that (some) people are willing to adjust their behavior without monetary incentives. What I found remarkable is how primitive the system for communicating the need is:
On the afternoon before an anticipated surge in demand, e-mails, faxes and phone calls go out alerting those who had already agreed that it is time for them to unplug.
So what if there were a way to automatically inform people of peak events? What if people that turned off appliances did get some economic benefit? (more…)
