As I write this, a large number of people in California are coping without what we've come to take for granted, a working electrical grid. As I wrote a California friend yesterday, I am sorry, but not surprised to hear about the outages.
I've never considered myself a "prepper", I tend to be too optimistic to believe that doom is just around the corner, but I do like to know how things work, how they break and how to fix them. In that spirit, I recently read Gretche Bakke's fascinating book THE GRID. It's a wonderfully conversational look at our electrical grid, packed with both interesting facts and some truly frightening anecdotes. Our current (no pun intended!) electrical grid is antiquated, under-maintained, and fragile.
I didn't just send my friend a "gee, that sucks" note, I also sent him a 10 Watt Solar Panel and a small lithium power bank. It's not much, but it's enough to keep his phone charged. Now I can't promise that every node of the cell network will stay up, but being modular and somewhat more modern, the phone system is better able to route around local problems.
Many of the residential solar systems in California are tied into the grid and have no local, on-site storage. When the grid goes down, many people with solar panels on their roofs are finding they still don't have a way to keep the lights on at night. Perhaps this latest round of outages will make more people understand that storage has to be a big part of any truly robust energy solution.
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