Lights Out
(Guo Wenjun takes aim at Gold in London. Image courtesy ESPN.)
I have yet to see anything from the Olympics on the tube. It is not that I am not aware of it, nor about all the crazy story lines: limbless sprinters, aging swimmers on the brink of immortality, strange sports with marvelous athletes of incredible ability.
I couldn’t tell you who any of them are, except for the first curious one, that amazing Guo Wenjun of the PRC, who took gold on Day Two in the ten–meter women’s air pistol contest. She was shooting lights-out good.
Air Pistols? Go figure. Nothing speaks more to the rise of the East than the medal count for the PRC. There have been remarkable things happening in the water in London.
I have been doing my own aquatic thing in the pool, an hour last night of fairly vigorous exercise after two ninety-minute sessions over the weekend. I feel stronger, and am walking around the unit (gingerly) without the brace on my leg.
Christina-the-Torturer has me again this morning, and the looming hour of pain has me jazzed and apprehensive at the same time. I would welcome an interruption in the grid if it got me out of some of the more painful aspects of therapy.
We are sensitive here to that after that strange wind-and-storm event last month, and looking at the radical improvement in my locomotion since then. The power was on when I teetered out to the kitchen and launched the morning scan through the events of the wider world, when I was struck by this:
“India’s energy crisis spread over half the country Tuesday when both its eastern and northern electricity grids collapsed, leaving 600 million people without power in one of the world’s biggest-ever blackouts.”
Six hundred million people? That is a population twice the size of the good old USA. Incredible. The media covered the astonishing outage brusquely, noting that there are serious concerns about the burgeoning demand for power, and the inability of the Indian grid to meet demand.
This was no wild derecho event like ours. It was not a sudden strike by fierce winds. It was the inexorable pressure of millions of air compressors blowing cool air, and hurtling commuter trains and the relentless demand of computers and televisions and personal electronics. The Northern Grid collapsed under the relentless demand, was restored, and then failed again. The cascade of failure spread from Uttar Pradesh through the eastern grid, causing the state of Orissa to go black.
Between the two, about half of India’s 1.2 billion people were in darkness and without air conditioning. The scale of the outage is remarkable: thirteen states are affected, and the number of people without electricity is more than the total population of the entire European Union.
Prosperity has brought crisis: demand for power has outstripped capacity by nearly ten percent this season, which has featured higher temperatures and a weak monsoon that has sapped hydroelectric production.
Of course, everything is vast on the Sub-continent. There are more people who did not have power at all than live in the US.
I am happy not to be in Delhi this morning. The implications of the failure are stark but distant. I suspect they will get closer as the Indian government begins to address the shortfall, and increases capacity.
There is not enough water to make up the shortfall. That means more coal and gas-fired plants will have to come on line, maybe with additional nuclear capability. The people are long suffering- four hundred million without a light bulb, much less a place to charge a cell-phone.
Demand in India. Demand in China. Demand across the East.
Not requests, I reiterate. Demands.
In this bizarre connected world, that means something to the miners of West Virginia and the drillers in the Upper Midwest and Canada. I suppose that means something to you and me, too. China was opening a new coal-fired power plant every week to ten days to accommodate demand. The Indian government is going to have to get serious if they are going to keep the people happy- and that will mean something along the same lines.
Getting the lights back on in Delhi is going to have consequences right here.
(The process of generating electricity from coal. Diagram courtesy of the Tennessee Valley Authority).
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
July 31, 2012
DailySocotra
