I don’t know about where you live, but here in the thriving suburban paradise of Lilburn, Georgia, (AKA “Thrillburn”) we’ve been losing our power with some regularity as of late.
I have felt these recent outages acutely. They struck during the early morning hours when few people would care that the power is out because they are still snuggly in their covers. I, on the other hand, am up at an unseemly hour and require electric light to go about my business.
In addition to light, I also require caffeination. I was minutes from resorting to boiling water on our natural gas stove top for a pour over coffee when the power came back on the other day.
Can you see how low this circumstance brought me? I very nearly became some kind of hipster coffee connoisseur. I don’t like what the power outage did to me. I just wanted my black coffee, and I was contemplating an act against my nature. Desperate times call for desperate measures, but this was a bridge too far.
The truth is, I have work arounds for both the lack of light and coffee. We have electric light bulbs and hurricane oil lamps for light. I can heat up the water on the stove and make coffee like a hipster. But one necessity I cannot otherwise plan around is a hot shower.
With our fancy tankless hot water heater, I need electricity to take a hot shower. No. Do not even think I go all Joe Rogan and take a cold shower. Will not happen. If I were to do that at my advanced age, my core body temperature would drop so low I would never be able to recover.
So there you have it – the three horsemen of my apocalypse: darkness, decaffeination and body odor. All it takes to usher them into my life, it would seem, is a little bit of rain.
What I don’t understand is why this is happening so frequently. It seems that every time it rains the power goes out. We’ve had a relatively dry summer and fall, so it’s been easier to track. I don’t remember this being an issue previously, and it makes me question the stability of our electric grid if we lose power every time it rains.
How has it come to this? Why does the New South have such fragile utilities? I am old enough to remember a time when electricity was not a life or death issue. I mean I’m not running a hospital here. I don’t have patients relying on heart monitors and oxygen tanks, though my youngest does sleep with a CPAP and reports feeling strangled when the power goes out and his machine cuts off.
Used to, when the lights went out, we had an adventure. My parents love to tell the story of when I was a young lad. The power was off at house, and they had resourcefully lit candles to provide light. Thinking that the only time we used candles in the past was to celebrate a birthday, I went around the house singing “Birthday you! Birthday you!” I was an adorable, if not clever, child.
Now when the power is out, we have no wifi, no cable TV, no ability to charge our phones and no way of making witty comments on the neighborhood Facebook group about the power being out. No power = no adventure.
All of these power outages are registering on my annoy-o-meter because we have timers on our outdoor floodlight switches. Every time the power goes out, I have to reprogram them. The power has been going out so much lately, I’ve just quit programming them and started doing the unthinkable: when darkness descends, I mash the button turning the flood lights on. When the sun comes up, I mash it again to turn them off.
What kind of prehistoric savagery has this calamity brought me to?
OK, resorting to cold showers, pour overs, and turning lights on and off manually are admittedly first world problems. The large point that isn’t lost on me through all of these outages is unsettling: all of the modern conveniences we have come to rely on require electricity.
Without power, we are… well, powerless.
What good is your fancy internet machines and smart TVs and programmable light switches without electricity? I hate to say it, but the New South isn’t very resilient. All of its innovation and advancement requires energy, which is all too unreliable these days.
I don’t think the solution is a generator or better batteries. I think I just need to be more comfortable with darkness, the absence of stimulants, and a cold shower. That may sound very old school, but making these fundamental adjustments will build true resilience.
This could be another way to distinguish us humans from energy hogging, data center dependent AI. It would be hard for the AI to take over around here without electricity. We could just pull the plug or even just wait until it rains.
