When the power goes out…

You’re never ready for the unexpected. But you can try to be prepared.

After water, food , shelter in that order, comes electricity. Having lived through a number of hurricane outages, we have installed a generator that runs on natural gas. As backup, we have a solar panel rechargeable battery system. We keep a Starlink around for an internet connection. There is a rain barrel connected to a gutter from the roof. It’s like insurance. You hope you’ll never need it, but you can sleep at night. If you realize how vulnerable is the Grid that we depend on, then you should get prepared now. Maybe you will after reading this article.

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MAY 31 ∙ PREVIEW      

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.” – Doug Larson

At the outset of 1998, a series of devastating ice storms blanketed much of lower Quebec and parts of neighboring provinces with a previously unfathomable deluge of freezing rain. While mere millimeters of solid ice can be enough to disrupt road travel and collapse trees, vast swaths of the region experienced several inches of the stuff in five compounding waves. For Hydro-Québec, the province’s power producer, the storms resulted in countless transformer explosions, “400 damaged transmission towers, 24,000 power poles to be replaced, 120,000 km of downed power lines and roughly1.4 million customers in the dark for almost a month.” The devastation was most acute just east of Montreal inside the triangle formed by the cities of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Granby, and Saint-Hyacinthe—a zone dubbed the Le “Triangle Noir” as the catastrophe dragged on. Frozen hell | Hydro-Québec

Although the brunt of the event was felt in Canada, parts of New England were also severely impacted. In Maine, some 700,000 of the state’s 1.2 million residents lost electricity, necessitating the activation of the Maine National Guard. It took 23 days and the assistance of hundreds of crews from around the country to fully restore power. Devastation in Maine | AP As disastrous as the Great Ice Storm of 1998

was for local utilities and the populations they served, one shudders to ponder the consequences should a similar event unfold in a high-population area of the US today. Take the I-95 corridor—sometimes called the Northeast megalopolis—which stretches from Washington, DC to Boston and experiences its fair share of freak winter storms. While its 50 million residents undoubtedly pride themselves on their ability to power through whatever Mother Nature throws at them, no grid could withstand the relentless onslaught of ice like what occurred 25 years ago. To a rough approximation, the area encompassed by the Le “Triangle Noir” alone would cover all five boroughs of the city of New York. Imagine the Big Apple without power for a month in the dead of winter. Now consider that a month might be wildly optimistic. For years, a burgeoning supply chain crisis has been plaguing the US power industry, straining grid reliability just as the pursuit of the Green Energy Utopia™ is stretching this hallmark of the developed world to a breaking point. A chronic shortage of transformers can no longer be ignored, and in a letter to federal lawmakers in November, the electric utility sector bluntly sounded the alarm (emphasis added throughout): “Throughout 2022, the electric sector and representatives from residential and commercial building sectors have been calling attention to the unprecedented supply chain challenges both industries have been facing in procuring equipment used to maintain and grow the electric grid.Specifically, electric utilities continue to have significant problems in procuring basic equipment – particularly distribution transformers – needed to operate the grid, provide reliable electric service, and restore power following severe storms and natural disasters. In housing construction, this is further exacerbating their ability to address the housing affordability crisis facing our nation…. Between 2020 and 2022, average lead times to procure distribution transformers across all segments of the electric industry and voltage classes rose 443 percent. The same orders that previously took two to four months to fill are now taking on average over a year. This is a serious threat to reliability.” Transformers play an essential role in enabling our modern standard of living. To transport electricity over vast distances at reasonable efficiency, stations must generate power at extremely high voltages. Before such electricity can be safely used in the home, it needs to be stepped down—transformed—to the standard 240 volts around which the US economy is designed. (This is further split at a home’s main circuit breaker panel into two 120-volt halves, called phases.) Distribution transformers—the equipment in short supply that most concerns the utility sector—provide the final voltage transformation in the electric power distribution system, connecting homes to the juice that powers everything. Unsung heroes to our way of life | Getty

The letter’s signatories request a $1 billion appropriation towards transformer production via the Defense Production Act (DPA) to accelerate supply. Despite the industry’s urgent call for resources, the Department of Energy is making decisions that will only accelerate the crisis. Let’s dig into the industry’s claims, the administration’s exacerbating policy decisions, and most importantly, the preparatory measures homeowners can take ahead of a major disruption.

https://open.substack.com/pub/doomberg/p/more-than-meets-the-eye?r=ytkw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

None Of Us Were Ready For This…

This is what exponential adoption looks like. Our minds cannot compute the growth of ChatGPT nor the role of it in our lives a year from now. When you first heard about Instagram, you probably thought, why would I need a new version of Facebook?


But ChatGPT is already yesterday’s news.

Now it’s all about AutoGPT, which just appeared last week designed to automate GPT-4 tasks, enabling the creation of agents that complete tasks for you without any intervention. AutoGPT can understand customer inquiries, provide support, and even suggest upsells available 24/7 that speaks every language. There are 2.8M customer service jobs in the U.S. alone.

That is just one of a myriad of uses. ChatGPT was cool, but this takes it to a whole new level.

Video Games and Unemployment

A few decades ago, an unemployed person might be stuck on the couch watching TV, isolated and depressed. Today, cheap or free services such as Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix provide seemingly endless entertainment options and an easy connection to the outside world. Video games, in particular, provide a strong community and a sense of achievement that, for some, real-world jobs lack.

Temptation_of_ipadA few decades ago, an unemployed person might be stuck on the couch watching TV, isolated and depressed. Today, cheap or free services such as Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix provide seemingly endless entertainment options and an easy connection to the outside world. Video games, in particular, provide a strong community and a sense of achievement that, for some, real-world jobs lack.

Read more about it

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