“Strong winds and rain today and tomorrow,” the local energy company texted this week. “We’re ready. Report an outage.”
This brought a shrug, mostly. Until I went to fire up the coffee maker and realized that having electricity may not be a basic need in life, but is most certainly a luxury. Then reached into the refrigerator for cold milk to go with the breakfast Cheerios. And plugged in the toaster.
The morning shower, a good hot one to counter the nine-degree wind-chill outside, was just completed. Hearing aids extracted, full strength, from their overnight charger. Clean plates, utensils, glasses and pots retrieved from the dishwasher’s hands-free chore.
A person can have only glancing familiarity with the science of energy—currents, power, amperes, coulombs, farads, ohms—to be confronted, upon having the lights go out and so many other indispensable devices inoperative, with a sudden reminder of electricity’s place in one’s routine.
I remember being smote by a total blackout when Super Storm Sandy hit these environs in 2012, rendering 11 days of cold and darkness to our homestead. Quite a shock, if I can use that term for a voltage-free jolt. A feeling of overwhelming powerlessness.
In such a situation the smite-ee finds himself without juice for the bedside lamp, laptop, cellphone, landline, oven, TV, radio, washing machine, dryer, paper shredder, dehumidifier, microwave, laptop printer, wall clocks, garage-door opener, water-pump system….(In the summertime, there is the additional denial of a sprinkler system, power trimmer, ceiling fans and air conditioner.)
For a few days, it is relatively easy to survive a power outage, which is usually all that most of us must endure. So the general advice is to keep flashlights handy. Avoid opening the refrigerator and freezer to keep things cold. Use a battery-powered radio. Cook on an outdoor grill. It’s just camping out, really.
On a small scale, I learned via the Internet, enough electricity to power small LED lights can be generated by employing a hamster running on its little wheel attached to a generator. (If you have a hamster. Anyway, for the existence that most of us have become accustomed to, it would demand a lot of hamsters.) A person’s own vigorous exercise reportedly can produce up to 30 watts with a half-hour of continual pedaling on a generator, though that would require maintaining a heart rate up to 120 beats or so; better be in reasonable shape.
Then, of course, venturing away from home means dealing with stoplights and other conveniences—necessities, really—that have blown a figurative fuse. A real glimpse of 19th Century existence, before Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla got figurative lightbulbs over their heads—bright ideas which eventually led to the grid becoming a dear friend.
You like movies? Concerts? Broadway shows? Commuter train and subway transportation around the Big City? Shopping in clean, well-lighted places with check-out computers that are operative? In 2024, U.S. electric consumption totaled roughly four trillion kilowatt hours, about 14 times greater than the figure from 70 years earlier.
To be from the generation whose parents had gotten through the Depression is to have heard constant reminders to “turn out the lights when you leave a room.” There’s a joke about the old fellow who was dying and looked around his bed, wanting to be assured that all his family members were in the room—each of his children, his wife, aunt and uncle and close cousins. Each query brought a reassuring “yes.”
“All here?” he confirmed. “Then why is the light on in the kitchen?”
In a way, that energy company text sent out during the recent high winds was saying: Take nothing for granted.