Another Case for Distributed Generation

It's been hard for me to come to terms with the fact that it's summer. You wouldn't know it if you'd spent the last little while in the Pacific Northwest, where Juneuary has dominated from Vancouver down to Portland; I understand that June 2012 in Vancouver may end up being one of the coldest on record. Personally, I prefer ice to fire--and as it turns out, that may be one of the advantages of having mountains to the east.

In that vast and sprawling land beyond the mountains, things aren't nearly as cool. Over the past few days, high heat and tinderbox-dry conditions fueled wildfires that still burn across huge stretches of Colorado. On Friday night, the area around Washington, D.C. was hit by powerful thunderstorms that clobbered the power lines; millions of people were left without power and states of emergency were declared in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.

Power outages can be unpleasant at the best of times, but this one comes in the middle of a heat wave. On Friday, the temperature in Washington topped 40 degrees Celsius. As I write, at 11:30 PM ET on Saturday night, it's still 30 degrees there and the next few days promise more storms and more scorching heat. If that wasn't enough, it could be as much as a *week* before electricity is fully restored to the affected area. Given the fury of the summer storms that passed through, leaving enough knocked-down trees and other debris that the National Guard has been called in to clear it up, it's no wonder that the distribution systems have been interrupted.

Still, it's not like this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Everyone's been through a power outage, and with the North American infrastructure deficit getting bigger and bigger with each passing year. Those towers and wires don't stay up because it's just their nature to stay up, you know. It's a problem that will have to be addressed, sooner or later--whether it be because we want to, or because we have no choice but to.

Get a load of those kilovolts!

The modern power delivery infrastructure is pretty much unchanged from the dawn of the electrical age: we have central power plants, be they nuclear, hydroelectric, natural gas, or what have you, and from them power lines reach out to connect cities and continents. The interconnections of the power grid make it possible for electricity generated in one place to fill the demands of another, but it can also lead to cascading blackouts such as the one experienced in the northeast ten years ago. It's highly centralized, and centralized systems are highly vulnerable to disruption.

The potential of a decentralized power generation system is just that, right now; potential--still, it's more feasible now than it ever has been before. Solar and wind generators have been steadily dropping in price for decades, and as prices decrease and efficiencies increase their possibilities become more and more apparent. Even now, Canadian Tire sells a line of personal wind turbines for $800 before tax. Admittedly, that's a fair chunk of change, and the turbines only generate six hundred watts of power--but that's more than enough to run, say, a desk fan. During a sustained power outage in the middle of a heat wave, six hundred watts is a hell of a lot better than zero. For people particularly sensitive to heat, it could be the difference between life and death, and the greater the extent to which personal generating systems like these are adopted, the more the price will go down.

I'm not saying that power generation would be completely decentralized, of course--there will always be a need for consistent baseload generation of the sort that consistent generators like hydro, geothermal, and nuclear excel at. Nevertheless, if every house and apartment had its own wind turbine and solar panel, along with a battery bank to be charged when generating conditions are good, that would vastly decrease the strain on the system as a whole. A system that isn't strained is a system that can be more effectively maintained, and it's resilient. We shouldn't be satisfied with brittle, fragile infrastructures that are brought low by storms. We should tolerate them if need be, but only as long as need be.

The Mistake By the Lake?

In the years after the Second World War, a particular idea became popular in cities across North America: the downtown expressway. Usually elevated, but sometimes buried underground as in Montreal, these expressways would provide fast, smooth routes into and out of a city's downtown core, so that commuters would not have to spend their mornings and evenings stuck in traffic on roadways that had not been meant to carry that kind of load. San Francisco got into the business with the Embarcadero Freeway, Seattle built the Alaskan Way Viaduct through its downtown, and Toronto built the Gardiner Expressway between the skyscrapers and the waterfront.

At the time, of course, it was a perfectly rational choice. In the 1940s, the automobile was the latest "it" thing and people everywhere were springing for the luxury of their own sets of wheels. At the time, an expressway like the Gardiner was seen by planners as necessary to ensure that traffic continued to flow; it wouldn't be for some decades before the traffic issue began to be seriously questioned. Decades during which the Gardiner was heavily used, and let's face it, things don't stay pristine forever when you've got tens of thousands of trucks and hatchbacks jouncing down them every day.

Which brings us to the present day. The Gardiner is close to sixty years old in some parts, and chunks of concrete fall off it so often now that it barely qualifies as news. ("The Gardiner is still falling apart, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.") The city is expediting its repair calendar, in which loose chunks of the highway are removed before gravity has a chance to do the job, but that's only treating the symptoms. The core problem is that winter salt and meltwater and rain infiltrate cracks in the concrete, corroding the steel supports and introducing new weaknesses into the structure.

According to the city engineering department, it's essentially cosmetic damage and the highway itself remains in good shape. Nevertheless, I can't help but feel that the Gardiner can be taken as a microcosm of our modern infrastructural deficit.

A portion of the Gardiner Expressway in downtown Toronto.

In those long-vanished years, before and after the Second World War, things were built. In the United States, there were the hydroelectric dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority and beyond, which brought jobs and electricity to places which wanted for both, and after the war the Interstate Highway System made it feasible for new-minted car owners to drive from one end of the country to the other. In Canada, construction on the Toronto subway's first stage began in the late 1940s, and transportation projects such as the Gardiner were joined by Highway 400 and Highway 401, and in subsequent decades Ontario addressed its electricity needs by building some of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. Simply put, in that time they built things; it was not difficult to get infrastructure projects off the ground.

The problem, the problem we live with today, came after those projects were finished - when it seems like society collectively elected to rest on its laurels. Perhaps the threat of nuclear war had something to do with it - maybe the subconscious recognition that everything could be destroyed tomorrow, so what was the point of it? The future could take care of itself. Now we're in the future, and we have to deal with infrastructure that's steadily aging in the worst economic climate since the Depression.

It's not as if there weren't opportunities. There were many. If you could bring a random traveller from, say, 1969 to the modern day, they would probably be shocked by how much hasn't been done, by the degree to which heavily-used infrastructure in their day has not been supplemented or replaced. I'm not sure what the problem was - all I know is the effect; that it seems to be we've simply got out of the business of building for the future. In the United States, the American Society of Civil Engineers argues that an investment of $2.2 trillion over five years would be necessary to bring that country's infrastructure up to par. Five years ago, a report from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities argued that Canada's infrastructure needed a $123 billion infusion to head off a "collapse."

It all boils down to the fundamental weakness of governments, and the willingness of officials to kick the can down the road to future generations - the casual assumption that things will only get better, and that in the future society would become so much more wealthy that it'd be cheaper, all things considered, to put off maintenance until tomorrow and keep taxes low today. For decades, Canada and the United States have been saddled with leaders who made a science of kicking the can, who made the present day prosperous by writing the future IOUs.

The future isn't just soon. It's now, and there's not much we can do with a few fistfuls of paper.