||| FROM SADIE BAILEY |||
This letter has been brewing for years. After last Thursday night’s 10 hr power outage, and another hours-long outage last Saturday, it’s time to speak my mind. We got lucky that these happened after the sub-zero wind chill nights, but I see this as a big wake-up call in terms of vulnerability of our energy grid.
Why on earth aren’t we addressing the elephant in the living room – that this is an untenable and unsafe situation for those of us in UGAs and all over these islands whose only heat source is all-electric? Have we thought on what can happen if something goes really wrong in one of these Arctic storms – like a days-long power outage?
Unable to sleep after a week mostly spent in bed because it was the only warm place in the apartment and it was too cold to venture out before Thursday night, I went for a walk during the outage to move around and stay warm, and enjoy the dark and the quiet – two things we rarely get to enjoy in and around town. Two places – the fire hall and saw shop – had noisy generators cutting into the silence and the relief I was hoping to feel from the usual constant light pollution and noise; I’m not sure if they were gas-powered. I didn’t stick around long enough to sniff out fumes. I wanted Nature and Quiet for a change.
I wondered again as I walked: How is it that we’ve not taken an accurate tally on how many all-electric dwellings exist right now on Orcas (and in the County)? How many more are being built or permitted? How can we keep justifying constructing all-electric housing without backup heat? We need to take stock. We don’t plan for worst case scenario in our planning and development, and because of it, people could die in a serious extended outage in the kinds of temperatures and wind chills we’ve had this week. Instead, all the responsibility is on us to “be prepared” but we’re given no option for how.
Impassible roads, a foot of snow, no backup heat or way to call anyone on the phone in a power outage… all of these add up to potential – and avoidable – disaster during unplanned outages. So why isn’t the County doing anything about it? Are we taking the unwise course of waiting for the disaster, and then trying to rise to meet it?
We’re told to just get to the nearest shelter. Reality check: We cannot / will not put old or sick pets (if we could lift and carry them) into a carrier and trundle them over to the nearest shelter, on foot, in sub-zero wind chills, only to stress them out even further with other strange animals and people. Or, carry our children and all the supplies needed for them on our backs or in our arms. What about our elders? How will they attempt to navigate dangerous road conditions and a lot of snow? Who can help, when we’re all in the same situation?
Sure, we’re old hands at piling on more sweaters and blankets, stocking up on batteries, candles, canned foods etc. But we need to know our baseline. Does the County have us covered? It seems not. The answer is simple; alternative back-up heat for every existing and to-be-built dwelling – shelters included – that are all-electric. There is no such thing as “clean” energy; all forms of energy hurt the environment. But we can educate ourselves. We can incentivize controlling wasteful use; bank into a battery grid for times like this. We can train people how to safely use the alternative energy available to them no matter how rudimentary; and make those choices easy and affordable to acquire.
What are houseless people supposed to do with their days in 20-degree highs while they wait for a shelter to open in the evening? If we can’t or shouldn’t drive our cars to a shelter due to impassible roads or frozen-shut car doors or no chains (adding to the problems for Orcas Towing and endangering other lives!), or if a growing population of poor and working class families and seniors are sick with the latest nasty “Island bug” on top of these other stressors and dangers – does cramming us unto a shelter petri dish situation solve anything? I doubt it.
That just strains the EMT and medical community.
What is the Plan, both short-term and long-term? Our winters seem to be getting colder, not warmer. There seems to be no admission by County officials of the contribution that unlimited growth and over-tourism – selling-out these sacred lands to the highest bidders – are doing to exacerbate this very situation, even though we’ve asked for decades for a carrying capacity analysis. These are not unrelated issues. As our officials and decision-makers are upping the densities all around town, forests are falling all around us to the roar of excavators and chainsaws. The wonderful wildlife diversity we once had in town has left, or died, or been turned into roadkill. As we watch desertification and flood zones be created before our eyes, our wetland watershed becomes an ever- worsening wind tunnel without the trees, which makes the whole freezing-cold windy situation so much worse for all who live here. I miss the forests and what they do for us all – windbreak, shade, shelter, wildlife habitat, and warmth.
Our thanks to the trees? Clear-cut, grind the stumps, and build more all-electric housing! Every domicile should have back-up heat – no exceptions. That should be MANDATED in our building codes. I don’t care if it’s a flower pot makeshift stove with a candle it it, sitting in a kitchen sink! What are our county officials doing to solve this? Because if we don’t solve it, people will do risky things to stay warm, and who can blame them?
In the “olden” days, those of us stuck in all-electric and often un-insulated little cabins that were only ever intended to be summer cabins, would walk through the snow to someone’s house for a bit of a warm-up by their woodstove or fireplace with a nice mug of something hot. We’d shoot the breeze with them til we could feel our fingers and toes again – then we’d trundle back home, having had exercise, cheerful company, and something warm or tasty.
There was a feeling of community. Most people still had wood stoves. Sometimes, people opened up their homes to a few unexpected guests in extended outages, as in 1989, when some places were without electric for days or weeks. In the 1960s, some folks were without electricity for months – but they had woodstoves, and neighborly neighbors. They could cook and be warm. Not so today, in the digital age and all-electric living where we’re encouraged to “switch it up” to all electric. In an outage, you can’t even heat a can of soup or a cup of tea.
Today, neighbors complain about neighbors who were too smart to get rid of their woodstoves or fall into the all-electric trap. They complain about the air pollution that woodstoves cause, but many lives have also been saved by having them. There is talk about the problems with energy, but not enough action on furthering back-up solar, wind, tidal, portable device heat sources that actually work, and construction methods that preserve heat.
We’re having the coldest winter temps we’ve had had since 1989/90; in some places, since the 1940s. Those of us already reeling from increased energy expenses and who are not self-sufficient, see what’s happening – our policy makers have not planned for anything really serious going wrong – and it’s a good wake up call to show how unprepared we are for emergencies. When we are so dependent on a sole energy source, that’s no solution. How strange to live in town, isolated; no phone service or way to communicate, cut off from everyone in our separate little boxes. We have a lot to re-think and re-do.
Thank-you for your thoughts, Sadie.
I agree with you.
Every home needs a backup for when the electricity fails.
Here is an EPA site about low emission wood-burning stoves:
https://www.epa.gov/burnwise/choosing-right-wood-burning-stove
Good comments Sadie. Especially the message that all forms of energy use have consequences and we need to be more strategic in our thinking and planning for infrastructure to support healthy and safe communities.
Thanks Sadie. I’m fully supportive of your perspective. Having lived through the ’89 storm, w/o power for 2 weeks, when wind chills were around 50 below, I was so grateful for my wood stove especially given that my youngest child was only 1 week old. A few years ago I discovered that all the renewable power in the county (solar panels and micro-hydro) provided one tenth of one percent of the total power consumed in the county. I think it may be up to a few tenths of a percent now because of the solar farm on Decatur, but that is still not storage. Kudos to Opalco for having buried many distributor lines, but there are overhead lines and if a tree takes one out during a bad storm, even power storage might not get to where it is needed. Now we need to wonder about bad actors taking out sub-stations, or old equipment failing when the power load is high. I encourage resiliency given these times of changing climate, heavy use, possible major loss of power either intentional or unintentional, given our rural situation and virtually total dependency on mainland power. I suspect that when the entire county loses power, Bonneville doesn’t even see a flicker on their meters. We are small and at the end of the line.
Thank you so much for the information on low emission woodstoves, Janet. I’m dreaming of some small lightweight portable heat generator that runs on a candle and fits in a tiny space and generates lots of heat.
Meanwhile, the Orcasonian has a very good article from Seattle Times about greenhouse gases in 2019 being the highest since ’07 (the pandemic lowered that a bit – which is why it’s baffling that people just want to go back to ‘normal’ higher rates of pollution and extinction!)
At the risk of coming off as a Nationalist, I firmly believe that much of our woes today – health, energy, and other – are because of global predatory capitalism and the global silk trade route and technocracy – and the USA’s harebrained push to export all of our raw resources across our fragile oceans – putting all life at risk. It’s all connected and related.
I am dreaming of small portable inexpensive devices that can make a difference between life and death in a severe extended outage. Maybe instead of thinking state of the art technocracy, we should look at what already worked before technology and the age of drilling the earth, and see if we can come up with simpler effective things and teach people on how to use them safely.
This is another good argument for OPALCO including Long-Term Storage in its renewable-energy projects. Meaning 10 hours or so, enough to carry us overnight. That won’t help much in a two-week power loss like Joe Symons recalls, but it would have helped in the last two county-wide outages that were due to mainland failures. The PV arrays on Decatur and elsewhere won’t be of much help in the winter when the sun is so low in the sky, but the storage certainly will.
Solar is of little help in winter, (December energy output is less than a tenth of summer). Local tidal energy potential is abundant year-round, predictable, and requires much less battery storage to firm. Battery storage is invaluable. Each OPALCO community solar microgrid includes storage. OPALCO’s Decatur microgrid has 1 MW (2.75 MWh) of storage. The forthcoming Bailer Hill microgrid will have a hybrid LFP/Vanadium flow battery with about 2 MW (4 MWh) of storage. Both Washington state and the US Department of Energy are awarding grants to fund large battery storage systems. OPALCO won its first Clean Energy Fund grant by innovating seven use cases to maximize the value of battery storage, including riding through outages, peak demand shaving, extending the life of submarine cables, delivering energy to essential services during extended outages, rapidly charging electric ferries (15 MW for 15 minutes) and electric planes, and firming intermittent solar. As this multipurpose local storage capacity grows, we increase our ability to ride through winter outages.
As a backup to electric heat, a propane heater is less expensive to install and much safer to operate than a wood stove.
Washington State counties are not responsible for utilities other than some generalizations in the ridiculously long and dozens of things that will likely never happen wish list included in SJC’s four year late Comprehensive Plan update. Mandating new building code requirements to include alternate heating and cooking options is not easy, and is probably better left to the buyers and builder’s common sense and budget. The one exception might be mandatory generators in multi-unit buildings, especially if there are elevators, and a requirement for them to be periodically tested and ready for use. Senior living spaces come to mind so stairways are lighted and elevators work for those mobility challenged. Yes, they will not be soundproof or environmentally benign, but there are tradeoffs to virtually everything.
Jay Kimball has noted that tidal generation is the one future power source that holds promise for relatively independent power from the mainland. Couldn’t agree more. The first unit for OPALCO is still a number of years off, but the possibilities are probably much better than solar which doesn’t work when the panels are covered with snow or the batteries are exhausted. As long as there is a moon, there will be tides.
Architects claim that a well-insulated home can be heated by 12 people dancing.
Low carbon footprint: Tidal. And 12 people dancing!
Tidal generation should definitely be a part of local generation in the islands! As long as we are fully aware going in that it will take significant investment in infrastructure and maintenance. I have been urging OPALCO to explore tidal generation for the last 30 years!
If we can let go of the centralized production of energy model and instead embrace micro-grids, we can make each of our islands MUCH more resilient in the face of increasing climate chaos. Each area of each island has different opportunities and challenges for generating, storing and distributing power locally. Some places have micro-hydro potential, some have pumped water/gravity storage potential (Rosario in particular), some areas are well situated for PV solar arrays and there are a few areas that could generate significant amounts of tidal power (Obstruction Pass, Cattle Pass, etc.) By utilizing small, affordable tidal generators suspended from anchored floats, we can avoid the ecological disruption and expense of permanent tidal generators attached to the sea floor. Obviously it will be complex to maintain a consistent electrical supply within each micro-grid and learning to do that effectively will be essential.
I propose we invert our thinking about electricity in San Juan county and begin with a stated goal of dispersed generation and micro-grids that are simple to isolate from one another. Maybe a 20 year goal of transitioning from BPA to local generation is feasible? What isn’t feasible is for us to continue to be utterly dependent on outside sources of electricity. It’s time to take responsibility for ourselves! If we don’t begin now, we will never achieve resiliency.
As I re-read this letter borne out of frustration of being so cold, and as I read these comments and responses, I realize that maybe I didn’t stress enough that most of these apartment and multi=unit housing buildings are rentals – not places owned where we can simply install a woodstove or propane heater; nor will state laws allow such a thing due to the inherent dangers to all if there should be a leak or worse. Our realities and limitations in apartments are very different than homeowners’. And there is no planning for that.
Climate-wise, things are going to get worse. We can’t turn that around or undo that. We as a species are not ‘sustainable’. Our energy use is not going to be ‘clean’ or ‘sustainable.’ I don’t have faith in putting all my eggs in the OPALCO basket, any more than I have faith in any other sole energy supply, “clean” or ‘dirty.’ They all have their issues and negative impacts on the environment. The inevitable will happen. We may slow collapse down a bit, but we are past the point of no return. The mitigations we may effect now will be small, local, and subtle; all we can hope to do is to get as right with Nature as we can get and try not to cause more ecocide on top of what’s already happening. Every action we take can have unintended consequences – because it’s all connected; we’re all connected. I think of all the ideas presented, Ken Wood’s make the most sense.
When I really think on it, I would rather be cold and uncomfortable than watch more trees felled to make way for more electric houses and more animals suffering and dying needlessly just so ‘I’ can be more comfortable. We are living in an anthropocentric civilization – at a local level, and at a global level. So maybe my letter is more a reaction to the frustration I feel living in an anthropocentric civilization and the doom for all living creatures from that kind of mindset. I want to live with nature, not dominating or subduing it for me- me-me or I-me-mine.
I still think there is a way to focus on creating something small, primitive, inexpensive, light and portable, and relatively safe with proper instruction of use – for backup power – primarily heat – in an outage in multi unit dwellings. Smaller, more local – less energy use. Not some thing to ‘install – something we can carry and move – because it’s the reality that there are a lot more of us in this same situation as I am. There is less energy to go around and less ecologically kind ways to get it, ad higher cost. Why are we still using gas fired generators, which are polluting, smelly, and noisy? The same goes for leaf blowers (what’s wrong with using a rake?)
Frankly, I’d rather dance with a rake than 12 people stuffed into a building or room together. We used to get warm doing actual… labor! Some of us still do!
If it means that our power supplier refuses to breach the lower Snake River Dams to think about other lives than just human lives, then I’m not interested in supporting electric or any energy source that prevents this from happening for salmon recovery and our resident orcas.
We complicate everything with big sweeping ‘global’ technocratic solutions for things that often have much simpler solutions or impacts; sort of like trying to use geophysics to cool down or dim the planet as the permafrost melts and the white reflecting ice and snow turns into a heat-absorbing dark blue. We try to do too little too late. I’m looking to what can be done locally, small-scale now.
I still hold firm to the belief that we need backup heat in every residence – as part of the basic needs of food and shelter. I think everyone should have it, but I don’t expect that everyone will get it. The cold hard truth is that there are haves and have-nots, and there is greed. The only good thing I can say is that for some of us, being used to living with less all along will make this transition to even less, easier for us than for a lot of folks who have never had to do with less. I can simply quietly go about taking care of this need on my own in the ways that are financially and technically available to me. But I can’t help thinking of all the others in this same predicament with no advocacy or choices..