Power went out on the night of Friday 27th November, as Storm Arwen, the first major storm of this winter and, folk say, the worst since at least 1953, flattened forests and snapped power lines. The damage to power, communications and, for some, water infrastructure was so great that ‘power’ took over a week to be re-instated in some areas. My own electricity supply was reconnected late on Wednesday afternoon (30th November).
There is a line in one of the Pibroch poems – In Time:
….electricity
was taken when available.
The line is/was intended to challenge the presumption, prevalent in Northern mainstream media, that power ‘on demand’ was a fundamental human right (clearly it isn’t) and to suggest that we must attune our appetite for power and instant gratification with the variability of available energy from renewable infrastructure – wind turbines, tidal, solar, hydro.
The failure of the local grid over the last few weeks has been a master-class in what my world looks like when electricity is NOT available. At this time of year, it’s cold, it’s dark, it’s quiet. At this latitude the sun is only above the horizon for 6 hours a day and the storm, in any case, brought snow in its wake.
Conscious of the need to shift away from use of fossil fuels, I had committed to renewable electricity as my sole source of light, heating and cooking. This temporary disconnection drove me to fallback on logs, candles and a camping stove (as well as five layers of clothing and a thick blanket). I sat (mostly in the dark) and waited whilst friends encouraged me to flee to somewhere else that ‘still had power’.
Of course, a winter storm is weather and a 3-day power outage is not Cyclone Idai, Hurricane Katrina or last month’s rains in Tamil Nadu. But here we sat, in the cold and the dark…waiting and reflecting on our ‘entanglement’ with the combustion – the simple one-step trick we’ve elaborated on for perhaps a million years – the instant gratification (if we have the fuel) that never quite disappoints.
My grandson, 2, was perplexed and amazed when light-switches did not deliver light, the remote declined to stream images and Alexa became totally unresponsive. The magic of modernity vanished over-night. Something fundamental in his world had failed and it was incomprehensible.
Meanwhile, decades old forests have been swept flat, old growth trees, not the slender matchstick Spruce of plantation. The pre-existing carbon sinks that pre-dated the dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions over the last 30 years, splintered, broken, destined to burn or rot. We forget that we need to ‘offset’ the impact on our forests through storms and forest fires BEFORE we offset our unnecessary jaunts to Mallorca or the US.
We cling to the possibility to build-back virtuously as well as better, shifting to renewables, planting trees – but the heat already stored in our environment, even now, compromises our fragile infrastructure and degrades the resources to support mitigation. As every month passes the mountain we must climb grows higher, the bills grow greater, our resilience erodes.