What If...The Lights Went Out?

A darkened room, its walkways dimly illuminated by emergency lighting and the displays of monitoring equipment, rumbles with the vibrations of cooling systems injecting chilled air towards hot processors and spinning disks. The shrill sounds of thousands of data storage devices fill the air, alongside the cooling systems; the relentless blinking and trilling of green lights goes on as data is sent and received through miles of copper and glass fibre. Clunk. Warning sounds – alarming cries from dumb systems that only know that something has failed. In a wink the UPS takes up the load, drawing power not from the high voltage mains, but from deep tanks of diesel embedded in the lower levels of this data centre. Management is notified and the call goes out for emergency supplies of liquid fuel: the contract says there is to be no interruption, and the fuel suppliers are on standby 24 hours a day. The fuel suppliers are receiving further calls, from a standing start they experience a tide of demand as throughout the city the power fails: data centres, hospitals, offices, government buildings, military installations – who gets the fuel first? Who gets the last reserves?

As Anne takes her first steps towards the bathroom, she understands something is amiss. Her clock is blank; no light seeps in through the blinds from the street; her fumbled attempts to switch on the bedside lamp were to no avail. The blackness is total – even the moon won’t come out to play with the darkened surface of the world. Sirens broadcast their Doppler cries in distant parts of the town as Anne moves her left foot onto the next step down, and misses her footing…thump, thump, thump, down the stairs and into the wall; a sickening rip as her ankle bends askew. She pulls her way down the remaining steps and picks up the telephone, her breath is short – there is a tone, the telephone company keeps the system running through its own generators. She dials 9…the keypad is soundless. She hangs up then brings the receiver to her ear – nothing; the gentle burr has gone as the last diesel dries up at her local exchange.

It seems cruel to leave Anne like this; less so to let the disks in the data centre spin down – though this data centre and other like it service the largest financial organisations on Earth and tomorrow the markets won’t be opening. Anne’s plight is repeated across the nation as the switchgear reacts to low loads, shuts itself off and puts the grid into standby. The hospitals will be busy until their own power supplies drop out. The ambulances can do little but patrol – the mobile phone network failed hours ago. Like perverse moths to a doused flame, the drivers and walkers are out seeing what a darkened world looks like…for a while, until they panic.

Inexorably, the country grinds to a halt as the extinguished lights symbolise the start of turmoil in a culture whose lifeblood is electricity, and whose arteries are the cables that join the organs of state and industry together.

This is a warning: the peaks are approaching.

Peak Coal. If humans continue to burn coal at the current rate and the levels of oil burning and deforestation stay the same there is no doubt that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach 450 parts per million by the middle of the century. This is a critical tipping point. James Hansen makes the stark observation that the only way to keep carbon dioxide levels low enough for the climate to recover, in the current technology-based culture the industrial nations are exporting to the rest of the world, is to stop burning all coal. This is not happening: consumption of coal is rising as China and the USA gobble up their own supplies, and the rest of the world balks at the rising costs of (the already peaked) natural gas. Coal continues to feed the economic treadmill. The production peak will come by 2015 if we don’t switch off the burners.

Peak Uranium. As there begins a drive for carbon free energy to feed a population whose electricity demand is growing – between 1983 and 2005 electricity demand doubled worldwide – the consumption of uranium is already exceeding its production. Uranium can be made to go further, but only through the production of plutonium. Thorium breeding is experimental, and even if successful will not produce enough energy to close the nuclear gap in time. The Uranium Peak is expected some time in the middle of the 20th century – sooner if coal is abandoned.

Some options remain. Renewables have huge potential, but are being rolled out abysmally slowly, and will never catch the peaks in time. Gas, as I mentioned is already on the wane, and the use of oil products will only cut into global demand for transport – at $110 a barrel, it has already priced itself out of the mains electricity market. As mains supplies fail the industrial world’s resilience rests on a continuous supply of diesel – just one demand placed upon an industry that is now digging up sand and shale to extract the last gobs of black gold. At some point in the near future, nations will lose their electricity supplies, with dire consequences for the infrastructure, and the people that depend on it.


Those That Don’t Survive

It calls itself the “developed” world: a world where machines usurped manual craft long ago, or use the hands of the poor to serve the rabid consumption of the rich. A world in which economic growth is the measure of a nation and the ownership of material goods is the mark of the man, or the woman. A world in which leisure time bypasses nature and sucks up the money the “developed” world’s inhabitants spend their working lives accumulating.

Above all, the “developed” world is an industrial world: one that defines itself through its use of technology – its cars, its planes, its cookers, refrigerators and washing machines, its computers, its electric lawnmowers and air conditioning units, its cranes, furnaces and steel mills. A world that depends on energy.

People in countries like the USA, Japan, Canada and Germany have, in just the last 50 years, morphed from seeing the continued supply of electricity as a luxury to savour, to demanding vast quantities that run every aspect of their lives. When the electricity goes off, lives switch off. Not only will their be widespread panic, accompanied by the inevitable looting and violence which distinguishes societies that live on a psychological knife-edge; people will not be able to feed themselves for long, keep themselves warm, even drink from the taps that are kept under constant electrically pumped pressure.

The mental burdens will also be intense for many. For those who spend their lives plugged into the mains, the loss of television, computer, telephone and even lighting will be unbearable. A hollowed-out existence in which the only veneer of life is driven by electricity seems like real life until the lights go out.

Politically, loss of power is suicide: the number one energy priority for Western governments is “security” – in other words, the need to maintain a continuous supply of power to every key part of the national infrastructure. What this really means is keeping a continuous supply of power to the economy – the money generating, trading and investing entities that stretch across the industrial world have their entire memories stored on computer disks. When the computers crash, the markets crash, and take governments down with them.

As civilisations continue to become more energy intensive, and dependent on its continuous supply, the need to secure reliable energy sources becomes ever more critical. Interference with the electricity supply of most industrial nations is considered to be an act of terrorism, even if the intention of the protagonist is to highlight the dramatic changes happening to the climate as a result of its generation. Electricity dependency creates a state of fear: fear that is generated by those that want to keep the economy, and its suckling society from collapse, and fear that results from individuals’ psychological need for artificial stimuli.

In effect, energy rich societies are under siege and, bizarrely, the attackers are those that perpetuate that energy dependence: the retailers, the advertisers, the property developers, those at the top of the heap that ride on the crest of a wave of wealth and political power. The wave is breaking, and the flotsam will be toxic for those who are in the water.


Those That Survive

In another home – a little place in the west of Scotland, in southern Nigeria, or perhaps in the south of France – a family is sitting around their wood burner, talking about the news that they picked up in the local bakery. Power cuts in the cities, darkness along the roads, civil unrest and a government that wants to crack down on dissent. Time to bring the chickens in, perhaps; the wolves could be coming to the door. There is still some oil in the lamps and stocks of candles, but at this time of the year bed time is soon after tea: as the body clock of each family member takes its cue from the darkness outside, they pump some water for teeth and a wash, then snuggle into bed, leaving the embers glowing.

Tomorrow they will take a walk into the village and find out if anyone needs help.