BOOK: Visualizing Breakdowns

Here's a small slice of a scenario I built for the new book (still in process):

In a little more than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, the steady hum of portable generators was a common feature of most cities and suburbs in the formerly prosperous nations of the G8. They usually kicked on shortly after lunch, when the central power systems shut down. In some built up areas, particularly in the favelas that had sprung up around many of the major cities, complete multi-megawatt electricity grids had been built with bailing wire and twine. 

 The arrival of the generators and ad hoc power networks arrived not long after the second financial collapse. In that crisis, many of the less financially able power companies went bankrupt, caught the crossfire between high commodity prices (oil, natural gas, and coal), customers unable to pay, and a global financial market unwilling to extend credit or facilitate transactions. The loss of power only lasted a couple of months, but people remembered, and those able to afford it began buying generators in bulk. Fortunately, the temperatures that summer only reached the mid nineties in most of the country, and the deaths due to heat exhaustion were limited to just over ten thousand, mostly elderly, citizens.

...

Comments

[Victor9098]

I suggest you taking some time to watch the documentary Powertrip (http://powertripthemovie.com/livewithelectricity.html), though the premise is about bringing (metered) electricity to a city by a modern US company, you can see a lot of elements that would fit into your scenario above and the whole thing was filmed within the last 10 years.

[Chris Wood]

John,

Nice piece. I would question though? With the financial breakdown, the global transport systems would fail. A tipping point would be reached. Without Electric power for couple of months, coupled with transportation infrastructure breakdown, I would think that the survivors would spend the majority of their time and energy foraging for food, fighting each other for limited resources, and attempting to provide security against others. If this happened on a large enough scale, then government assistance would be overwhelmed and desperate themselves.

Imagine, New Orleans, post Katrina, if there had been now outside assistance. It could take years to build some level of recovery and only that if there were the net energy sources available. The quantity of net energy leads to the surplus of available time to build/tinker/innovate which would be needed to patch together generators with bailing wire and twine.

At any rate, great forward thinking. Please keep up the great work.

[mb]

South African utility Eskom is losing billions to:

1. Billing and metering errors/fraud
2. Theft of 144 km of cable
3. Illegal connections

Some local communities block Eskom technicians from doing inspections or disconnections.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20080403060102701C734502

[alpwalker]

I would guess there would have to be a black market for gasoline in order to keep the generators running. The generator owners would also run a black market for electricity access to charge phones, laptops, etc or for direct connection to nearby houses for refrigeration, etc.

This is how I understand things work in Iraq. The only difference is gasoline is actually produced in Iraq and I assume would be readily available to those who have connections in the industry. How will the average American let alone the electricity black marketeer access gasoline in the environment you describe? What will be the penalty for possessing black market gasoline in a rationed/controlled market? Recall the black market gasoline sellers who were arrested/put out of business by the US military in Iraq. Energy bootleggers will be the new social hero.

Perhaps the maker class enters here or maybe a combination of the tech/makers with backwoods types just a generation or less away from the moonshiners of yore. Bio-fuel/booze production/moonshining would evolve over time and would require chemical know how, access to some specialized equipment and a secure location. Wood gas generators, on the other hand, could be easier to set up with less required know how and equipment and would be highly portable even to the point of being used to power vehicles. Imagine immigrant neighborhoods each specializing in their own form of booze/energy production based on cultural recipes and authorities playing whack-a-mole trying to maintain their energy monopoly/tax revenue under the guise of protecting the public from fire hazard/drunks etc.

Food access and food preservation would be huge issues. People would have to be told how to prepare and preserve food in an environment where processed food would be hard to come by and expensive once you found it and there would be limited use of refrigeration. Again, black market food vendors will be active both selling prepared food and fresh. Ice cream will once again become an incredible luxury.

[JB]

Do walls come into play with RC's? They would seem to be a logical means of controlling access and would keep out those up to no good (mongels and tax men)

[Danover]

I usually keep my mytho/spiritual speculations to myself because you inevitably lose much of your audience. However, there are times when doing so strays from the inauthentic to the inaccurate, and it comes time to take up one's holy book, whatever it may be. I don't suggest that you need to open this can of worms in your book, but my own speculations always include attention to the fact that our scientific and religious verities are hollowing out as quickly as our institutions.

The past couple years of quantum physics experiments have been relentlessly driving nails in to the coffin of the old, materialist/reductionist scientific paradigm that we are all compelled, by polite convention, to assume: confirmation that quantum indeterminacy applies to objects large enough to be seen with the naked eye, interpretations that the observer effect travels backward in time, quantum teleportation, more confirmation of "nonlocality," etc. These things are the scientific equivalent of pedophile priests.

In the short term, I would expect both scientific and religious fundamentalists to harden their positions. (Good news for Richard Dawkins.) For this reason, I'll bet there will be a lot of sorting out on the basis of mythology. Some of the most successful RCs will be religiously-based. Don't forget that the LDS folks have been preppers for decades. Local color will return to our franchised landscape and cults will flourish. It is possible that all of the most successful RCs will have some kind of mythological glue.

Longer term will depend on how young people interpret the new findings. I don't suppose that people my age will even try. "Science progresses, one death at a time." But it seems clear that the cosmological shift is as profound and pervasive in its ramifications as the dethroning of the earth from the center of the universe.

To go out on a limb, since I've gone this far, I think a technologically-empowered and effective altruism will be central to the new mythos.

[Pan]

Engaging.
Maybe adding the municipal collapse
can make it even more engaging.
I like what Dan said too.

[Doug Marrs]

JR,

Rather than gensets think CHP microturbines run off landfill gas or biogas from human waste or even natgas from legacy FF pipes. It is cheap about 1000 usd per kw rating installed so for a housing cluster of say 12 homes 5kw per its 60 kw = 60k USDs

Character dev could be the tinkerer maker that was a plumber or AC guy who cobbles this together for his RC in a suburb of detroit

Doug

[Greg Burton]

Nice premise, but allow for uneven distribution of the effects. That is - utilities that have invested in alt energy will be less likely to "completely" fail; regions with relatively high consumer solar investment are less damaged; existing generators in RVs and boats are pressed into use and converted to alt fuels; hospitals, government installations and other institutions with existing backup have power and are forced to triage the usage...

Then cross this with "ownership" of the utilities - PUDs vs public corps would lead to different responses, etc.

@ Danover - nice reference to Kuhn :)

[WarLord]

During the depression my mothers family moved every month as the rent was due and at every new place her brothers jumpered the electric meter connection to steal electricity.

I'm guessing the old skills will be back in the new age but lots of battery powered appliances with solar chargers and like the Amish more air powered app;iamces and tools.

I'm guessing the guy willing to baby sit the generator with a shotgun gets his power first then the guy who steals the fuel...

nice beginning

[James Kalin]

People who live in cities and towns in the USA are familiar with power outages: these happen, last a while, and then power is restored. Sit tight, go to sleep early, conserve batteries, visit neighbors who have portable generators in their homes or RVs, eventually power comes back on. Most people imagine a few weeks of power outage, or months of erratic power service, would be inconvenient but not fatal. What US citizens are generally not familiar with are water and food outages. People can hunker down and wait out power outages. This doesn't work with water and food. Water and food outages require people to get up and go, or die. A nationwide energy crisis that affected water treatment and distribution and food production and distribution would within a few months create 10's of millions of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) sloshing around the countryside, looking for refuge. I can imagine huge IDP camps, stateline check points, travel passes, vigorous enforcement of vagrancy laws, etc.
A "research" suggestion: check out a 1993 video mini-series entitled "The Fire Next Time" about a near future USA suffering the effects of climate change. Corny in parts, gripping in others, features a USA coming apart inundated by vast numbers of IDPs. Not bad at all for 1993.

[Greg Burton]

@ Danover - I'd say archetype-based. The mythologies will (in many cases) come later, as actual events are slotted into teaching stories about "why we do things this way". While "religion" is a useful typology, I'll predict that subcultural archetype stories will shift from the "Hero's Journey" to something more like "Heros", and that will have a greater effect than who or what a group worships (or not).

[victor]

Is there an assumption here that the grid failures you are projecting in the future had only to do with limited availability of fuel supplies for power generation and not to terrorists taking out several key nodes of the national electical grid - for which there are few, if any in some case, replacement parts on the shelf? Or an EMP (Paki nukes and N. Korean rockets on two or three tramp freighters)?

[kenmeer livermaile]

Seems to me that the guv will takeover failing utilities. They are much more efficient than buying gas to run a generator. In circumstances of deprivation, people will want power to stay warm and have light. Gas/diesel would be too valuable for transporting needed things for it to be wasted on silly generators (except the very wealthy).

Only the guv would have the rapid step-in capacity to keep the grid running at least partially.

Anyone remotely suspected of messing with the grid would probably be bludgeoned to death: people in a city depend on that sucker.

I suspect the guerrilla craziness in Iraq and Afghanistan is possible only because of decades of previous war and totalitarian dictators. In America, militias run seriously underground and their surfacing would not be well accepted. We are not a society in which brandished Kalsihnikovs go unnoticed or approved.

LIke James Kalin said, the guc cannot afford this to happen. A major cyber-attack may well happen, after which we'll sphincterise the networks so tight that.... oh well. Enjoy the free online porn while you can.

Moral: while a huge bureaucratic/cybernetic system can be brought to a halt with a small sabot, the edifice will remain and will quick;y repurpose itself to maintain structure.

As ever, the single fundamental is: energy. enough energy, you can grow food, supply potable water, and stay warm/cool enough. Energy doesn't come from grids, it comes from energy and energy-releasing substances/processes.

[kenmeer livermaile]

Apologies for not editing the above to lay ideas in easily comprehensible sequence.

[Jeff]

This excerpt is boring and lacks believability.

Try showing instead of telling.

[In a little more than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, the steady hum of portable generators was a common feature of most cities and suburbs in the formerly prosperous nations of the G8.] If they are no longer prosperous, how can everyone afford gensets? How did we go from financial crisis to energy crisis? You didn't show me the connection. Where does the fuel for the generators come from? You failed to convince me.

[They usually kicked on shortly after lunch, when the central power systems shut down. In some built up areas, particularly in the favelas that had sprung up around many of the major cities, complete multi-megawatt electricity grids had been built with bailing wire and twine.] Not even close to believable. (What the heck is a favela?) If it's so easy to produce power, why are there so many black outs? Why do central power systems shut down after lunch? None of this makes sense.

[ The arrival of the generators and ad hoc power networks arrived not long after the second financial collapse. In that crisis, many of the less financially able power companies went bankrupt, caught the crossfire between high commodity prices (oil, natural gas, and coal), customers unable to pay, and a global financial market unwilling to extend credit or facilitate transactions. The loss of power only lasted a couple of months, but people remembered, and those able to afford it began buying generators in bulk. Fortunately, the temperatures that summer only reached the mid nineties in most of the country, and the deaths due to heat exhaustion were limited to just over ten thousand, mostly elderly, citizens.]

Boring. Uninteresting. Unfun. Not anything I would want to reread. Showing is harder than telling but it is more interesting to read. You might try adding some characters that I can identify with to make it easier to read. It reads like a laundry list of predictions that may not come true in the time period suggested in the text.

If your goal is to preach to the converted, you might just sell a few copies of this book.

[James Kalin]

The scenario was not an excerpt. It was just a one-dimensional background context within which the story would be rooted and unfold. The story would be multi-dimensional with characters, plot, action and the flow of time.

[Mike Warot]

Since electricity can't be hidden while its in transport across a grid, nor can it be protected from theft.... why would someone set up a grid in a scenario in which it is most likely to be tapped and leached to death?

Perhaps a deal with the local mafia would offer protection?