Blackout 2003: The Debate We Won't Be Having This Time http://hnn.us/articles/1633.html Sir: Practically speaking, the recurrent electric power crises of the last couple of years are air-conditioning crises. Air conditioning is not only a significant component of total electric energy consumption-- it takes the lion's share of peaking demand as well. The size and scale of the electric power generation and distribution industry is governed by peaking demand, not average consumption. The utilities have to build capacity which will be used only on the hottest day in August, so to speak. The conventional air conditioners in general use are grossly inefficient, largely because they are not designed as organic components of the buildings they are installed in. Most Americans insist on air conditioning, but this insistence has not made itself generally felt in building codes. The result is a vast number of extremely inefficient window air conditioners. A geothermal heat pump-- that is, an air conditioner with a thermal connection to the subsoil-- can typically reduce air conditioning load by a factor of five or ten, eliminating it for all practical purposes. To take an analogous case, compulsory indoor plumbing means that we do not have people emptying chamber pots out of upper story windows. On the eve of the current energy crisis, the payback period for a geothermal heat pump was approximately ten years, depending on assumptions. That is sufficient to secure gradual, but not rapid, adoption. Rapid adoption seems to require a payback period of a year or so. Air conditioning exhibits positive feedback. Once people start using air conditioning, they lose their heat acclimatization. The result is that they need more air conditioning, so as to avoid exposure to the heat. As a rough index, the percentage of households with central air conditioning has approximately doubled in the last twenty years. The electric load required to power conventional air conditioners varies approximately as the square of the difference between the outdoor temperature and the desired indoor temperature. Because the national air conditioning system has been going haywire, it has thrown increasingly unbalanced load on the electrical system until the electrical system reached breaking point. There are technical solutions, of course, such as geothermal cooling, but these require that one go back and rethink the particular technological system instead of mindlessly trying to expand it. I think that on the evidence, both Democratic governor Grey Davis of California and Republican president George W. Bush qualify as mindless expanders. Both are committed to giant bureaucratic solutions of escalating expense, and progressively totalitarian propensities-- it is a mere matter of detail that one is socialist and the other, corporate capitalist. A long-term solution to the air conditioning--electricity crisis is going to involve turning our backs on both Davis and Bush, and the bureaucratic interests they represent; and reverting back to the household level. It is a matter of urgency to refit large numbers of buildings for geothermal heating and cooling, reducing their dependence on large-scale electric grids, and reducing the peak loads they put on such grids. To do this, fiscal-political measures can be devised to fit all political tastes. The net tendency of this refitting will be to reduce the dependence of the individual on the central government, as well as his impact on the natural environment. There is a literature on the social effects of air conditioning (see notice re Raymond Arsenaut, below). In arsenaultian terms, one can talk about how air conditioning creates or destroys the conditions for a crowd, which can become a mob. In these terms, looking at the 1965 blackout, in november, one must bear in mind that most buildings were heated by natural gas or oil, According to McConnell and Philbin, a typical oil burner installation runs on the gravity feed system, with the oil tank at a higher elevation than the burner. Likewise, a steam circuit is self-circulating. One might add that natural gas, of course, comes out of pressurized gas lines with considerable internal storage. Northeastern gas supplies might very well have been pressurized by pumps in Texas, and thereafter fed through mechanical pressure reduction valves. Typical heating systems did not depend on the electrical supply, with no electric pumps or controls to fail, and therefore an electric power failure in the cold season would not tend to drive people into the streets-- or, for that matter, into bed. About the same time, however, the Kerner Commission had noted the role of temperature in riots, i.e.. the numbers of tough young men hanging out on the streets because of the heat wave, cheerfully scuffling with each other like so many musketeers, and ready for any adventure. People like Herbert Gutman, Jimmy Carter, etc. no doubt perceived the looting in the 1977 as an "outlier" of the riots, with much the same causes. In the late seventies, something like half of all households had air conditioning, with a heavy concentration in the south, and naturally, the incidence in northeastern slums was much lower. A reasonable "guesstimate" might be something like ten percent or less. Air conditioning still did not tend to interfere with the formation of street corner society, a la _Talley's Corner_. By the present time, air conditioning has effectively reached demographic totality. Practically everyone has air conditioning, even if the areas cooled are still expanding. Used air conditioners are extremely inexpensive, and attempts of utility companies to enforce payment for electricity in slums tend to shade off into the futilities of counterinsurgency warfare. In the kind of urban neighborhood where the local kids view it as natural to throw rocks at the electric company man, electricity is effectively free, and so is air conditioning. This is of course why the electric utilities serving the big northeastern cities have the highest rates in the country. Now, when people are accustomed to air conditioning, they fail to build up a heat tolerance over the summer. When the air conditioning goes off, they are mostly just enervated. They want to lie still and not do much of anything. And that is how it turned out. Andrew D. Todd 1249 Pineview Dr., Apt 4 Morgantown, WV 26505 adtodd@mail.wvnet.edu http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Bibliography: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles McConnell (revised by Tom Philbin), Audel's Plumbers and Pipefitters' Library, Vol II, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1967, 1977, 1983, 1986, pp. 80, 292 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Materials relating to Raymond O. Arsenault's "The End of the Long Hot Summer: Air Conditioning and Southern Culture." (Journal of Southern History, Nov, 1984): http://www.modernprometheus.com/despectaculis/archives/000041.html http://www.nelson.usf.edu/spccoll/local/rayguide.html papers deposited by Arsenault. http://www.avsands.com/History/Objects/airconditioning_vsb_av.htm http://www.untiedundone.com/72901f.html http://graphics.tech.uh.edu/Com%20Systems/AirConditioning.pdf Newspaper precis of Arsenault. ------------------------------------------------------------------ http://www.bhny.com/events/Events141.html Review of a more recent book. Quotes a figure of 83 percent air conditioning. ------------------------------------------------------------------ http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/scistud/esf/sve.htm Elizabeth Shove, Notes on comfort, cleanliness and convenience, --------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs97/decade.html http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs2001/detail_tables.html Official statistics relating to air conditioning. One limitation of this data is that it does not deal as extensively as might be with differing regional patterns, especially in conjunction with historical time scale. -----------------------------------------------------------------------