Breezy, With a Chance of Blackouts

It being late September here in the Seattle area, the Rainy Season has started up again. So from now until about next July, the skies will be gray off and on, and every so often, a relatively small amount of water will fall from the sky. (And by small, I mean between one-tenth and one-quarter of an inch over the course of a day. Seattle may be famously rainy, but a tropical storm or a hurricane drops more water over several hours to a day than we commonly see up here in a year.)

Sometimes, there's a little bit of wind, to go with all of that rain. And that's when things become hairy. Today, for instance, the winds were forecast to be southerly, at about 10 miles per hour or so, with gusts peaking at a little more than twice that.

The winds struck me as calm today. I went out to the grocery store, and while I was gone, a squall or two brought down some branches and a bunch of leaves, but nothing particularly strong was in evidence.

But, as I type this, some fifty thousand people in the greater Puget Sound area are without power, mostly just south of the state capitol, Olympia, which is some ways south of here. On a day that was admittedly wet, but barely windy enough to really be noticeable.

And that seems par for the course around here. Power outages seem to be a regular occurrence whenever the weather is the slightest bit ornery. Are the winds strong enough to actually fly a kite? Have the kite surfers called in from work to rush down to the shores of the Sound? Then you can pretty much bet that the power is out somewhere.

A lot has been made of the fact that China, and likely other state actors, have been putting in a lot of work to infiltrate utility networks across the United States, to cut off the power or wreck energy supplies in the case of a war. Here, they don't need to put in the effort, just looking at a power line funny seem to be all it takes. Part of the problem is, I suspect, that I don't live in Seattle proper, which appears to have much more durable infrastructure (and a different power company) than the suburbs. Still, this is a major metropolitan area, and electricity isn't a new technology.

This lack of reliability in the power grid is the source of a certain amount of friction, as state and local governments work to wean the area from fossil fuels, through regulations such as not allowing natural gas to be used in newly-constructed homes for heating and cooking. Which is fine, but if the power goes down somewhere every time Mother Nature so much as twitches, an exclusive reliance on electricity leaves people in the cold and dark, rather than just the dark. And this drives opposition to climate initiatives.

I have no idea how power companies are run, so maybe PSE is doing their best, and this is just a difficult place to keep the lights on. But it seems to me that other places have solved this.