Energy Crisis: Power Blackouts Are Becoming More Frequent In Most Countries.
Past power failures 'dress rehearsals' for frequent future blackouts
Paper warns that lights will go out with increasing severity as demand for electricity for gadgets soars amid inadequate investment
Soaring electricity demand for air-conditioning, iPads and increasingly cars, combined with a growing population and inadequate investment in creaking power networks, is pushing the world towards frequent blackouts, academics warn.
China, Brazil and Italy have all had significant power failures in the past decade but these are just "dress rehearsals for the future" in which the lights will go out with increasing frequency and severity, predicts a new paper, Blackouts: a sociology of electrical power failure.
The authors, Hugh Byrd of Lincoln University in the UK and Steve Matthewman of Auckland University in New Zealand, argue that the west needs to abandon the idea of uninterrupted electricity supply.
"Supply will become ever more precarious because of peak oil, political instability, infrastructural neglect, global warming and the shift to renewable energy resources. Demand will become stronger because of population growth, rising levels of affluence and the consumer addictions which accompany this," they argue.
They note that there have already been frequent warnings about future blackouts in Britain from as early as 2015 from government advisers, network operators and the energy regulator, Ofgem. Byrd and Matthewman argue the picture is broadly similar across the world, with the American Society of Civil Engineers warning that US generation systems could collapse by 2020 without $100bn of new investment in power stations.
The enormous growth in demand across the US is highlighted by figures showing that even as long ago as 2007 commercial and domestic air-conditioning alone consumed 484bn kilowatt hours of electricity – not much more than the country's total energy consumption in the mid-1950s.
It has grown substantially since then, while air-conditioning sellers have moved on to China, where household ownership of units has tripled in a decade and is still growing at 20% a year. India is showing the same pattern, says Byrd, a professor at Lincoln's school of architecture, and Matthewman, an associate professor from Auckland's sociology department.
Their report records a growing pattern of failures in power systems, starting with 50 million people being plunged into darkness on 14 August 2003 across the north-eastern US and Ontario, 60 million offline on 10 November 2009 in Brazil and Paraguay, and 600 million affected by failures across India on 31 July 2012.
From; http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/26/power-failures-future-frequent-blackouts-electricity-supply
