Energy News: Europe's Electrical Grid Nearly Collapsed

Elaine Meinel Supkis

High demand for electricity to heat homes causes nearly an entire collapse of the power grid in Europe. This, on top of last winter's shut down of natural gas from Russia sends a shiver through all of Europe which is already facing many dire consequences of the Hubbert Oil Peak and attendant energy crisis.

Energy needs exceed capacity during a minor coldwave!

Power cuts have struck several countries in Western Europe, leaving millions of people without electricity.
Power companies said the outage started in Germany with a surge in demand prompted by cold weather, and then spread to other parts of Europe.

Some five million people in France lost power, mainly in the east of the country and including parts of Paris.

"We weren't very far from a European blackout," a senior director with French power company RTE said.

Pierre Bornard told the French news agency AFP that two German high-voltage transmission lines failed, causing problems across western Europe.

This triggered a "house of cards" style system breakdown, he said.

As the price of oil and gas shoot up, people use more and more electricity to heat their homes both in Europe and America. All these attempts at forming a bubble around ourselves to keep the temperature comfortable is not only very expensive in its use of energy, it is rapidly destroying the entire ecosystem. I begged everyone to begin government programs to put solar energy units on all new housing and to retrofit it on older houses way back in the seventies.

As recently as just four years ago, ABC news told me quite curtly that no one is interested in any schemes to dilute the concentration of generation of energy this way. So shut up, Elaine.

Now things are infinitely worse and getting worse by the day. The American solution is to increase pollution and burn all the coal. The energy grid that transmits this bonanza is in bad shape so it always is on the verge of collapse. The collapse in Europe which only affected large swaths but not everyone is yet another warning for Western Civilization.

After the greatest blackout to hit America, one would think we would be doing something about this but nope. Nothing has changed or rather, the privatization piracy has only accelerated, making the future much darker. Indeed, funds to develop alternative methods has collapsed.

The relentless logic of energy+labor=manufacturing profits means the USA and Europe must outsource all production to China in order to avoid bankruptcy from costs of importing fossil fuels.

In the 1950s M. King Hubbert found that as the years went by, U.S. domestic oil production was decreasing, mainly because new discoveries became fewer and smaller. The changes in production could be plotted on a graph, forming the left side of that familiar shape known as a bell curve. Looking at the graph, Hubbert could see that the peak of American oil production would be about 1970; after that, there would be a permanent decline. When he announced this, most people laughed at him. But he was right: after 1970, U.S. oil never recovered.

For thirty years, therefore, the U.S. trade deficit has been heavily effected by dependence on foreign oil. Thomas D. Kraemer, in his report for the U.S. Army, states that "fully one-quarter of the U.S. trade deficit is associated with oil imports." Lauren Poole, a writer and editor for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, adds that "the United States had a trade deficit of $449 billion dollars in 2000; $90.2 billion (approximately 20% of the total) was the value of imported oil. . . . It is projected that petroleum imports will account for 60-70% of the U.S. trade deficit in the next 10 to 20 years."

This is a terrible trap, a horns of dilemma we can't escape. We have avoided running up our energy bills to the Middle East and Venezuela by removing our factories and making other countries import energy but the downside is, our trade deficit is even worse now because we export little and import a lot in order to keep up the pretense we are a first world nation and not the new 'Africa'.

Japan has chosen to make the people pay the price of manufacturing by having them save energy even if it means suffering a lot.

Every time the price of fossil fuels jump, the Japanese people respond to government commands they cut back by ruthlessly cutting down energy use, for example, not heating buildings at all. Meanwhile, America can't even throttle back gas guzzling vehicles.
KAMIITA, Japan -- When the Japanese government issued a national battle cry against soaring global energy prices this winter, no one heeded the call to arms more than this farming town in the misty mountains of western Japan.

To save on energy, local officials shut off the heating system in the town hall, leaving themselves and 100 workers no respite from near-freezing temperatures. On a recent frosty morning, rows of desks were brimming with employees bundled in coats and wool blankets while nursing thermoses of hot tea. To cut back on gasoline use, officials say, most of the town's 13,000 citizens are strictly obeying a nationwide call to turn off car engines while idling, particularly when stopped at traffic lights.

This is from an article I wrote last winter. The Japanese have a giant trade surplus with the USA and this pays for the energy for their factories and the workers there have jobs while here they don't have jobs but we live better because all this is via IOUs that won't come due...yet.

But if we attack North Korea and irritate China, the bills will come due, rapidly. And the Japanese can't foot the bills for us alone anymore! And so it goes: trade, energy, diplomacy, war and peace and religion are all part of the same machine and that machine is the Earth and the ecosystem and how we use it and interact with it.

The USA consumes 24% of all world resources and we are about 6% of the population. We can't afford this boon anymore. The differential between our consumption and our output is totally unsustainable in this present set-up.

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