An Energy Carol
Last time, I took you with me on an in-depth dive into the power grid. Today, while visions of sugar plums are finishing dancing in some folk’s heads and New Years Resolutions are getting checked off, in mine is dancing the rest of the glorious tale of energy, municipal power, and Light Commissioners. It’s a harrowing but hopeful story, filled with ghosts of past, present, and future! Get ready for another long read! Between this and Friday night, it should give you much further insights into what goes on to make all those holiday lights twinkle. And I hope it inspires you to get out and vote on Monday April 4th 2022, because as I previously mentioned, the Board of Selectmen doubles as the Commissioners of our Municipal Light Department. That means if you think that I will be someone knowledgeable and ready to sound-board and collaborate with the talent we’ve got at our Light Department, then cast your vote for me in this election.
And now let’s get back to talking about energy . . . we’re gonna talk about things like energy pricing, renewable power, and the future of the grid!
The Ghosts of Energy Past
So we’ve already talked about all of the following things in my last blog post:
Types of energy
Ways energy can be converted
Methods used to generate power
How specific types of power technology work
The anatomy of what equipment makes up the “power grid”
How power gets from where it’s made to where you are
Now we’re going to get into part that most people actively think about when they think about electricity and energy: their power and heating/cooling bills.
What is your bill actually made of? Are you paying for barrels of electrons or something? How come the amount varies? And especially what can cause it to go up at times when your usage hasn’t? Settle in and we’ll demystify these things.
Your energy bill is made of more than just the energy itself. A typical bill has multiple factors at play based on the way that the grid works.
The Fuel/Energy
This chunk of the bill is fairly easy for people to understand. It’s the costs around the resources that are used to make the energy. The resource itself, and whatever rigamarole is needed to make that resource usable to produce energy. When it comes to your power bill specifically, it’s a blend of whatever power sources your power company is paying into. In Norwood what we’ve been paying into most recently are the following types of power sources:
Nuclear
Natural Gas
Hydro
Wind
Photovoltaic Solar
(and for a brief time recently we were also paying for temporary diesel generators to try and mitigate the peak. We talked about the peak in my previous post)
So as the markets around these specific resources change, so too changes the costs for energy provided from those sources.
An important thing to remember: “power company” is a blanket term that gets thrown around, but really you shouldn’t picture a power company as being one entity where all the above stuff gets delivered and then sold right to you. There’s not some facility in Norwood where trucks full of uranium and gas tanks are pulling in to deliver it for our Light Department to go out back and turn into all of Norwood’s electricity. The energy grid is way more spread out than that.
Power Companies: “Buying and Selling” Energy
In reality there’s a distributed network of “power generating companies” and “power buying/selling companies”, linked together through a bunch of equipment (all that stuff I mentioned in my previous post) … though there can be overlap between “companies who make the power” and “companies who sell said power directly to us at our homes”. But uuuusually it’s more common to see companies making the power to sell to other companies. Those power buying companies are buying power from lots of different places, and then they in turn sell and provide power to us at our homes.
Predominantly a given power generating company gets funding to set up (their own capital, investors, subsidies, etc), then hooks into the grid to distribute what they’re making. They get various places (towns, businesses, private corporations, investors, etc.) to enter into contracts with them to purchase the power that they’ll be making from then on. Sometimes the investors and the power buyers are one in the same even! You’ll see that a lot with renewable projects as more and more places vie to meet energy goals.
Now that’s a bit of a misnomer for me to say “purchasing their power”, so let’s talk a bit more about that aspect of it . . .
Buying power from a power company doesn’t literally bucket up their energy and deliver it directly to you. Like if we buy power from a Wind farm, there’s not some method of partitioning off electrical current chunks just for Norwood from that Wind farm separately from other places who are also hooked into the grid infrastructure. The grid doesn’t work like that. Whatever energy is being put into it is all blended together and accessible to anything else hooked up to it almost instantly.
(I mean yeah yeah we could get into the minutia of how much current travels over what distance per nano second, but that’s one level more complicated than I want to get about this explanation haha).
What is functionally happening when places are paying a power generating company is it’s more like sponsoring the operations of that facility, as opposed to literally buying buckets of electric current to pipe directly to that purchaser’s houses.
Once you know this aspect of it, it’s easier to understand that portion of the bill. You’re not paying for specific chunks of something physical, the electrons aren’t like loaves of bread coming to your house from a specific bakery. An electric bill is more like paying for access to an on-going service. It’s more like paying for a television Streaming service. No seriously, think about it . . .
What Electric Companies and TV Streaming Have In Common
Whatever shows are on a given television streaming service platform, anybody else who is paying into it can watch them too, right? And all the shows that are available on that service are sourced from tons of different production studios all over the world. And there’s investors (advertisers in the case of Streaming services) paying toward certain kinds of content being produced and made available on said service. Some shows are more expensive to produce than others. And any costs the overall service is faced with get passed down to anybody who’s using the service. All of that is a lot more like how the power grid works, metaphorically speaking (with some obvious and important differences).
All the various things it takes to make that power source run have a cost. Nuclear for example, you’re paying for the perceived value of the radioactive materials, the scientist’s and other staff, the physical equipment at the facility, the training programs, and everything it takes to make a nuclear facility run. Same with natural gas. The workers, the pipes, the perceived value of the gas itself, the safety equipment, the training programs, replacement parts, and everything it takes to make a natural gas based facility run.
I want you to remember this concept for something we’ll talk about here in a few moments that impacts our bills . . .
The Transmission
So the next part of the bill to understand is called “transmission”. Remember all those towers, power lines, transformers, blah blah blah that I mentioned in my previous post? Well those have to be paid for. What’s more, they have to be maintained too. So a portion of your bill is about funding these components of the grid, the workers it takes to fix and maintain them, the replacement parts for them, etc.
Transmission is going to become a really big deal in the very near future. Why? Because we’re pumping more and more energy through equipment that was built to handle a different intensity and “style” of energy service. We’re drawing down more and more and more energy (we’re not so great at conservation of energy, we keep adding more stuff we want powered). We used to have just lots of electromagnetic generators to juggle. There’s a whole fascinating process with transmission and delivery that revolves around harmonizing the way that generators are feeding into the system to keep it from overloading, going to ground, etc. Now we’ve added in things like always-on-yet-seasonal direct current generators like photovoltaics. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of how much things are evolving. That means as the equipment has to be adapted for the changes, for the increased load, and it’s going to be no small feat to do so.
The Capacity
Then there’s a chunk of your bill for “capacity”. Capacity is a measure of how much energy needs to be made to meet the need, and are the operators able to produce that much. If they can’t? More equipment has to get added to meet the demand. So as we draw down tons and tons of power, that requires more and more equipment. That equipment and the folks installing it has to also get paid for. Same deal, the parts themselves, the workers to work on it, the replacement bits. That means that the more complex it gets to try and wrangle proper energy flow in the grid due to escalating demand (or weird rises and falls in demand), the more expensive capacity costs can get.
Decommissioning
So now here’s something else that everybody hooked into the grid shares the burden of . . . now it’s time to talk about the thing I said earlier to remember, about the costs of everything that goes into the running of all these different types of power generating companies? There is one other cost that can sometimes come plowing at us and that is called “decommission”.
I don’t know if you’ve considered this, but energy is HOT.
At least in the form we’re utilizing it most.
Running all that current wears materials out. Nothing lasts forever having all that energy pumping through it. The elements of nature also batter away at things the same way it does any other building or thing left outside. Solar radiation, wind and water erosion, hail and teeny meteorite strikes, and so on. Existing on our planet is kiiiiiind of a rough ride for whatever is outside, even a building. There’s also wear and tear on the inside of power generating facilities too. With nuclear plants for example, all that radioactive material takes its toll on the inside of the facility. It literally irradiates stuff, degrades its structure over time, etc.
(Honestly I could make an entire other blog post just as long as both of these posts combined telling you about how nuclear plants work, it’s very interesting stuff!)
Basically, most power making facilities of any type with very very few exceptions, have a life expectancy. A point at which it basically wears out so much that you can’t just swap out parts and kintsugi it any more.
When a power generator / facility needs to be retired, it isn’t like an old empty building that gets to sit around idle. It’s a whole big process to shut the thing down, and it takes specialized expertise to safely retire them. Stuff like:
Dealing with any bi-products, like equipment that needs to get recycled
Disposing of any hazardous materials that need to get dealt with
Procedures to keep the public safe as necessary. It could be sealing things up, hauling things out, or any number of tasks.
Inspections to ensure that it’s being done properly
There’s a whole mess of process and planning that happens to retire a power generating facility. Retiring a power generating facility is called “decommissioning”. You don’t get to decide when a power generator gets to be decommissioned either. The gradual break down of the equipment forces everyone’s hand. You don’t get to just keep driving your nuclear plant with the check engine light on, so to speak. Why does this matter?
Because decommissioning is not free. It’s a costly process. A necessary cost of sale. And the cost of decommissioning is absorbed by everyone who’s paying into that plant.
Perfect example: a few years ago we (and many others in the region too) felt the impacts of the decommission of the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant. Retiring a radioactive power generator is NOT cheap. Which brings me to one tool used for trying to deal with these kinds of costs . . .
Rate Stabilization Funds
Sometimes we’re able to mitigate these costs using what’s called a “rate stabilization fund”. It’s baaasically like a break-in-case-of-glass pool of money that’s used to try and soften the impact to ratepayers
… (sorry, for clarity a “ratepayer” is any customer who is paying for electric services. You’re a ratepayer if you have an electric bill! ^_^) …
anyway, the stabilization fund tries to cover spikes in costs that happen from some of the situations outside our control, to try and keep people’s bills from being driven up too badly by these periodic-but-necessary events. Decommissioning is exactly that type of cost-spiking event. The stabilization fund can’t always foot the whole thing (because it depends on how much you had in the fund to work with when the spikes happen), but it can be a big help to mitigate price spikes to customers.
Local Costs
So everything I just described is JUST talking about things that happen outside of our town for the energy to get into our area at all. All of the above costs exist before our power company even gets into the mix of things. They are costs that every power company with customers, private or municipal, has to contend with. Because ultimately we’re all hooked up to the same system. The grid. So what kinds of stuff is happening right here in town then? Well that’s stuff like the following:
The local distribution equipment. Poles, the little transformers, wires, substations, and much more.
The trucks and tools needed to service said distribution equipment.
Fun fact: There’s more than one kind of truck used for dealing with our distribution network! There’s specialized trucks that drill holes & set the poles when they’ve fallen over, there’s trucks that raise up for workers to do maintenance on the parts on the poles, little trucks for smaller service issues. If you’ve never been to one of the town Touch a Truck events, check it out some time! You can often see these up close and ask questions.
The equipment that measures energy usage at your home/business, and the equipment that talks to that, not to mention the equipment used to repair those things.
The labor to run this stuff. That’s the lineworkers, the service reps to speak with ratepayers with questions or outage reports, the staff monitoring and setting in motion response to outages, the engineers, portfolio managers (eh, more on that shortly), the list goes on. It takes a variety of different roles to make power happen.
Don’t forget about the software for this stuff too. And I’m not just talking about billing software. There’s also software used to detect and monitor outages, to visualize to the managers so they can more swiftly strategize how to respond, and so on.
All these things are parts of what make up your bill. It ebbs and flows based not just how much power you’re using, but on changes in the costs of ANY of the stuff I just described. All of that said, about 80% of the bill is specifically the various costs I described above dealing with operation of the plants/generators and the materials needed to do so (and retiring said plants/generators as necessary).
But wait, there’s more!
See here I had you thinking that how much energy “costs” only had to do with how it’s sourced, how much of it is used, and how it’s maintained. Oh no, there’s even more to it. These next parts are also highly variable and driven by human behaviors.
Power Factor
I discussed this previously, but as a reminder: what makes the grid run well is consistency. And so there are costs built in to penalize inconsistency. A power buying company using way more power than expected, or way less power than expected, provokes penalties in the form of extra fees. Because responding to that wildly swinging demand is costly. Predictability of usage matters a lot in this grand system we call the power grid, because it’s really hard to just spontaneously slap in more generators (currently). So if we collectively as a town are devouring power at wildly higher rates, or in weird spikey unpredictable patterns, differently than we said we would, then we get hit with Power Factor fees.
If you want to really dig into it, here’s how it breaks out:
How much energy you use over a given span of time is the “kilowatt hours”. Meanwhile, the highest (and lowest) intensity of usage is the “kilovolt amperes demand”. Power Factor is a measure of the relationship between those two things. It’s a measure that tries to capture how closely does our consumption of energy match what’s available to draw down from the grid. And when kilowatt hours and kilovolt amperes demand aren’t closely matched? Added costs.
The Forward Energy Market
Here’s another fun piece of the energy pricing puzzle, the Forward Energy Market. This is a process by which all those various energy generating companies I talked about earlier try to compete to be the ones chosen to meet demand. A forecast is made for the expected amount of energy that needs to be produced to meet demand, based on observed trends. There’s some really complex models made to try and predict this (and again, our energy system is designed to discourage irregularity. We want a steady amount of supply and a predictable amount of demand). Each power generator puts forth claims about how much power they can make over what time frame. Then bidding happens. The interesting thing is that at the end of the bidding, multiple companies will be selected (because no single power producer is capable of meeting all the demand, we are a thirsty thirsty society when it comes to energy usage), but all of them get compensated at the price of whoever among the chosen companies was the highest bid. It’s a really fascinating topic and that’s scratching the surface of how that bit works. Then there’s your actual portfolio to think about.
Portfolio? Oh yes friends, energy portfolio is a thing . . .
Energy Portfolios
Another ghost of energy past is your energy portfolio. It’s the guidance for what kinds of energy projects and companies you’re willing to fund. It can be based on a variety of factors, some of which include:
How expensive that energy source is
What kind it is (maybe there’s a preference for say Wind or Nuclear, the portfolio is where you’d articulate that)
What kinds of terms you’re willing to agree to in contracts
The amalgamation of these things is your portfolio. It’s the check list of which types of energy producing companies and projects your power company is willing to fund. Your portfolio needs to get updated and adjusted periodically too in response to changing market trends, ratepayer requests, goals of your organization, as well as regulations at the State and Federal level. And surprise surprise, it costs to maintain and update said portfolio. Someone has to watch all the factors and market changes that need to be taken into consideration and plan and react.
So aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall of that is what your power bill is made of!
(Ok technically I didn’t tell you about specialty rates but we’ll get into that in a moment)
Now let’s talk about some Ghosts of Energy Present!
The Ghosts of Energy Present
There’s a lot to think about when it comes to what’s going on within the town today and energy. What’s the landscape like currently with energy regulations? How do we tend to use energy as consumers and businesses? What causes outages when they happen? What’s going on with that solar grid up at the landfill? Are we doing other renewable energy? Well let’s take a look!
Power Outages
I’ll start with this topic because it’s the most short and sweet of the various municipal power topics in my opinion.
First thing’s first: I want you to try to guess what causes the most power outages. Is it:
A) Car crashes
B) Old Trees Falling Over
C) Severe Weather
D) Squirrels
The answer: squirrels. Or to be very specific, squirrels and other animals capable of getting up that high and accidentally touching the wrong bits and creating electrical grounding. See, there’s a reason our lineworkers have such specialized equipment when they’re up there working with this stuff. Not only is it dangerous, but if you touch the wrong parts in the wrong way by mistake, you can change the flow of energy and cause failures. Energy really REALLY wants to get to ground. Touching things in the wrong way can cause that. When that happens, it can cause a failure, and then whatever homes or businesses are linked to that failed part of the distribution system loses power.
Now don’t get me wrong, all those other things I mentioned can definitely cause outages too. But squirrels are the most frequent culprits statistically. Why? Well it turns out that in addition to using our power distribution lines as their own little furry highways among trees and roof tops, certain parts of the distribution system are invitingly warm to those animals. You know how cats and other animals sometimes try to sit on or tuck up into cars to stay warm? Squirrels do that with our existing electrical distribution equipment. Certain spots seem cozy to sit on if you’re a squirrel. And these little critters are climbing around up there constantly. Or getting chased by hawks along them. Nature is crawling all over our distribution network and every so often they touch the wrong bits and … bad news for the squirrels, bad news for us.
“Why don’t they just bury power lines underground then? Then no cars can hit the lines, no squirrels can fry them, no storms can blow them over, no trees can fall on them, why don’t we just do that?”
See you’d think hiding it all underground would take care of things right? Nope. It just changes what the risks are. And makes it harder to address when something goes wrong.
Instead of wind damage, you get flood damage. Instead of squirrels climbing the lines or trees touching them, you get underground critters tunneling and gnawing and roots pushing at them or fallen trees snapping them below ground with their massive root systems. Plus the common added threat of residents and contractors accidentally cutting through them while doing work. I actually had this happen to my workplace in 2009ish. A construction company cut through the underground line to our building. We lost the whole work day. Which brings me to the maintenance on underground systems.
I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the lineworkers doing repairs or replacing above ground poles, but it is fast. To fix an underground issue means you first have to dig the things up before you even get to then do the investigation and repair on them. The lines themselves can also be way more complex - there’s literally this oil surrounding lines that you have to freeze using nitrogen, and so on and so on. And then rebury it all once you’re done. Fixing an underground issue is hours or even days of work, harder to come by resources, and disruption. Fixing an above ground issue is minute to a couple hours and an officer re-directing traffic (and in many cases just helping drivers go around and not creating an actual traffic detour).
Also all of this pretends that the ground you’re dealing with is physically something you can dig around in and bury lines. Good luck getting lines into solid granite slabs in the rockier regions for example.
Like it or lump it, electrical distribution above ground is easier to access and swiftly fix, cheaper and faster to install or deconstruct as necessary, and easier for people to see and avoid. Maybe some day there will be advancements in distribution equipment that discourages squirrels from climbing around and sunning on it.
How We Use Energy
Next up, energy usage. Try this one: I want you try and guess what you do in your day to day life that uses the most energy.
The answer? In a typical home, the thing consuming the most energy is: controlling temperatures. Heating and cooling your environment basically. That includes your water as well as just the space you’re walking around in. When people think of saving energy, their first thought is often their light switches. But the big culprit is actually your temperature controls.
Although one interesting (but sad) trend that is being monitored by the federal Energy Information Administration is that we’ve expanded our use of energy into so many extra gadgets in our lives that the gains we were making on energy efficiency are being undermined. We did good for years making big stuff like kitchen appliances be more energy efficient, but then all the rest of our increasing collection of newer gadgets are not being built with any energy efficiency in mind. Smart devices, electric toothbrushes, the works. Yikes! But for now let’s just talk about temperature energy in our lives.
In Norwood, like most places, we’ve got a blend of what types of heating are happening in people’s homes to get us through winter. Some are on natural gas (furnaces and/or fireplaces). Some are using oil. Some are using pellet stoves. Others? Electric driven “resistance” heating. There’s plenty of wood fireplaces. Maybe you might even find some places using radiant floor hydraulic heating systems. There’s even one or two geothermal systems in town last I knew! The Norwood Theatre actually brags of being geothermal based.
If you’re not familiar with geothermal systems, it’s basically where you bore into the ground and use the ambient temperature that happens underground to heat and cool things above ground. At a certain distance below ground temperatures are fairly stable and in a range that we humans tend to like. Not too hot as compared to summertime, and not too cold as compared to winter time. You can use special equipment to modify the temperature of your space using that stable comfortable temperature from underground. Back in the day you used to have to dig WAAAAAY down, but today with advances they’ve also figured out that they can run the equipment at a more shallow depth and snake it horizontally and accomplish the same thing.
When it comes to cooling, most places in town are using one of the following: electric air conditioning systems, electric local and/or whole house fans, or no system at all and just toughing it out. Or, rarely, the aforementioned geothermal systems.
Except now … there’s a new kid on the block though for heating and cooling. Well … not so much “new” as reinvented. Meet the new and improved generation of Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP)!
Pump It Up!
When I say “heat pump” what you might think of is those little rectangular wall units you sometimes see with horizontal flappy fins that open and shut and can handle about one room’s worth of heating and cooling. Or you might think of the heat pumps of decades ago, which didn’t do great and also couldn’t handle deep cold like we get here in New England. But what I’m talking about is a new generation of heat pumps - a much larger appliance that is capable of supplying heating and cooling (and bonus: dehumidifying) for an entire building. You might think of ground based heat pumps like the geothermal systems. But what I’m talking about requires no digging in the underground at all. It’s a device that sits above ground, powered by electricity. You might remember older electric heating methods, but this is something different. There are also even air source heat pump water heaters now too. Why are modern air source heat pumps so exciting? Let’s dive in shall we!
The way that a heat pump works isn’t what makes them awesome. This principal hasn’t changed much: they’re basically moving heat around from place to place the same way geothermal systems do it with the underground. Too hot in your home? Then it punts the heat outside. Too cold? Then it drags heat inside. The thermodynamics of this process is a fun thought exercise, but that’s not what is awesome about air source heat pumps. What makes the modern ones awesome is their effectiveness.
The technology has gotten so good now that if you need to heat (or cool) an area, an air source heat pump can temperature control an area using way less energy than fossil fuel or electric resistance based equipment can. That’s because most methods of heating (and cooling for that matter) are converting energy on site from combustion processes and/or trying to put the heat into a space using resistance. Air source heat pumps are not. They are just compressing and manipulating existing air, which takes FAR less energy to do than combustion/resistance methods. The pumps are either bringing in or throwing out heat found in the air, depending on your needs.
It is a much more efficient process than combustion or resistance transfer methods. And that means they can deliver up to triple the amount of heat energy into a home compared to the amount of electrical energy they consume to run in the first place. That’s true even in in very cold regions like ours (the tech used to only be good for more mild climates, but now they can handle much deeper cold).
If you put a gas furnace, a fireplace, an electric resistance heater, and an air source heat pump side by side and used the exact same amount of energy for each to try and heat a building, the air source heat pump would provide more heat than its rivals for the same amount of energy consumed.
That’s why as a Selectman and Light Commissioner I will be very enthusiastic about finding opportunities for residents to have this technology. While we are already providing some rebate programs that residents can opt into, I want to see us do even more in this space. Even if we didn’t increase our renewable portfolio, residents using air source heat pumps would be utilizing energy more efficiently, and for many it would also bring them cooling without a whole second system, which will help with the threats of heat stroke from increasingly hotter summers. Plus dehumidifying too, a boon for those of us in wet parts of town. Added business benefit: more revenue for the town, because people are choosing to pay a chunk of their energy via electric in a way that they weren’t in the past with gas, oil, wood, etc. And as we continue to decarbonize our portfolio and the rest of the grid, all our ratepayers are along for that environmentally friendly ride. It’s win, win, win, win.
What’s decarbonization? Alright now is as good a time as any to get into renewable energy. It’s a big topic. Let’s take a look at where we are with it today in Norwood.
Ghosts of the Present: Renewable Energy
Here. We. Gooooooooo. I’m about to get into the weeds of one of my favorite topics in energy. Sustainability in Norwood.
A Changing Landscape
Many years before I came to Norwood, back in the 1970s, the people of our Commonwealth updated the Massachusetts Constitution with the following:
“The people shall have the right to clean air and water, freedom from excessive and unnecessary noise, and the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic qualities of their environment …” - Article 97 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Since that time, laws and regulations have continued to evolve to try and meet the threat of our spiraling-out-of-control climate. In fact, within the last two years, the Statehouse has modified requirements and regulations for private and public power utilities to get us working on powering the grid in a more sustainable way.
Why are they so focused on carbon and greenhouse gases? Let’s get a little crash course in The Great Dying.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but millions of years ago there was an event known as the Permian Triassic Extinction event. A time when the amount of carbon and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was SO high, that it caused a series of disastrous cascading changes. How do we know? Well we can see it.
Using the mineral and fossil records from that era that still remain, we can use our scientific advancements to see the terrible evidence of what materials were present in various parts of the world and life at that time, and in a variety of ways. What was the atmosphere like? What were trees that got trapped in fossil records up to at that time (you can see it in their rings)? We learned a lot. And what we learned was that the amount of carbon in the atmosphere at that time was much higher than periods before or after that era (well … at least until it started wildly climbing at the start of our industrial revolution era), and same with things like the presence of methane. In our ancient stones and fossil records, we learned what happens when things spiral out of control.
What we learned was it was so bad - so much of life on earth died - that the Permian Triassic Extinction was given the nickname “The Great Dying”.
Hold that term in your mind for a moment.
The. Great. Dying.
Pretty ominous right?
What caused The Great Dying is obviously a topic of deep investigation by scientists. Was it volcanos? Was it an over abundance of these methane producing microbes? Was it an asteroid impact jostling things up and setting an imbalance into motion? Whatever it was, we know what the results are:
When that much carbon and greenhouse gases got into the atmosphere, and that much warming happened, everything starts dying.
The ocean absorbs the carbon, becoming acidic and less oxygenated.
Sea creatures living in acidic waters without oxygen die. 80% of them in fact.
The death of so much marine life massively hits the food chains that touch said sea creatures, rippling into the deaths of 70% of land flora and fauna too.
The Great Dying.
I’d like to pause here on this dramatic thought, because this part 2 is pretty long, but when I come back with my next blog post, we’re going to get into details about the nature of Renewables and how we’re trying to avoid The Great Dying 2.0, and how power companies and each of us play a part in it. For now, make sure you and your friends & family get out and vote on Monday, April 4th! I would be very honored to be your Selectman and Light Commissioner, to tackle the big challenges we have in front of us around the Grid, around changing technologies, and around reducing carbon emissions in our energy supply.
Ready part 3 of this series by clicking here!
Post Script 1-25-2022 Special shout out for W (I won’t use your name here in case you don’t want to be publicly spotlighted) for the awesome conversation around the Siberian Traps. I’m personally more suspicious of the methanosarcina in hindsight. But it brings me tremendous joy to know that voters are paying attention and deliberating complex topics with me!