Power cuts or Powerdown?

WrittenBy: WEKA - Date published:10:33 am, May 10th, 2024 - 49 comments
Categories: climate change, public transport - Tags: limits of growth, neoliberalism, power cuts, powerdown

From RNZ’s live coverage,

The country has woken to a bitterly cold morning with temperatures dropping as low as -6C in some areas overnight amid threats of power cuts.

Transpower’s executive general manager, Chantelle Bramley, told Morning Report there had been an amazing response from New Zealanders to the request to cut back on their power usage on Friday morning.

“As you know, the situation was very tight; we’ve had really cold weather. We just want to thank New Zealanders for their fantastic response this morning, it has made a huge difference getting us through the morning peak.”

Just pausing here to note the remarkableness of RNZ doing live coverage. This is where we are at now.

It looks like the crisis has been averted, but there are still serious concerns,

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

* Transpower has warned households that unless they conserve electricity, they could face possible power cuts on Friday.

* It said households could help by turning off heaters and lights in unused rooms, delaying using appliances, and not charging devices and cars.

* The time of main concern for power shortages was between 7am and 9am on Friday morning.

* The Major Electricity Users’ Group, which represents big industry, said the sector had freed up about 60 megawatts of power this morning in preparation for the shortage.

* New Zealand’s largest electricity distributor is warning the country to hurry up with controls around charging electric vehicles or face unnecessary bills running into the billions.

* A group representing big industry is warning that appeals to conserve electricity will become more common.

Twitter is aflutter with comments about New Zealand being a third world country, but I’m wondering where everyone has been for the past decade. That our national grid isn’t up to scratch isn’t news. Nor the problems of increasing demand that comes with the necessary shift to electric vehicles. Climate change and what is coming down the line isn’t news either. Nor that our infrastructure won’t cope with the increasingly chaotic nature of weather events.

We’ve also known for a long time that many people live without adequate power supply permanently because of the housing crisis and successive governments’ running the economy with an enforced poverty rate. Imagine living in an uninsulated house in the South Island with -6C temperatures and not being able to afford to turn the heater on when you need to.

I find this explanation for the crisis aversion interesting,

* It said households could help by turning off heaters and lights in unused rooms, delaying using appliances, and not charging devices and cars.

Because this is the bit that so many seem to be missing. We don’t have to use so much power. We can conserve resources. We can live within the limits of the natural world. We could be doing those things now all the time by default.

Powercuts in a wealthy country like New Zealand don’t make us third world. It’s bog standard neoliberalism which has both impeded upkeep of our infrastructure and blocked meaningful climate transition. Third world is when you can’t afford to fix, maintain and futureproof society. Neoliberalism is when you do that by choice.

Which leads me to the Powerdown. The current idea that we can keep ‘growing the economy’ is insane. What that idea means is we can keep increasing our population, which means increasing the demand for electricity, as if there are no natural limits. We can build more wind farms and the Onslow power bank will take some of the pressure off. But what happens when we reach the limits of those because of the growth?

Why is it so hard for people to understand we live on a set of islands with a finite amount of land and resources available for us to use?

Just as importantly, why do so many people think things are going to improve from here on out?

I first wrote about the Powerdown in 2017,

The Powerdown is a process where societies, in the face of climate change and resource depletion, choose to transition to a post-carbon world sustainably. Sustainably, because we cannot have perpetual growth in a physically finite world. Nor can we ecologically afford for the whole world to have Western middle class lifestyles, but instead we must live within the natural limits of the world in a way that allows that natural world to continually restore itself. Counting carbon and reducing it to zero is not enough.

The Powerdown is not based on high tech solutions (although we can continue to use various levels of tech as appropriate), because reliance on high tech as our major approach fails the resilience test and takes too many resources. Instead it looks at providing for human needs by using fewer resources and energy, and designing within whole systems frameworks in order to maintain the least disruption to human life while still giving us a chance at surviving. It isn’t a process where we all end up living in caves or reverting back to some imagined pre-industrial agrarian, nasty, brutish and short existence. Instead we take the best of our knowledge and design systems that enhance life rather than strip-mine it. In other words, we can powerdown and live good, meaningful lives. But yes, it means that we in the West will need to give some things up.

New Zealand’s Overshoot Day this year was April 19th. This means if everyone on the planet lived like us, we would need three planets.

Wondering what my point is here? We don’t have a shortage of electricity. We have excessive demand coupled with unsustainable design and the neoliberalisation of our infrastructure.

The longer we hold onto the fossil fuel fantasy of perpetual growth and keep expecting the neoliberal political economy to make things better, the worse our chances become of getting to live good, meaningful lives. With climate scientists telling us this week to expect climate catastrophe this century if we don’t transition,

If all this seems too much, consider this. Even under neoliberalism we could start to transition. The push for electrified public transport and alternative forms of getting around (walking, biking, ride share) is in part because of the choke point involved in everyone shifting to personal EVs instead. We have no choice about getting off fossil fuels, we do have a choice about whether to do that in a way that makes sense given the material reality of the situation we are in. There is no goose laying a golden egg, but instead we have sustainability design that is giving us new ways of organising like doughnut economics, transition towns, or degrowth. These are the things that both prevent the worse of climate change and build resiliency for us locally to deal with what is already locked in.

When I talk about us having more choice than ever before on how to transition, what I mean is that there are a myriad of things we can support that take us in the right direction. We don’t have to simply sit and rage on the internet about this shit show of a government, nor that we had a potential power crisis averted. Instead we can support local cycling initiatives, we can get involved in our local council’s plans for public transport, we can become members of any number of NGOs and community groups doing the mahi on transition.