News: When the lights go down in the city

There was a blackout yesterday that hit many parts of Florida (thankfully, no effect here at Shangrila Towers). According to the news report, only about 5% of the electrical power Florida generates on a peak day was lost, but that's still a whole lot of energy for a state where air conditioning is pretty much required in every occupied building. Most problematic, though, is that people at FPL are still puzzled at how a small malfunction could cause sporadic statewide outages.

We live in an age where you take for granted the fact that when you flip a switch, the lights come on. Make no mistake, though - electricity is still primarily generated by the burning of fossil fuels - lots of them. The small scale blackout yesterday was the loss of about 2,500 megawatts of power. That may not sound like much, until you consider that in Thomas Edison's time, that amount of electricity could probably power the Eastern Seaboard.

America, as well as the rest of the industrialized world, is completely dependent on electricity. Without it, we can't work, we can't produce food, and in some cases, like the traffic snarls experienced in southeast Florida yesterday, we can't even get from place to place. There's something sobering about that, I think.