It is our privilege to have energy to burn

Southern Australia has been suffering through one of it's worst heat waves in history. Melbourne had 3 days of extreme heat over 43C temperatures (110F) and Adelaide are into the 7th day of hell. In these temperatures everything, even in the shade is hot to touch. A few statistics:

A new record temperature of 45.1 degrees set in Melbourne
Victoria set another record electricity demand of 10.4 gigawatts, up from 9.7 gig in Autumn 2008 (remember the Grand Prix?)
Electricity to 120,000 homes in Victoria and over 265,000 in South Australia was cut as emergency load shedding was introduced to stabilise the power network
Energy spot prices peaked at 10,000 MW multiple times, with 29 events greater than $300. This beats the whole of 2008 - a year having only only 21 such events.
Almost half of the high prices were seen on Thursday the 29th January.
Tasmania stopped providing energy to mainland Australia becasue of the heat, aggrevating energy supply problems

Whilst 40+ temperatures have always been common in this part of the world, the increasing occurrence of multiple consecutive days of high temperatures is something that we are starting to come to realise and are going to have to come to terms with.

So why is this such a big problem? Well it's two fold:

Electricity is the ultimate supply and demand commodity, it needs to be made as fast as it's used. Here in Australia, this means massive carbon burning machines, and lots of them. Fact is that when everyone is pumping electrons at the same time, the machines can't keep up.
The way we make our electricity is bad, really, really bad. In fact it's part of the problem that's driving our heat waves in the first place.

Because of these two, it is unlikely that our future will be powered like it is today. If it is, chances are we are going to be in a lot of strife.

Electricity is a privilege, not a right.

How many people have you heard say either:

thank god for my air conditioning or,
next year, I am so getting air conditioning installed?

This is becoming a common theme, as we seek to “climate control” our environment. Well guess what folks? All this takes energy, and a hell of a lot of it.

We have come to think of electricity as a right, not a privilege where in actual fact it's just like water, something that needs to be found, designed, made, supplied before consumption. And this is our ultimate privileged which needs that needs earned – because it comes at a cost.

With the likelihood of energy shortages being more and more common , we are going to have to get smarter with how we use, manage and become more responsible with what is a common good – our energy.

#melbheatwave

@samotage

Images courtesy of flickr and Darrel Wyatt