← all discussions
micro-fusion · grid · self-sufficiency · heat-dome
Forty kilometres apart, two towns lived two different afternoons — one of them barely noticed the dome, and I would like everyone who called me a crank in June to read that twice
OW
offgrid_wrenOP2124-08-04
Two towns, forty kilometres, one heat dome. In the first one the voltage sagged, the brownouts walked from block to block, and they sent the old people to sit in the cooled library like it was 2060. In the second one a unit the size of a warehouse had been humming since spring and the afternoon was so uneventful the manager stood there admiring a flat load chart. I have had four years of this board explaining to me, patiently, in cubic metres, that my position is romantic. Here is my position, stated without a single adjective: a community that generates and distributes its own power did not have to ask anyone's permission to be cool on the worst afternoon of the year, and a community that hangs off a line owned by somebody two hundred kilometres away did. That is not a mood. That is a load chart. And before the corrections start, I already know what the manager said — earlier, not smarter — and I notice nobody has asked the obvious follow-up, which is earlier at what and paid for by whom, because the answer is not going to flatter anyone here. The dome broke this week. Those four hundred houses will find out from the news, same as us. That is what I have been trying to describe for four years and I have never once had the vocabulary for it. Second sowing of beans is up, incidentally, and the squash is coming in ugly and enormous. The world can wait.
BK
baseload_kestrel ↩ offgrid_wren2124-08-04
offgrid_wren, congratulations, you have discovered capital expenditure. The manager handed you the entire story in four words and you skipped past it to get to the part where you were right: earlier, not smarter. Earlier is a financing event. A shared municipal cell of that class runs to a number with eight digits in front of it before you have poured the pad, and it is carried on a twenty-five year municipal instrument that a town can only float if it has an unbroken revenue history and a rating, which means the towns that went early are, with monotonous regularity, the towns that were already solvent. Delia Cruz's cooperative did a real thing and I am not sneering at it. I am telling you the selection effect: this is not a story about the courage to be independent, it is a story about which places had a balance sheet in the year the hardware got cheap. I would put it at 84 percent that if you rank those valley towns by median household income in 2118, you predict who has a cell today with maybe one inversion. Independence is a thing you buy. The romance is the free part.
OW
offgrid_wrenOP ↩ baseload_kestrel2124-08-04
I am not conceding, and I have read all three of you twice, and I want to say the thing all three of you have walked around. You are arguing about who could afford the reactor. Nobody has asked why that town was allowed to put one in at all, and the answer is in the first paragraph of the piece and you all read past it. The other town is hanging off the old regional interconnect. This one is not — it has its own poles, its own switchgear, its own distribution, because it kept its municipal utility when the fashion was to sell them. You cannot site a unit that serves your own households unless you own the wires that reach the households. The money is the second gate. The wires are the first gate, and the towns that failed the first gate failed it forty years before the hardware existed, when somebody signed the distribution over for a one-off payment that got spent on something nobody remembers. So yes, kestrel, earlier is a financing event. It is also a property question, and the property question is older, and no cooperative can borrow its way past it. Tell me I am romantic about that. I will take the correction on the maintenance contract, oksana, because you are right and I have known you were right about that since March.
BK
baseload_kestrel ↩ offgrid_wren2124-08-04
That is a better point than mine and I am going to say so plainly rather than bury it in a qualifier. I priced the cell. I did not price the distribution asset, because the distribution asset is not traded, is not in any of my books, and — this is the embarrassing part — is exactly the bottleneck I have been shouting about in the fusion thread for two months without ever noticing it was the same bottleneck. You cannot buy your way to the household through wires you do not own, so the ownership map of the last kilometre is doing more work than the generation map, and nobody publishes the ownership map because there is no instrument written on it. Revise my earlier number: income in 2118 predicts who has a cell, but I would now guess the stronger predictor is which towns still held their distribution in 2085, and that is a variable I cannot trade and had not thought about before this afternoon. wren, you were right by accident and it was still right. I will take it.
SR
standpipe_rani ↩ offgrid_wren2124-08-04
wren, i am the last person on this board who will tell you a town should not own the thing that keeps it alive. i chair the committee that rations what my district does not own and i would trade the whole arrangement for four hundred houses' worth of anything we controlled ourselves. so take this as a question and not a slap. who paid, out of which line, and what did that town give up to service the debt? because i have watched two neighbouring wards go opposite directions on exactly that arithmetic, and the ward that borrowed to build got a rate rise that pushed eleven families out of their houses inside three years, and the ward that did not borrow is on rota to this day. both outcomes are survivable and only one of them makes a good article. also note what the manager did not say. he did not say we were braver. he said we were earlier, and then he stood there watching a boring chart with visible affection, which is the single most honest sentence in that piece. earlier is a budget cycle. i have lost three of them in a row to a barrier overrun.
TO
tidewrench_oksana ↩ offgrid_wren2124-08-04
One correction and one bill, wren. Correction: a unit that size does not run itself, it runs on a maintenance contract, and somebody with a district payroll and a certificate drives out to it on a Sunday when the coolant loop throws a fault. Your four hundred cool houses are cool because a stranger on a salary is on call. Bill: on the afternoon your ridge floods and your access road goes under, the people who pump it out work for the same public body you have spent four years describing as a dependency dressed up as a service. I have rehoused three families out of my own district and every single one of them was rehoused by an organisation with a budget line, not by a neighbour with a rain barrel. I am not saying the barrel is worthless. I have one. I am saying the honest accounting of your position includes the salaried humans you never see, and when you leave them out of the ledger you are doing the same thing the ministers do when they leave you out of theirs. Anyway, the pumps do not care what we believe about them.