Alternative Editorial: Power cuts may trigger a people-power surge

Photo by Federico Beccari on Unsplash

By Pat Kane, Alternative Global co-initiator

Candles standing on sideplates? Storage heaters and throbbing, smelly generators? Family dominoes played in the near dark? The National Grid’s warning this week - that 3-hour electricity power cuts might be required in the UK this winter - opens up a memory hole, for those at a certain age and stage.

The power cuts engendered by industrial strife in the early to mid 70s felt quite exciting, even luxurious, to a pre-teen boy in Coatbridge, Scotland. Covid’s lockdowns occasionally reminded me of being sent home from a switched-off school in 1972, curling up under my quilt with an Asimov or Heinlein. I might even have started up a coal fire in my bedroom grate. (Allow yourself a carbon shudder.)

It might be difficult to remain wistful about electrical outages of the past, if this one occurs amidst our current collective febrility. The fingers of blame could point all ways. At the warmonger Putin, if he cuts off gas supplies to Europe. Or at Tory regimes, who removed our capacity for gas storage. Or at British citizens, whose recalcitrance about being told what to do (like reduce energy consumption in an energy crisis) seems to spike political leaders’ capacity to lead.

I dug up a 2019 paper from King’s College, London, which was actually commissioned by the UK Cabinet Office. It’s a literature review of available studies on how populations across the world have responded to “major power outages”, behaviourally and psychologically.

“Findings from multiple studies suggest that people who have prepared for an emergency are less likely to feel intimidated by a power outage”, write the academics. This would tend to cut against the Truss government’s reported reluctance to get into the business of “telling people what to do”, in tune with their libertarian tendencies. Though they seem to be right to alert the public well in advance - forewarned is forearmed.

The paper also notes that “many people attempt to maintain a normal routine and report that adaptions to this routine, rather than major restructuring, helps to reduce any sense of threat.”

However, knowing what to do with the resources you think you already have will still be necessary. How do you make sure you don’t get food poisoning after the freezer’s been off for an afternoon? The authors finally report to the Cabinet Office that they should expect a lot of altruism in communities, and little or no panic or criminality.

Keep Calm and Carry On: this is a familiar sensibility on these islands. But as any of our regular readers know, we need not to carry on, but to “wake up” to the huge challenges of our era: primarily the climate crisis, but also advanced technology and an alienating work-to-consume culture.

Yet that shouldn’t be through top-down hectoring or even nudging (we’ll grant that to the libertarians). Instead it should be grassroots-upwards community strengthening. That means cosmolocalists reaching for new, locally-buildable infrastructures around energy, food, communications, housing and much else. They’ll draw inspiration (and plans) from a global, internet-enabled commons of practice and research.

However, as an editor of these pages since 2017, I am reminded of philosopher Roberto Unger’s observation: ”we still depend on crisis as the midwife of change, and we must learn to arrange things so that we may depend on it less”.

True, we must. But it’s striking how many blogs I’ve posted which show crisis is the driver of many alternative practices. (Covid’s deconstructive impact on the work ethic - the Great Resignation, “quiet quitting” - is only the most recent example).

Is the cutting of electrical power to a population that kind of crisis? From our own scanning, the answer would seem to be: it depends on how long the blackout lasts.

Blackouts and illuminations

We recently blogged about the extraordinary and inspiring “solar insurrection” movement in Puerto Rico, titled Casa Pueblo. Moving out from its base in Adjuntas, it aims to generate 50% of national energy from local, community-owned solar arrays.

But this hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Indeed, it seems that Hurricane Maria in 2017, which left 1.5 million residents without electricity from between 3 to 18 months, was a massive collective spur towards renewables in Puerto Rico. This came from below, and certainly not from the existing (and creaking) fossil-fuel-based national energy grid.

Here’s an example:

In October 2020, Casa Pueblo finished its most ambitious project yet. With funding from a charitable foundation, the Adjuntas Pueblo Solar initiative installed 1,000 new solar panels in the town’s central plaza, creating a microgrid that will provide 220 kilowatts of affordable, reliable electricity to 18 stores, restaurants, and warehouses.

The businesses pay a governing body, made up of those businesses’ owners, to maintain the grid. The resulting profits go toward financing solar panels for low-income families in Adjuntas and paying local residents to install them.

What is interesting here is how Casa Pueblo’s work emerges from an older and wider organisation, which has been building links between community, ecology and technology since 1980. The citizen action networks, the community agency networks - what we’re generically calling here CANs - have been forming like musculature, getting stronger with by practice in diverse projects. And now they’re ready to take on a major national renewable energy challenge, village by village.

Whether from the perspective of the Cabinet Office or the Puerto Rican government, there’s a clear benefit of an increase in communal altruism around power outages. Which is its role as a ward against the health problems these disruptions generate, mental and physical.

Professor Shao Lin of Albany University, New York, studies the mental health of populations after hurricanes and blackouts. In 2017, she noted that communities who went months without power, suffering the structural damage this causes, tended to have raised rates of mood disorder and substance abuse, as well as stress-related diseases. (Lin’s predictions for the same outcomes in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria were recently proved correct, in a JAMA Network study from the beginning of this year).

So it’s encouraging—and a testament to a highly-active Puerto Rican civil society—that such harrowing, demanding experiences can generate positive and constructive responses, rather than an overall defeatedness.

What kind of activity and mentality will the introduction of powercuts to British daily life generate? From the Cabinet Office report above, the UK government seem to be prepped for a general stoic resilience - as long as people know in advance the length of the blackout.

But just like Covid, there is an under-the-surface battle for the narrative of such a crisis event. The Conservative government will lay the blame on the energy-warring of an oligarch, or general global economic conditions. Their immediate party-political opponents will charge them with unpreparedness, incompetence, recklessness - hoping to find favour with the electorate as the next capable national managers.

However, what about the narrative that points to our continued dependence on fossil fuels—and claims that local resilience and self-provision, using renewable and restorative methods, is ultimately the most reliable solution to these energy crises?

The instances which might carry such a narrative - other than the traditional “comms” blitz from above - is worth some imaginative exploration. A few weeks ago we profiled the joyful social artists Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn. Having successfully shown how to set up their own high-street bank, Hilary and Dan are now trying to turn their Walthamstow terrace into a “power station”, using various green technologies (solar power, heating and insulating tech).

We find them attractive and enabling in their style and method. But they’re only playfully meshing with a substantial and growing constituency of local self-providers, which we’re curating here via the concept of “Regen Economics” - see page and category.

We understand the temptation, from the usual oppositional political position, to seize upon power cuts as another cudgel to thump the existing government with. (The coming “winter of disconnect”, as the Metro paper wittily dubbed it).

But let’s also keep an eye and ear out for ways in which this event, like Covid, could open up cracks in our consciousness about alternative pathways forward. The power cuts may unleash a power surge of a quite different kind.