Nothing to see here, folks, move right along. It seems that the power devouring data centers might be causing a little trouble on the ol’ power front.
There are 3 big ones in my county, alone.
We always seem to be jumping into things with both feet and absolutely no forethought.
Doesn’t New Jersey have enough trouble?
This is concerning. Between data centers and electric vehicles, there is a lot of stress on the grid. I’m no expert on the power grid, but do know that it’s a very complex thing and not something we should take for granted.
Anything go wrong there and we are done for.
Most people have no idea of how dependent we are upon electricity, until it goes out. I worked for an electric utility at one time, and occasionally would pickup some extra income filling in when the dispatcher was out for the day. One summer evening, there was a massive storm and the power went out for many of our customers. Our line crew was working hard to restore power, and I kept getting constant calls from various customers in one specific area. I knew that the line crews were working the problems, but I also Knew that there were many problems for them to work, and that it would take some time to restore everyone.
One particular customer kept calling and was very insistent that we get her restored, because she was hosting a party. I gave her the only answer I had, which was that many people were without power and we had called in every lineman we had to work it. This wasn’t enough you see, because she was hosting a party, and that was more important than entire neighborhoods without power, not to mention customers whom were using respirators and could die without power. Nope, that was peanuts compared to this party.
She would call back and have a freak fit if she saw one of our trucks pass her house without stopping, oblivious to the fact that the cause of the outage could have been miles away. I learned a lot about human nature that rainy night. Many people were patient and understood that this was happening to many people, while others were fixated with their own, personal, inconvenience. If we ever have a major grid failure, there will be some very unhappy people.
Some people feel so very entitled.
… to a striking degree.