“I’ll just go ahead and make this heat wave about myself,” I said this week as I hit the streets to shove my microphone in people’s faces to ask how they feel. In my defense, when you meet someone from Ohio, I feel like it’s natural to want to talk about Ohio.
The conclusion I reached was that both people and hounds prefer to go outside in the morning.
Even as I write this about 8 pm, ERCOT is gently encouraging us to maybe turn up the thermostat a bit.
“I should shove a microphone in the face of an actual expert,” I thought to myself.
I called a professor at the TCU Energy Institute. Since the sun has a tendency to set every day, and wind isn’t always consistent, generation often drops around sunset.
I learned power plants don’t care for the heat either. Sorry to bog everyone down with scientific language, but the power plants like a nice swig of cold water, too.
Plus, all these Californians movin’ to Texas keep bringing stuff to plug in.
“I’d feel better if Dennis Quaid were narrating this heat wave,” you’re probably saying to yourself.
Luckily, a documentary filmmaker in Dallas thought, “You know how bad those rolling blackouts were a couple years ago? Let’s make them worse. A million times worse!”
David Tice’s documentary will be released on Amazon and YouTube this fall and looks at what might happen if the entire country’s electricity went down. After natural disasters now, crews from other states will fly in and help get everything working. Grid Down, Power Up considers what might happen if every part of the country had to figure out a way to get things working at the same time.
Spoilers: a zombie apocalypse might happen:
But Dennis Quaid is one of the ones who live, so the documentary has a happy ending. The film ends with a reminder that we came back after the Civil War to become a world superpower. We’ve invested in infrastructure before with the interstate highway system.
So Tice hopes the documentary will lead to people contacting their lawmakers and utilities to urge investment to prepare the grid for the future.
We could maybe drop a giant ice cube in the Gulf of Mexico.
