Can Electric Cars Cause Disasters?

Could the electric car be the straw that breaks the Power Grid’s Back? Here’s the scenario: The Year is 2015 and America has reached the goal of 1 Million electric cars. Many of those cars are in Florida and throughout the Gulf Coast states. A category 4 hurricane has set its sights on Florida. A voluntary evacuation in the Miami area has been issued and it appears the evacuation will become mandatory within 24 hours. So what do people do before evacuating? They stock up on essentials, do a few loads of wash, gas up their vehicles and now, they plug in their electric cars to make sure they have a full charge to max out their evacuation distance. All of this demand on the power grid causes a massive blackout, stopping gas station pumps, shutting off washing machines and cutting off power to those costly Electric Car batteries. It also halts evacuations of hospitals and nursing homes; all causing the man-made disaster just ahead of the hurricane’s natural disaster. Thus, we have the mega-disaster of 2015 which will serve as yet another learning opportunity for Emergency Managers and the folks at DHS charged with our Critical Infrastructure Protection. A post disaster congressional committee will find that America still suffers from a lack of imagination and we would have averted the Mega-Disaster if we had developed a comprehensive, strategic energy policy during the Eisenhower Administration.

America has known for 50 years that our power grid is over stressed and that oil from the Middle East was a risky proposition. Blackouts after blackouts have remained lessons Not Learned, since learning is hard and takes considerable effort and determination. The Oil Crisis of the 1970’s didn’t wake us up, since by the 1990’s we were indulging ourselves with HUMMERS and Oversized, over powered SUVs, while doing little to build American oil producing capacity. The fact that we were becoming ever more dependent on Middle Eastern oil didn’t scare us into exploring for much more oil at home-even though we know it’s there. Thus, we careen into the future with a more vulnerable power generating infrastructure than ever before in our history, at precisely the time when it appears our oil supply may well become a fugitive of the rebellions in the Middle East. With all of this going on, one would think we would recognize and act on our vulnerabilities right away. But it seems we are not vulnerable enough for us to awake from our energy coma.

Since most of our electricity is generated by coal burning, our Environmental Protection Agency has set its sights on American coal in order to clean the air and take a vital leg out from under our energy stool. Nuclear power has scared us to death since the infamous Three Mile Island accident, the “Not in my back yard” (NIMBY) folks have made it easier to transplant a face than it is to get a license for a nuclear power generating facility. America remains nuclear-phobic even while the French acquire 80% of their electricity from nuclear power. Remember, the French built the Maginot Line to keep the Germans out after World War I. While these folks are not normally seen as astute strategic planners, they beat us on this front and got it right on 21st Century Energy policy.

If energy from coal and nuclear sources are bad, oil is Satan. In our current state of denial, we are committed to solar power, oil producing algae and windmills to generate all the power that America needs for 21st Century prosperity. As we speed down those 50’s generation railroad tracks on our high speed trains toward an inevitable energy crash, it is important that we keep our electric cars plugged into those electric sockets-at least until the lights go out.