Rolling blackouts are coming to the U.S., either this Summer or some time soon hereafter. But the United Kingdom is a little ahead of us on the downhill energy spiral, so it is useful to see what is going on there. The London Times headlines: “Hard-up families will be paid to use less electricity and avoid blackouts.”
Millions of households could be paid to use less electricity at peak times this winter under plans from the National Grid to reduce the risk of blackouts.
The company responsible for keeping the lights on is working urgently to establish a scheme to pay consumers with smart meters to ration their usage voluntarily when supplies are scarce.
It believes that this could be a cheaper and greener option than paying fossil fuel power plants to generate more electricity….
This is called demand-side management. Historically, the role of utilities and governments has been to figure out how to meet citizens’ needs for energy. But that is changing: now the question is, how do we drive down the demand for electricity to align with the limited supply of wind and solar energy that we have intermittently available?
The answer is, in the same way we drove down demand for gasoline by pushing the price up to $5.50 a gallon (which I paid over the weekend). That is, make electricity so expensive that lots of people can’t afford to buy it. Hey, we’re managing demand!
Of course, it won’t be limousine liberals who can’t afford electricity and who therefore agree to be “paid” in the form of lower rates for not watching television and for doing their wash in the middle of the night. The Times headline says it all: “Hard-up families will be paid to use less electricity.” For the rich, it will be life as usual. For the non-rich, it will be like living in a third-world country–electricity available only at certain hours of the day.
Around the world, liberals have been making war on the working class for some time now. This isn’t just a U.K. issue, the same future is careening toward us here in the U.S., as long as our politicians are bought and paid for by the “green” energy industry.
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