Five Reasons Why Baseloading's a B*tch

an exploration of our conflicted relationship with energy

(don't hold me to the number 5 in the title.  It's definitely more than three reasons and likely less than ten. If you want a listicle head over to Buzzfeed)

Sitting here at 10,500' beside a mountain lake watching the sun come up over the ridgeline. 

And, as we whipsaw from one of the biggest snowfall winters in decades to extreme fire danger in the span of three months, am wondering how we got ourselves into this collective global pickle and how we might get ourselves out.

(for those of you sweltering someplace that's not supposed to be quite so hot as it is these days, the current temp up here is 49F degrees!).

We're into the thick of building an off-grid cabin that has been an abject lesson in what can and can't be done in hard environments with good intentions.

Bottom line: We began this project 100% committed to 100% renewable energy, all solar powered, electric heat pumped, naturally insulated badass little Net Zero ski hut that would keep us toasty, and charge our EV and electric snowmobile ta boot.

Super groovy apocalypse cabin, as Yvonne Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, might build it.

We've ended up with 2000lbs of buried propane tanks, a Tesla that will stay on the flats in town cuz turns out they SUCK in the cold (and the company hasn't yet taken the obvious step that Ford did with their electric F150 to allow it to tie into house power) and a series of heartbreak compromises to simply deal with the realities vs. the possibilities of a post-carbon future.

And time again, whether with our little project or writ large across the world of renewable energy transitions, a pesky little concept keeps rearing its head.

Baseload.

Baseload is our requirement for Always On/Always Available energy.

Wind and Solar knock the stuffing out of coal, hydro and nuclear and pretty much anything else...

Until you need those electrons when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining.

(or, in our case, during a ten day blizzard)

Then you have to store it and release it again at a later date.

And all your efficiencies go to hell in a lithium-ion bucket.

This is also why, paradoxically, adding more solar and wind to grid utilities has often ended up creating more pollution rather than less.  

That’s because as we transition to renewable juice and take big coal plants offline, we create spikey vs. smooth energy loading (more during sunny windy days than nights) and the backup fossil power is dirtier and takes more juice to fire up than just keeping the big old plants spun up and running.  

All to accommodate our baseload addiction.

Which we treat as normal.

It's not.  At all.

Really, ebbs and flows are natural parts of all energy cycles.

As the Good Book reminds us, (by way of the Byrds) "to every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven."

Take a look at any indigenous or agrarian society and folks did different things at different times of year, and different times of day.

It would've been ludicrous not to.

Sunny? Maybe do the laundry and hang it out to dry.

Cold? Chop wood and it'll warm you twice.

Rainy? Stay inside and mend, bake, write, yarn.

Dry? Fix those leaky roofs or dig those irrigation ditches.

Windy? head to the mill to grind the flour.

It was a basic form of Taoism.

Feel the Force. Don't force the feel.

---

But somewhere between Thomas Edison's first electric lightbulb and the bastard innovation of Uber Eats, we've become accustomed to instant gratification, 24/7/365.

Seasonality (and patience) has gone out the window.

We expect to be able to cool and heat our homes at the push of a button, flip a light switch at any time of day or night, and live lives of such atom smashing conformity and predictability that anything less is considered hardship.

Or poverty.

And it's not just our electric habit that suffers from a baseload problem.

Consider our grocery stores.

In February.

What any reasonable human who's ever lived in the Northern Hemisphere might expect to find would be an abundance of root vegetables–beets, turnips, potatoes, onions, radishes, with maybe some ground flours and canned fruits leftover from the autumn harvest.

What do we get these days?

Grapes grown in Chile (and rushed all the way here before they rot!), Valentine's Day roses grown in Columbia, and chocolate covered strawberries grown in Mexico. (though how they keep the chocolate from melting in those Sonorran fields is beyond me).

All so that we don't have to skip a beat on our baseload desires, Always On/Always Available. 

Never mind the time of day or year.

If you think about that, this combination of "live wherever we want, no matter the climate, eat whatever we fancy regardless the season, and power every last electronic and petroleum bell and whistle at full throttle day or night?"

That's a level of either triumphant abundance or willful indulgence the likes of which kings and pharaohs have never seen. (except maybe Harry. He seems to be doing pretty well for himself up in Montecito) #healingjourney

It's also utterly unsustainable.

And unnecessary.

Depending on who's counting and what point they're trying to make, we would need somewhere between 3 and 6 planet Earth's to supply the raw materials required to lift all 8B humans to a US standard of living. (not that anyone's seriously trying)

Which is obviously a bit problematic. 

Unless we invent a Play Doh Factory/Star Trek Holodek that can squeeze anything we dream out of carbon capture technology, the only two scenarios to deal with this imbalance are collapse or revolution.

#boombustisabitch

Or maybe some kind of Third Way, Paul Hawken-esque Drawdown whereby we voluntarily reduce First World consumption while lifting the Global South's until we're all kumbaya-ing in our solar powered mud huts together.

Which for obvious reasons, isn't the most feasible pitch to get a US or EU politician elected (or keep them from getting shot once in office).

But really, we could keep way more of the things we've grown accustomed to, if we only rejiggered our baseload requirements.

It's how most of the world lives already.  

But most of the time it comes packaged as political failure and infrastructure collapse.

Rolling brownouts of the electric grid.

Odd/Even day water and fuel rationing.

Limits on grocery staples.

We frame this sort of thing as hardship, when really, it could be reframed as sensible alignment with natural cycles.

Besides, as all the optimal psychology research shows us (to say nothing of ubiquitous bratty suburban kids), having more without earning it doesn't make us happier.

An example:

I remember back earlier in my guiding career I took a group of students backpacking for a month in the Weminuche Mountains near Telluride. And every single day the afternoon monsoons would kick in and we'd get thoroughly pissed on.

(it's precisely El Nino's interruption to this cyclical monsoon pattern that is responsible for the extreme fire danger in the Rockies right now. It's only rained one day since mid June!).

And these poor little sods didn't even have tents to crawl into at the end of the day.

They had tarps. Little rectangles of nylon strung out with sticks and parachute cord to keep the elements at bay.

But let me tell you something.

When the weather pattern finally did shift and the sun came out...

It was glorious.

We basked on rocks and dried out socks.  We hung sleeping bags in trees and napped and lounged like a bunch of furry little marmots.

The next semester the students had bluebird days the entire time, and the one day it rained, they complained.  

The sun was a constant, and taken for granted. Never did that second group bask in and delight in solar rays the way their soggy predecessors had.

Think of it as the Cadbury Creme Egg Effect.

If you could get those things anytime, anyplace, you'd never want them.

All that sickly sweet fondant center.

Pain the arse to peel that tinfoil.

Either stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth mushy, or so hard from the fridge they take your teeth out.

But once a year, for only a month?

Magic.

And that's what adjusting our baseload expectations would do for all the good things we love.  

If we have them all the time we 100% take them for granted.

They cease to be "figures" in our lives–something we are focused on and appreciate, and recede into the back"ground" –wallpaper constants whose cost we no longer count.

But the costs (social, political, economic, environmental) of our baseload obesity are adding up, regardless.

Happiness researchers have long ago established that it's not the absolute level of comfort or abundance that dictates how happy folks are, it's how closely reality matches their expectations.

If I expect to be hungry and am gifted a hot apple pie from McDs, I am over the moon with joy.

If I expect to be noshing on a 'Gram worthy dessert at a fancy restaurant, only to find the pie crust isn't gluten free?   

#pissed

(this is also why the French Revolution happened when it did.  It wasn't that times were objectively worse for the peasants compared to the prior thousand years that they finally rose up to overthrow the Ancien Regime. It was the rising expectations of the petty bourgeoisie. Things were getting better, just not fast enough to match the desires of an uppity new middle class. Marie Antoinette also didn't help) 

We're likely heading into a season of declining resources, so rightsizing our expectations now, in order to better match our realities soon, seems a wise general move to future-proof our happiness.

As our buddy and energy researcher Nate Hagens likes to joke, "collapse early, beat the rush!"

***

But really, we can extend this baseload thought experiment even further, to include all sorts of situations where our insistence on stability and predicability no matter the cost, is causing more harm than good.

When we interrupt natural ebbs and flows, we create the conditions for violent blowback.

Take wildfire prevention and hydroelectric production.

Because we insist that protection of private property is a god-given right (that the government is conveniently supposed to enforce), wherever we build homes, we presume fires have no right to exist.

And build homes we have. All up in them thar hills.

–In all sorts of scenic but arid environments throughout the American West.

Over decades of this kind of Pyro-NIMBYism (no fires in my backyard!), we've stopped natural and accidental burns, and accumulated a nuclear arsenal's worth of downed, dead and diseased trees, all waiting to go up in flames.

Warming temps are making this much worse as insect infestations boom in the absence of hard freeze winters.

Rather than a series of incremental burns year after year that forests actually need to clear out understories and promote healthy browsing for deer and elk, we've created cluttered, unhealthy landscapes. (unlike millennia of first nations' forest management that created thriving parklike woodlands)

#carboncycleFTW

Today, when they do go up, it's a full crown fire inferno that smokes everything in their path–even the thick-barked old growth redwoods that are supposed to be fire proof.

(personally, we are in the cognitively dissonant spot of building our dream cabin abutting national forest, and presuming that the whole thing is gonna burn within a few decades, no matter what we do! It's like planning for a wedding/funeral double header at the same time). 

***

Same with damming the Colorado and Columbia Rivers (and most other major rivers systems). Without the seasonal ebbs and flows of spring runoffs and high and low water marks, these river systems stagnate. 

Indigenous fish, plants and wildlife get out-competed by invasives that are better suited to the unnatural constancy. Sandbars and eroded silt end up clogging dams rather than creating habitats (and riverside camp spots for boaters).

All so that these once mighty rivers can spin turbines to give Phoenix and Vegas AC and streetlights you can see from space. 

24/7/365.

Consider our efforts to iron out tidal ebbs and flows in our oceans too.

Post-Katrina everyone's become aware of New Orleans' vulnerability. (but if you want to read the masterful take on that situation and how far back in time it goes, check John McPhee’s epic New Yorker piece).  

Same with Venice and Amsterdam across the pond.

All have to pump rainwater out of their street drains because they're below sea level.

Coming soon to a Miami, San Francisco or London near you.

And our efforts to build seawalls and King Canute the tides, only shunts the floodwaters to the poorer communities that can't wallet-whip the apocalypse.

#whackamole

We convert mangrove swamps and tidal estuaries into all-inclusive resorts and condo complexes and wonder why "mother nature" repays our efforts with flooded downtowns and hurricane porn on CNN.

And as always and ever (!!!) the simplest, most economical, scalable and elegant solutions are the natural ones, if only we could tolerate lower baseload expectations.

Phoenix, after all is a rad place to post up.

In the winter.

Miami will be a sweet beach party spot for centuries to come.

At low tide.

Grapes and strawberries are amazing little fructose love bombs.

At harvest time.

Somehow, we've bought into the utterly absurd and arrogant assumption that we are entitled to civilized constancy in the face of natural cyclicity.

Across nearly all the energy systems we've built our civilization upon.

But if we allowed for ebbs and flows, for movement and fluctuations, we could still have all the things we hold most dear.

Just not all the time, no matter what. 

And it would take less than a quarter of the energy we expend today to keep up our current state of artificially juiced, always-on abundance.

Which would reduce our resource needs from four planet Earths, to only one!

(I'm no statistician, but something tells me this is closer to where we need to be).

Because if we pan all the way back from this extended riff on baseloading, and we acknowledge its central role not just in our energy transition to renewables, but also in our global farming and food supplies, urban development, fire mitigation and river management–we begin to see an even bigger, deeper more philosophical problem underpinning our greedy 24/7 appetites.

It's our fear of death.

Not just our own.

But everything's.

From the sun going down each day and bathing us in darkness that we insist on defeating with electric light.

To that same sun's seasonal migrations and our insistence on living in a 72 degree bubble year round.

To jiggering our global supply chains so everything's always in season somewhere and on our shelves everywhere.

To refusing to let fields lie fallow and juicing them to the gills with NPK petroleum fertilizers that then end up as runoff in our watersheds.

To choking rivers and holding back the seas so we can live where we want.

To...

botoxing our faces and dyeing our hair so we can pretend to be twenty forever.

To disappearing our elders into "retirement" communities to be drugged up and looked after by randos on minimum wage.

To all manner of our efforts to cheat the Reaper without ever paying the Piper.

Taken to its logical conclusion, our baseload addiction is really about our desire to stop death in all of its expressions of light/dark, feast/famine, hot/cold, flood/drought.

Ironically, but utterly predictably, this only creates more death and destruction in the long run, not less.

Only when it comes this time, it comes with a vengeance and leaves with a hangover.

You could go as far as saying that we've become downright Thanato-Neurotic.

(Thanos–death, Neurotic–needlessly fucked in the head)

Because we have fallen out of right relationship with the downward part of the cycle of creation and destruction, because we stiff-arm Death at all costs and in all instances, there will be (and already is) Hell to pay.

Fires, floods, and famines, all at once, because we've been unwilling to face them a little bit at a time, over time.

***

But it doesn't have to be this way.

We could reclaim a more balanced relationship with the ebbs and flows of life.  We could embrace the Chthonic, the subterranean, refractory, composted and decaying.  

We could celebrate the darkness in our winter feasts, and rejoice in the return of the light in our spring and summer bacchanals. 

We could patiently wait for those Cadbury Creme Eggs, and binge on them until we're delightfully sick (until next year).

Instead of remaining stuck in our Thanato-Neuroticism, we could make a return to Thanato-Eroticism.

(a love of life and death as part of an inextricable whole)

An orientation to life that embraces the ebbs and flows, that celebrates Death as an essential counterpoint to Life.

As Bruce Damer, the astrobiologist has noted about the origins of life in thermal hotsprings, and the inevitable boom/bust processes of nature, "Death writes the code to life!"

If we can reintegrate that simple catechism into our own worldviews and practical decision-making, we have a chance to adjust our lives to be more in balance with the Way Things Are.

We can reduce our baseload expectations to better match the energy across our collected systems.

We can time our dance with the diurnal and annual cycles of the sun.

We can steward the miracles of photosynthesis and metabolism on our farms.

We can help optimize the ongoing carbon, nitrogen and hydrologic cycles to our advantage.

It's safer, simpler, richer, more equitable, and ultimately, more fun.

Because we can either have a neurotic relationship to death and the inevitable cycles of life, or we can have an erotic relationship to it (not in the sexy sense, more in the "vital life force" sense).

As the old tune about the hillbilly with a leaky roof goes,  "when it's raining it's too wet to fix it, and when it's sunny out, it's as good as any man's."

You could say the same about our efforts to stop air conditioning half the planet. Or driving and flying everywhere. Or supporting dirt cheap petro-chem agribusiness.  

"We'd transition off carbon sooner if it wasn't so damned hot already, inconvenient to carpool and required a tiny bit of delayed gratification!"

It's time to flip that lazy logic

It's time for us to start fixin' the holes where the rain gets in.

The sun rises, just like it did over that mountain ridge this morning.

But the sun also sets.

And we're wasting daylight.