As someone who lives in Marin I’m not sure where you got this idea. Most people who live in Marin have been there for 20-30+ years and are retired.
They probably paid less than 300k for their home.
64.1% of those in the county 16 or older are in the labor force. Most people living in Marin County are not retired.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/marincountycali...
Which is related, but not totally, to who lives there.
"We told the California Public Utilities Commission of a 4,700-MW need through 2022 and that gap started in 2020. Despite all that, only 3,300 MW was authorized for procurement and none starting until 2021," Berberich said during a special telephone conference the Cal-ISO Board of Governors held Aug. 17, following a weekend during which the grid operator twice conducted rotating blackouts because of high demand and tightening reserves.
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
It's weird that none of the 'experts' in the news could figure this out and we've gone to blaming random homeowners, electric lines, 5G and everything else in this story without this information even coming up.
I think the only well known non-US private school system (off the top of my head) are UK commonwealth secondary boarding schools, and those schools are more well known for their abuse than their academic strength.
Pretty much any other country (for example, France, Japan, China, etc) are generally built on a system of publicly funded schools
Private for-profit schools can use their money to get political influence and reduce public school funding in order to further its economic advantage.
But that would probably be irrelevant for substations and you could isolate lines from populated areas with not problem. I think the issue is probably because there is little will for investments.
> We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe
> The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified RFR as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" in 2011. Last year, a $30 million study conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) found “clear evidence” that two years of exposure to cell phone RFR increased cancer in male rats and damaged DNA in rats and mice of both sexes. The Ramazzini Institute in Italy replicated the key finding of the NTP using a different carrier frequency and much weaker exposure to cell phone radiation over the life of the rats.
> Since 5G is a new technology, there is no research on health effects, so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation. These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users.
> Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology.If this is the study I'm thinking of, it's suspect for 3 reasons.
1. First off, the study didn't test against 5G. It used 2G and 3G emissions. Even if you believe the study, it doesn't make sense to use it as a reason to stick with 3G instead of 5G.
2. The study tested male rats, female rats, male mice, and female mice. Only male rats were allegedly impacted by radio signals. If 3G is so universally dangerous to living tissue, why did it only impact one of the species tested? And only the males of that species? Sidenote- the mice were actually exposed to more energy than the rats
3. Even though the male rats exposed to 2G and 3G were more likely to get cancer, they also lived longer than unexposed rats. Male rats exposed to 3G lived nearly 10% longer than ones that weren't. If this life extending capability also applies to 5G signals, we should be accelerating 5G deployment.
That's explained pretty well by this -
A rebuttal to that article appears in the same publication, and adroitly takes apart it's claims: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...
https://www.troyhunt.com/lets-stop-the-5g-hysteria-understan...
I don't think anyone can confirm or deny that 5G carries health risks. But, we do have evidence there are health risks with other cellular communication technologies, and we ought to use that as a basis for decision making.
2. please try to explain the security issues that 5G presents that aren't present in 4G, 3G, etc.
3. a lack of information is not an excuse to promote doubt and misinformation. part of the reason we haven't been able to measure the long-term effects of cellular radiation is that it takes time to run those studies. please stop promoting lies and undermining trust in the systems that help manage our society
In response to #3, I have not posted any lies, and anything that disagrees with your narrative is not automatically FUD. There are serious doubts of 5G on many fronts by many experts, and these doubts should be discussed. However, as I've noticed here, there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber. Anything that's not in-group is not allowed, as we see here, where an expert has a serious concern about untested technologies. I wish we were able to have an honest conversation about this.
> It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Why not? When we moved from 3G to 4G I felt like it was kind of useless, but now that I have it I definitely enjoy all the things that become possible with it (lower latency everything, mostly). It was the same way moving from ISDN to cable. It's never bad to have better stuff - you'll find a use for it even if you don't have one now.
> can you explain some concerns you might have about 5G
Frankly the only real and reasonable concern to have is that there are very few engineers that roll out 5G networks that aren't Chinese. I'm not opposed to China, but I am opposed to a country's entire infrastructure being built and maintained by another country (that may want to use that to exert political pressure some day).
> there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber
In this case I really don't think it's that, it's mostly that you posted information that's just wrong and then you retreated to a (frankly lazy) defense as to why you're spreading misinformation. It makes you come off as the kind of person that's really unpleasant to talk to, because the lies tend to be so sticky and pervasive. It's exhausting to have to revisit every component of what you know just because someone else couldn't be bothered to figure it out for themselves.
However, I do think there is an echo chamber here, and I think that anything that cautions against the cavalier use of untested technology is not permitted, which I think is very dangerous.
What you think is a 'lazy defense' is really just a guy trying to subdue what he could already recognize as a geyser of vitriolic, and frankly wrong, comments. But, hey, this is apparently a place where everyone's opinion counts as fact, and no criticism at all of 5G is allowed.
I'm going to stop commenting now.
You post a bunch of cherry-picked nonfactual stuff about 5G and then complain that HN doesn't have enough fact-based content?
It has no scientific basis and is not a recognized medical condition.
https://www.who.int/peh-emf/publications/facts/fs296/en/
High levels of RF exposure can of course do damage, in the form of burns. Any seasoned amateur radio operator at some point in the progression of their hobby can surely attest to the pain of being "bitten" by an energized RF cable.
But trying to promote the idea that cellphones are dangerous is just scaremongering. You'll absorb more energy in just a few seconds just by standing in a sunbeam.
I don't know why all the rebuttals focus on energy absorption and absence of ionizing frequencies. Seems like the mechanism of toxicity, if any, has nothing to do with that.
Blocking signals with your body becomes more true as frequency (and bandwidth) goes up. 5G Wifi can't even properly penetrate dry wall, not even mentioning all that water and bone in your body.
Beside that, below the infrared spectrum, it is unlikely that much damage is done by common RF signals; the energy in a quanta from that spectrum is too small to effectively do anything but heat molecules up a tiny bit.
Photochemical effects, ie, things like chemical reactions being induced or cells reacting to the light, require atleast about 1Thz to work (low-end IR).
The heating occurs primarly for frequencies between 30 and 120MHz, which is actively used but not by B2C commercial things, it largely involves ham radio, air traffic radio, sea traffic, weather satellites, etc. Things you're likely to be closer to the receiving end of than the high powered sender.
Which also bring to the other issue; the energies in common RF close to you is too low. If you send with 100mW power, the power your body will capture, even if it's the phone right next to your ear, is likely below 10mW of power. Low enough that your native body heat already overpowers it easily.
I appreciate that in your brief analysis you are considering several mechanisms of action besides just the heating. There may be many kinds of resonances, at molecular level, supra-molecular, etc. If very little 900/1800MHz suffices to alter BBB, then it is like a trigger to worse things, without the need of much energy. In the animals tested, the amount reaching the brain, at typical GSM levels, had already the observed result. Of course my tone is speculative here, but if the effect was confirmed in humans, it would not need much energy, and just the medium-to-weak signal reaching the brain could be worrisome.
There are not yet any studies on it, but if the effects of 5G on BBB were much stronger than with 900/1800MHz, it may also be the case that much lower signal intensities would still alter noticeably the BBB, even after the attenuation of the body traversal.
I am not a luddite at all, but I do hope that scientists working to certify that 5G is healthy are not hand-waving away the problem only by saying that the energy absorbed is too low or that the body is blocking its intensity. That would mean they did not hear at all about the effect of the mere frequency as a signal on the adhesion between cells.
I really would like to see some study elucidate the mechanism (or the absence thereof, and the flaws of the previous study), maybe some sort of resonance, soon enough to avoid to be in a situation were Wifi/4G/5G would be everywhere yet with dangerous long-term effects on health.
I'd worry more about standard heat given off by devices like laptops. The radio emissions aren't gonna do much but the 80C hot air out of the exhaust blowing into your lap is definitely going to do something. There is plenty of studies on the effects of overheating genitals in males.
But back to the topic; the energy is too small. If these radio waves had an effect, being out during a cloudy day would. The energy you get from solar radiation over a day is probably about the same.
Things like DNA breaking apart don't generally happen with this low frequency, largely because they require a bunch of energy to happen. Like ionization, even 1000W of 100MHz radio waves aren't going to make it happen. There is no amount of energy you can dump into a 100MHz transceiver that would cause ionization of atoms. It simply won't happen. Well, they will ionize but not because of the radio waves but because they've heated up enough that they're starting to undergo plasma formation. But that semantic difference is still important.
The sender in your cellphone or the energy you get from your wifi router are too small to be measured and by all acounts of physics, their effects are too small to be reasonably measured even in long term studies. We're talking literaly sub-milliwatt over your entire body. The entire body uses atleast 100Watts to stay alive. <0.1% change in thermal energy.
However, I really hope they find what was the flaw(s) that led to the surprising result on the BBB of rodents.
Quoting a US senator on technology is not exactly a strong argument. Like arguing about email security and quoting a senator on the technology committee saying he has never sent an email.
https://www.engadget.com/2015-03-09-lindsey-graham-never-sen...
In many cases senators are the least possible informed people on a topic, and are almost certainly not focused on the pure science of an issue. Quoting one of them pretty much means you are trying to sway me by using their position, not research.
Also, nothing that you quoted about 5G actually says it is unsafe. Saying that 2G and 3G are unsafe and that we don't know what 4G does, and that government doesn't want to investigate 5G, and that tumors of a certain type 'may be at least partially attributable' to cell phone radiation, and all of the other slights, all of that doesn't add up to 5G is unsafe.
This is the direct rebut to the article you linked, even from the same site.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...
> On the strength of epidemiological evidence, cancer fears are dangerously misguided: While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008, there has been no indication that glioma rates have increased proportionally in the same period—a nonrelationship replicated by numerous other studies.
> David Robert Grimes is a cancer researcher, physicist, and John Maddox Prize–winning science writer. He is based at Dublin City University and is a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford. He advises, across Europe, on the public understanding of science, particularly on vaccination policy and combatting cancer misinformation. His first book, The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World, is now available from Simon & Schuster UK.To characterize the nearly ten years of cell phone growth as "virtually zero" makes me seriously question the authors fact checking and thought process.
To whit: "While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008"
Senators who don't send emails don't do so because they don't know how to send emails -- they do it because they're doing seriously fucked up stuff and don't want a paper trail. As the fictional drug kingpin Stringer Bell says in The Wire -- "is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"
That is too bad, I grew up in an desert locale that had all its power lines buried and I only experienced one power outage in fifteen years. Then I moved out to a coastal area where burying the lines wasn’t really feasible and pretty much every time it rained someone would hydroplane into a utility poll and knock out the power for a couple hours, and it rained at least once a week. If the climate permits them to bury, they should go for it.
I grew up in an old (for the US), hilly east coast city and nothing was underground. Because it wasn't very dense and didn't have gridded neighborhoods, it would have been quite expensive to run utilities underground. I subsequently moved to a newer part of a different city and all the new construction had underground utilities. It still doesn't prevent outages at the substation or high voltage transfer line layers.
Power outages are a once ever few years or more thing.
For a few years I lived in a neighborhood that had above-ground lines, but further down the street they were below ground because that neighborhood was significantly richer. Our power went out fairly frequently. The neighbors told me it was because of the transition from below ground to above ground, but I also wouldn't have been surprised if NIMBYism kept older equipment in service.
I'd be out there cheering on the linemen for replacing the old junk. :D
I can definetly see how replacing a lowly old pole with one of these annoyance towers can lead to strong opposition even for those not having 5G scares.
Most of those other things, I have seen, but on different projects lol. Like the LED street lamps have been phased in on most streets out here over the past few years. They also upgraded the light-up street signs to have LEDs and replaced the yellowed, cracked, faded glass with shiny new glass.
All of those things were super solid improvements though.
Of course, we could just act like the town is evil, defund everything, and then have them sell the rights-of-way to companies that would almost certainly squeeze the blood out of the infrastructure and place advertising on it.
Maybe they'd put cameras and use machine learning to determine which streets are the busiest, and find out more about the demographics of people who walk the street, so they can decide how long to leave the lights on - oh and sell that data to further profit lol.
I take it you've never been to Japan
Just replacement to exactly what was there does not require that approval.
I have worked as an executive in a risk department at a telco and can say definitively say that NIMBYs don’t influence these decisions.
I worked with our government relations, legal and comms teams and was in charge of risk management.
There’s no profits to be gained in fixing most infrastructure issues and most times NIMBYs provided us cover for service issues.
“Yes congressmen we’d love to upgrade our infrastructure and provide better service but those damn NIMBYs”
There's an effort to underground the utilities near Foothill College by tapping into Santa Clara County Fire's funds for improved fire safety, since they're allowed to use these funds in that specific location.
A simplistic napkin math computation says that the cost delta in electricity between what Santa Clara pays and what PG&E customers pay, times the amount of electricity that LAH residents consume would pay for the entire undergrounding in 5-6 years.
So to my mind, it seems like a simple argument in favor of a municipal power utility that charges PG&E rates until it pays off its infrastructure, and then charges a more reasonable rate thereafter. Of course this assumes that LAH could achieve Santa Clara levels of cost efficiency, but it doesn't seem crazy either.
Too bad the deadline has passed for nomination for LAH Town Council. You should run next time ;)
More likely, though, is that smaller and newer utilities are likely to be more nimble than the big behemoth that has lots of tech debt and internal and external bureaucracy.
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/how-rates-w...
Then again, maybe it's the same demand for power and independence that we are seeing with "Karens", masks, protests, Confederate statues, anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, etc. As individuals feel more powerless, they will almost certainly lash out at anything they can, including local utilities disrupting their life/convenience.
I think it was worth it. But there are crankypants types that hate any change because it's change.
Not all locations are amenable to underground cables.
Here is a white paper that lays out all the tradeoffs and includes some costs. New construction costs can differ between overhead and underground by 2-10x. Conversion costs aren't negligible either. https://www.eei.org/issuesandpolicy/electricreliability/unde...
Where I live, 99.9% of power is delivered via underground cables, I get power outages like once every 5 years. Brownouts are more often but usually not related to cable issues. America needs to catch up to the rest of the world there.
It is complicated, as are most things.
The actual cost of construction and maintenance are going to vary from place to base based on geology, existing infrastructure, weather, labor costs, regulatory oversight, cost of capitol, etc. So there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
That's incomprehensible to me... and then these same people complain about outages? Wow.
https://www.dailybreeze.com/2020/01/08/a-third-manhattan-bea...
My understanding is that the mean-free-path of conduction electrons in even OFHC copper is quite short -- scattering on impurities is the dominant loss mechanism, not the boundaries of the conductor. Is the theory advanced above that the morphology of the wire matters, or is there another mechanism at work?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...
1. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chp...
The increase of resistance with temperature is well-known -- I was curious if there is some effect that is directly related to the wire sag (changing morphology, somehow-altered surface area/skin-depth, changing kinks at the connections, some subtlety with increased length (cross-sectional area also increases), etc..).
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_expansion and check the coefficient of expansion.
Like bending a piece of metal back and forth, it weakens each time.
Maybe I’m wrong and this kind of wire stretching doesn’t impact resistance?
https://www.atcllc.com/blog/why-do-power-lines-sag-on-hot-da...
You certainly know more about this topic than I do, but according to the article, it wasn't the operators that decided to cut back on power, it was ordered by the Independent System Operator.
From what I read, Edison, PG&E and SDG&E just did what they were told, and for some reason the ISO told them to cut back earlier than was previously necessary. That's why the experts are "stumped."
If I'm missing something, please let me know.
Serious question, why is the answer to this not a slightly-but-not-much-more-polite version of "That's ridiculous, be quiet." and moving forward?
Laws could be passed to sidestep all of this and support infrastructure growth, but those laws would trigger the same attacks from coordinated groups NIMBY, who happen to often be wealthy single-family homeowners, and thus more often than their competition have captive lawmakers to resist any effort they disapprove of.
None of that precludes doing the right thing, of course, but if it's not an issue you care strongly about you might decide not to fight it. The best countermeasure is for everyone else to tune out local politics less, which is an area people oddly ignore even though it has the most day to day impact on your life.
These days, most households, especially the wealthy ones like in Marin, are helmed by people who do NOT work with their hands, do not respect people who do, and who have no interest in learning more. Even worse, infrastructure work is so heavily regulated and specialized that gobs of accidental complexity prevent anyone who wanted to from learning more about it, reinforcing the ignorance.
And truly, it's easy to have sympathy. The world is a complex place, and no doubt they have their hands full dealing with the technology revolution and palace intrigues at work; who has time to understand something as boring as infrastructure? And besides, if infrastructure fails, it fails for everyone so there's no real benefit to being informed or prepared (in that sense being informed about city infrastructure would be very similar to being a "prepper", in a weaker sense, which comes with it's own stigma).
So if you say "That's ridiculous, be quiet" you will offend sensibilities to the extent YOU will be banned, banned for having dirty knowledge, for shaming those that don't, and for tacitly asserting the value of having such knowledge! Plus, your views aren't in their news-feeds, so there's no emotional juice to them. Emotionally driven opposition is the inevitable retarding force in the hyper-connected, capitalist info-sphere, and ultimately leads to civic ignorance and paralysis. Good luck overcoming that in your city council meetings! (But you have my respect if you even try.)
It's why you're seeing a rapid uptake in battery storage by consumers in California; it's a hack around regulatory and utility failures (and you get a federal tax credit if it charges primarily from your rooftop solar, which is mandatory on new CA residential construction).
It is ridiculous, and people who are ridiculous must be negotiated with (unfortunately!). I don't know what the solution is besides applying constant pressure in the appropriate direction.
Disclosure: This information comes from my own research, as well as first hand accounts from electrical linemen friends in NorCal upgrading infrastructure.
But the TLDR is that (in the example of 5G), the power levels were talking about amount to ~300,000x less power than what would be required to irritate your skin in a minor way.
Of course, it's always complex because sure, stick your hand in to a transformer and electromagnetism will do plenty of damage to you. Being against 5G or power stations because EMF "can do damage" is a bit like banning cars because jumping in front of a car "can do damage", except cars are _far_ more lethal and far less helpful than signal-carrying cables.
Yes, stupid people can vote. This is the main vulnerability of democracy.
I think that what you've found is a flaw with humanity, not with democracy.
In a monarchy or despotism, there is no transition of power by design. It is supposed to be difficult, because it is not wanted. So if you end up with the wrong choice it is very hard to correct.
Trump is scary. I am not of the US but: I fear if Trump wins. I fear the tantrum/insurrection of Trump if he loses in respect to a peaceful handover.
Well, yeah. BTW, I didn't say I have a better idea, I merely pointed out an issue.
The US clearly fits in here. The US is not a direct democracy, but neither is any other country in the world, including Switzerland that perhaps is the one I know of that comes closest.
Here is what happens when you google democracy: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy: 1a: government by the people especially : rule of the majority b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
dictionary.com: government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.
You said the US is not a democracy, all definitions I can find says it is.
The end result is that many state and local issues are resolved through direct voter action.
https://mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-democra...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-u-s...
https://thebaffler.com/latest/were-a-republic-not-a-democrac...
Thanks for the links. I found the first link interesting and then disappointing, since I had worked at a bookstore in NYC in the early 90s that carried a lot of philosophy books, economics books mainly from the Austrian School, and so the mises.org link caught my eye. Ryan McKaken the author of the article basically dismisses the use of "we're a republic and not a democracy" when used as an argument in two cases of what he believes people are thinking. I was pointing out that we are not simply "a democracy", but more precisely constitutional republic, no more, no less.
How do you answer the question, "What type of government does the U.S. have?"
As to your question, I would say that the U.S. constitution defines (indeed, guarantees) the country as having "a republican form of government" (at the state level, but this is maintained at the federal level), and that the processes and principles that it puts in place, such as representative elections, qualify that system as democratic.
That's a nice story, except as the article notes it wasn't distribution but generation that was the problem. Not a shortage of installed capacity, but shutdown of four (one wind apparently due to conditions, and three natural gas apparently voluntarily by the operators) plants.
Ever since it was passed, NIMBYs and other types of individualists have found more and more ways to use its provisions to block anything from happening that they don't want to happen.
But I have looked into it exactly zero.
what follows is speculation, so you can grab your pitchforks if you want but it will be a hollow victory.
I've always been suspicious of the claim that EM fields have zero effect on human beings, especially near high-volts lines. It doesnt seem possible. Our bodies function based on electrical signals and many cellular mechanisms are mediated with ions.
do we have a list of all electrically-sensitive bodily processes? could we guess what would happen if their simultaneous activation changed by 5%? what about 45% or more? So much of the human body is not exhaustively understood in the general case, and certainly not in the individual case.
idk, i dont wanna go all tinfoil hat here. it just seems like circumstances are aligned for there to be large holes in our public understanding (accidentally or otherwise).
note: for whatever its worth, ive spent some time around the 8MW generators on Nimitz-class aircraft carriers[0].
While you read this, over 100 billion neutrinos went through your thumb.
we'd have to be doing the studies, first. second, we'd have to know what we're looking for. if the effects were subtle, generational, or multiple and confounding, it would be hard to see even if we were looking. also, im sure the sample size is small. not a lot of people/animals spend years 10 feet from high-volts lines.
also, people are generally pretty change-averse. if there were proof that our current way of life was harmful, not a lot of people would be interested in discovering, spreading, or changing due to this news, least of all the companies with a profit motive. saving the turtles is fine if all you have to do is use a metal straw instead of plastic, but ask people to inconvenience themselves (less TV, less air-conditioning, less hot water, etc) and you've got a different response.
Sorry no link found right now.
ahh yes, seems like the "looking for toilet paper in all the wrong places" phenomenon where there's no lack of supply, but the existing supply lines head to the wrong places. (all the industrial/office stuff is idled, while rural locations are blasting AC in ways they've never seen before)
Can you elaborate? A substation is about to start construction just across the (narrow) street from my child's elementary school.
I'd say 1/3 were reassured by my explanation of why non-ionising radiation isn't going to harm your unborn child/give you cancer[1], 1/3 decided I was a lying tool of the Establishment and They Knew The Truth, and the last 1/3 had a genuine mental illness - "No you don't understand, the Prime Minister has authorised the Police to monitor my TV viewing using radio waves and it's giving my family cancer".
[1]Unless you're climbing a transmitter tower and exposing your womb to a focused microwave beam at a very close range for a substantial period, then the heating effect probably isn't going to be doing good things.
That's exactly what I'd expect from a lying tool of the Establishment.
I would like to imagine that regulators and utilities have this under control, but making some effort to verify this could be reasonable.
(49 states permit utilities utilities to ground a current carrying overhead wire at utility poles, resulting in parallel currents in the ground. I’m not aware of this being a documented hazard to people, but it’s a documented problem for cattle. CA is the exception.)
Abstract This 2019 brochure is intended to explain the issues surrounding EMF. It covers the physical nature of EMF, our everyday exposures to EMF, the health research and its findings, and the conclusions reached by expert scientific panels and government agencies. It provides key updates to the review of the science that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) published in 2002 in a booklet entitled, “EMF: Electric and Magnetic Fields Associated with the Use of Electric Power – Questions & Answers.” The 2002 booklet contains very useful information that remains current, and that the reader of this brochure may find of value.
Do you think think the demand would be higher? In parallel, while many people are working from home, the businesses are closed, which I would think eat up much more electricity.
I think that people who run their AC like they do are selfish and do not understand the impact that their everyday actions have on the world.
(I really don't run my AC. I do think people are overly dependent on it. The number of people I know who have their home cooler in the summer than the winter indicates many people really just do it because they can.
But also I'm not a judgey asshole, so I don't moralize about it to people)
That's all.
Serious question: How was this handled in pre-AC times?
Is it just an issue because buildings are much better sealed than they used to be, or is there more to it than that?
But old buildings generally aren't even close to air tight. Under those conditions as long as they are heated even a little the humidity is mostly lower than outside. Mean the amount of water in the air as a percent is the same inside and outside. But since it's hotter inside the house the relative humidity is lower. In temperate climates you don't get mold.
It's actually modern air tight houses that have terrible problems with mold. Because they don't breath water vapor builds up inside.
Newer homes and buildings have a vapor barrier beneath the outside cladding. This article on the Perfect Wall [0], explains the benefits and options.
Older houses, like the Victorian that I live in, didn't have modern insulation, which can deteriorate if it gets wet, so they were made to breathe, so that any moisture that got into the wall could be removed through air movement. Not to mention that fireplaces required a constant stream of new air to replace that which is pulled up through the chimney.
[0][https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...]
At the level of the generation there won't be much change, but the distribution / "last mile" substations have never been planned for the duty cycle and load they have seen over the last months.
Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote monitoring capability beyond whats detected at the line. Operators tend to baby these stations intentionally as their failure could spark massive outages across the grid (again, due to older design considerations)
Now this part might get a little political, but these substations/transfer depots/etc... arent just old because the outage would hit a lot of customers at once, but because NIMBY groups frequently oppose building or augmenting existing substations. Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.
its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.