I know most people will read my previous article and think they can see a realistic scenario for surviving without electricity. Let me see:
1. Going completely pre-industrial. Have a farm, grow livestock, staples and vegetables, use animal waste and compost as fertiliser. Use wind or water to power a mill. Manage a forest as a sustainable source of fuel for the winter. Great plan, it would work, until hungry, desperate, violent and armed people from the cities come and take your farm. If you resist they kill you, if you don’t resist they make you their slave, and since there’s lots of them, the farm suddenly can’t produce enough to sustain all of them. Best case scenario, they repeat the dark ages feudalism scenario and occupy several farms on a territory, and take 10% of produce from each. This is long-term sustainable, but it would take lots of trial and error until they get there. Let’s say you were very “lucky” and you get to live as a serf.
2. Going sustainable high-tech. Have a solar power plant on your farm, produce biodiesel for your tractor, grow animals, staples and vegetables. Great plan, and it would work, until something breaks down and there are no spare parts; also, everything from 1. applies and you are eventually found by an armed gang and either killed or enslaved.
3. Let’s say you create/live in a sustainable enclave, or you are seriously lucky and your community can control a power plant (hydroelectric or nuclear) that can work sustainably for decades. You also have functional agriculture and limited industry. Good for you. Now you’re the prime target for everybody else in the world who wants what you have. You defend it, and the armed conflict destroys the assets and now nobody has them; everybody dies. Or you don’t defend them and somebody else takes over, and you are either enslaved, killed or exiled.
4. You have an underground shelter stocked with food, have access to a filtered water source or huge tanks of water, have some sort of a power generator that can go for decades (let’s say it’s hydroelectric, powered by a subterranean water flow). Nobody knows you’re there, and you don’t know what’s outside. You possibly use your underground facility as a base for conducting raids on the surface, to replenish your supplies. Congratulation, you became a Morlock.
5. Join an armed gang that robs, kills and enslaves people. The problem is, you turn into a predatory beast and sacrifice virtue for survival. Not the best tradeoff to make, in my opinion.
6. Form an alliance with farmers, where you protect them with weapons and they feed you. Alternatively, the farmers form a wider alliance and feed a protective paramilitary force that’s known and trusted. Joining such a community is a good option, if they will take you, but the problem is that they will most likely shoot outsiders on sight.
7. You have an unsustainable, but substantial cache of supplies. You wait for things to improve. They don’t. Your supplies either run out, or attract robbers.
8. You belong to some native community that traditionally survives off the land in some rainforest, desert or wasteland, where trained traditional people can live off the land, but the resources are so shitty nobody else would find it worthwhile to fight over. The problem is, if you don’t live like this now, it won’t happen.
So, this is my problem with preparing for apocalyptic scenarios: when I apply game theory to them, they all either turn into dead ends, or shitty life that’s not worth living. All the prepping scenarios where you can do something constructive are those that assume a local, contained disaster where the rest of the world is fine and help will eventually come, or a disaster that degrades the civilisation, but everything more-less manages to limp along afterwards, and improves after a while.
Looks good.
Number 6, but instead trying to join one, organize one 🙂
I have been playing with this ideas lately and basically the only thing that makes sense is organized small town.
However, you kind of need, well, not apocalypse for it to happen, so it’s like chasing its own tail.
Considering history and human nature, armed gangs and slavery is the most likely outcome.
So, Nikola Zrinski last march seems like most preferable option.
I think there’s one thing I have to emphasise, because it’s something people tend to miss. It’s the part of “every damn thing that works on something else includes a crucial component that runs on electricity”.
Your car works on gas/diesel. It produces its own electricity via alternator. All fine. Go to the gas station, oops, the pump is electric.
Your central heating works on utility gas, you think you’re fine without electricity. However, the water recirculation pump in the boiler is electric. Also, the boiler, unless it’s one of the first Vaillant models from the 1970s, is electronic and doesn’t work without electricity.
Phone lines; unless you have an ancient analog line, you need a router that has a VoIP phone connection. Your router needs to be powered by electricity in order for that to work. Also, VoIP is not a classical phone. The phones used to have an independent low-power line that powered the phones, but I don’t think it’s the case anywhere anymore, but if there are any experts here feel free to correct me.
Let’s say you are off-grid solar, you make your own electricity and your stuff works. Not only that, your phone/tablet/laptop is battery powered and can keep working for days. Guess what, the mobile network towers have an UPS that will keep them running for under an hour, and then they go dark; you still don’t have connectivity. Also, it is safe to assume that the Internet goes down because the back-end of every connection is grid-powered.
I recently had a surprise – short power outage, the UPS kicked in and my computer worked fine, but I had no Internet connection. I ask myself, how the hell, the router is on the second UPS downstairs, it should be working. Wow, it actually is working, but I’m using ethernet over powerline to get gigabit ethernet to the 2nd floor where my computer is. No powerline, no ethernet. Sure, I could have easily switched the desktop PC to WiFi but that’s not the point; the point is that I forgot that one part of the system that wouldn’t work in a power outage, and I’m the paranoid bastard who has a separate UPS for the router downstairs.
Your garage doors, do they have a manual override, or are they electric only with a remote? Same for the main gate to your house, if it exists. Can you open it if there is no power?
Some people use a water pump to get water from a well or a tank. It’s electric, so no water.
That’s just some things from the top of my head, so the list is by no means exhaustive.
All electricity issues are real issues if outage is global or at least continental and that means either strong solar flare or nuclear attack with NEMP as first detonation – nothing else would have such magnitude and any less magnitude would not be problematic in long-run, since neighbouring countries could help out rather quickly.
NEMP is especially bad because single high altitude blast can affect entire continent and it is composed of three phase EMP:
– E1 – high power fast pulse which can not be blocked with normal surge protection
– E2 – microseconds later which is equivalent to lightning, but since it immediately follows E1 which fried many of E2 protections, E2 will be much more devastating than it would be on it’s own
– finally E3, an equivalent to solar flare causing geomagnetic storm which can induce high voltage in power lines (including underground) causing damage, including fire to the transformers.
(solar flare on it’s own only has E3 component, but it can have devastating magnitude).
So, yea, basically everything you mentioned is dead few seconds after NEMP, so even if one could somehow get electricity after the event it would not matter anyway.
To be honest, when I started following your line of electricity I realised, one does not even have to nuke the cities any more, single NEMP over every continent would be enough because our dependence of electricity is so enormous that it would be a waste throwing nukes around 🙂
Of course, military is probably much more protected from these events, but as far as civil infrastructure goes, entire continent can be paralysed and pushed into total chaos in a flash.
You don’t even have to detonate a nuke anywhere, just have the watermelons in power and they will make sure that sun and wind, the things that make them feel positive emotions, are the only ones used for producing electricity, and oil and gas are banned so everybody starts using electricity for heating, which will collapse the grid and there you go. This scenario doesn’t produce a total outage, just serious irregularities and imbalances, which might actually be as bad, but I just don’t know yet.
Actually, they made sure that won’t happen, at least in Croatia. For couple of years, HEP (Croatian electricity supplier) has been changing household boxes to new models which all have limitators built-in and you are simply cut off if you go over that limit.
So, now they have “packages”, minimum package is 3.5kW (which is what cheap apartments builders usually go for since it’s not enough even for two-person apartment) and on few occasions we went over that and you are simply cutoff and have to manually restart the box (which is not in apartment, but building base floor).
Also, you can’t collapse entire grid – it’s split into areas with large transformer stations which are then split into small transformers for each village or few of them, depending on size.
Maybe you can collapse Zagreb (which would be bad) but they would probably get it up rather quickly, especially since everything around Zagreb would be functional.
Additionally, in such overload scenario, you can just go and buy solar panels and power everything you need and even sell extra or local municipal might invest in solar power plant and power it’s area or you can re-distribute power from local hydro-electric dams.
Ukraine is good example how actually robust power grid is.
They blew up BUNCH of thermal plants and transformers and it still isn’t completely dark and that level of destruction is way beyond any overload might cause.
So, watermelons will limit our transportation to bicycles, but electric power grid should be fine – you will not crash it, you simply won’t be able to charge your precious Tesla 🙂
Croatia has an exceptionally diversified and robust electrical grid, but it lacks one additional nuclear PP; Gernany, on the other hand, is in deep shit. The problem with Croatia is that we have corrupt politicians that work against our national interests, and when it gets bad elsewhere, they will sell our fuel and electricity to Europe and let their own population freeze/starve.