The power of community still works

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/01/2024 (694 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It warms the heart a little. And, at the same time, it warmed the living room.

Everybody’s living room.

Over the weekend in Alberta, a combination of an intense cold wave, offline natural gas generating plants, lower-producing wind and solar sites and high demand for electricity came close to tipping that province’s electrical system into having to start rolling blackouts.

Demand was, quite simply, outstripping the electrical system’s ability to supply all the power that was being used.

Informed of a danger of the collapse of the entire system, individual Albertans took actions to ensure the safety of their neighbours by, dare we say, undergoing a little inconvenience themselves.

Immediately after the warning went out on the province’s cellphone alert system, electrical users began to reduce their consumption, removing hundreds of megawatts of demand from the power grid. Graphs of power usage in Alberta show an almost immediate decline after the message went out.

The province also got power from its neighbours to help it over the peak: British Columbia, Montana and Saskatchewan all delivered power to the Alberta grid. (Of course, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe couldn’t let that moment of jurisdictional collegiality and co-operation pass without also tweeting out an attack on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but that’s just Moe being Moe.)

You could take more of this space to talk about the way politicians used a near-crisis for their own partisan purposes, like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith immediately pinning the blame for the shortfall on traditionally low winter levels of wind and solar power so that she could hype the need for fossil fuel-generated electricity.

But a more important aspect is how the general public, without the need for individual recognition, acted co-operatively to take the strain off an overburdened electrical system. Asked to conserve energy, they, well, conserved energy. That shouldn’t necessarily be a reason to celebrate — but somehow, it feels that way.

After all, this is a world where people feel comfortable trumpeting on social media about their “personal victory” of refusing to wear a mask while visiting a relative in a hospital filled with immune-compromised and critically ill patients — despite the clear concerns and objections of medical staff.

Examples like that make it hard to believe we’re not now in a place where the notion of community comes second to (let’s not put too fine a point on it) naked personal greed and self-importance.

It’s reassuring to realize there are people in this country — perhaps, hopefully, a near-silent majority of people — who recognize the value of taking co-operative actions, however small for the good of the community, rather than putting their personal desires absolutely first in every instance.

How pleasant it is to imagine that, in a laundry room in some part of suburban Calgary, someone decided to walk over and shut off the dryer, thinking “I can finish that laundry later this weekend,” rather than leaving it running and thinking “I pay for the darned electricity and I’ll use it any time I want to.” Or that someone in Canmore just put on a sweater and a pair of slippers and turned down the thermostat, instead of railing about the Libs.

Imagine a community where all of its members are willing to be inconvenienced in some minor way to improve the circumstances of the community as a whole.

Oh, wait a minute — isn’t that exactly what every community is actually supposed to be?

If you can’t stand the heat of that basic part of living in a community, why not get out of the communal kitchen?