A grid is a "maintain or die" system for an industrialized society, it is as important for the running of our culture as clean water is for human survival.

But that only mean that you must maintain it, its not physically impossible, you only have to work! That the worlds largest economy should be unable to do that is a crazy thought.

A "get out of reality free" card. I love it!

I thought the article was pretty dumb. It makes the same mistake of equating physical power, in this case electricity instead of oil, with economic and political power. Maybe the author has a good grasp of how the electrical grid works, but he obviously has no grasp of how the rest of the world works. California imports a lot of power from out of state, and yet in terms of economic and political power the state wields a lot more than Nevada or Arizona. This directly demonstrates the utter falsehood of the BS spouted in the article to support collapse.

The author also doesn't take into account that much of installed PV would be distributed and not add any transmission to the grid, rather it would reduce it. Once again the idea that just because electrical power generation is distributed therefore political and economic power must also be distributed is just crap. I generate my own power, but unfortunately I'm still a part of the United States and its economy. At times I really wish I wasn't, but not having to buy electrical power from the local utility does very little to increase my independence.

when in reality we will hit every branch on the way down that we touched

How could that be possible? History is never so perfectly mirrored. More importantly, the resources that made those previous eras possible no longer exist. Most of the "branches" in question were fundamentally provided by agriculture, for instance. Our Green Revolution began not as a fluke, but because we had finally consumed all arable land on the planet, and had turned much of it to desert. Without fertilizers, very little of the world can still be farmed, even without climate change. I'm afraid that while this scenario has that scent of common-sense truth, I simply cannot figure out any way in which it could possibly be supported once we get down to the details.

only many generations and 100's of years later to end up in a form of tribalism if anyone survives.

I believe that the map will open up first in those areas where it most recently closed. There are even now areas where tribalism is possible--even in fairly surprising locales. This will only increase as civilization contracts in fits and starts. Sure, in 50 years, you'll undoubtedly be able to find functioning cities. But you'll also be able to find new tribes forming, not out of ideology, but because it's the only way of life that fundamentally works. Even in New Orleans after Katrina, people began forming tribes almost immediately. In any crisis, humans instinctively form tribal structures. I think it's evident that we can expect more, not less, of this as the alternative breaks down.

and how many times has it been pointed out that price in any one currency system is a very bad indicator of the actual cost of something?

The US consumes about 4000 billion kWh/year.  If we spent $100 billion on new transmission capacity over 10 years, that's $10 billion/year or 0.25¢/kWh.  I get the feeling this is manageable.

But electric consumption is very peaky; the average is less than half our total nameplate generating capacity.  If we cap or slightly reduce our peak electric consumption while raising the average, we could move much more energy over the same grid without any expansions.  I don't know what this might cost; it depends far too much on the specific technology involved (from ice-storage A/C to PHEV cars).  Some of these measures may reduce costs, by eliminating the need for peaking plants and spinning reserves.  If we got seriously into vehicles like the Chevy Volt and every year we replaced 8.5 million old cars achieving 22 MPG average (13,000 mi/yr) with 8.5 million new ones using 250 Wh/mile for 2/3 of their driving and 50 MPG for the rest, we'd boost electric consumption by 18.4 billion kWh/yr (about 0.46%) while cutting gasoline use by about 4.3 billion gallons/year/year.  At 10¢/kWh and $3/gallon, the juice would cost $1.84 billion/year and the gasoline savings would be $12.9 billion/year.  (This could be doubled by building more than 50% PHEV's.)

That would pay for the grid improvements right there.  Strange, innit?

Electrical deregulation will be a thing of the past. Within a few years I have no doubt we will have moved back to more regulation and put this disaster of deregulation behind us. We'll look back on it as just another failure of uber-rightwing ideology, the false idea that everything will operate more efficiently and cheaply under competition. Some systems simply must be centrally planned in order to operate effectively.

I view the ideological course over the next century being one of determining which systems benefit from competition and free markets, and which benefit from central planning and coordination. The idea that free markets work for everything is just as false as the idea that central planning works for everything. We need to move beyond black and white ideology and go with what actually works on a case by case basis.

Electrical deregulation is just an example of out of control ideology, and once it fails soundly in the Republican bastion of Texas it will be dead everywhere.

Did you follow through to Jason's self description?

Life Goals: Tearing down civilization in order to make his model obsolete.

I'm sure such things will show up in the forthcoming TOD "concept map."

The complexity of electric utility operations is in the process of being revolutionized - with the addition of vastly more complexity - through the move to smart grid technology. This recent conference is typical of the buzz (irrational exuberance?) surrounding smart grid architecture, based on the integration of communications technology. It will be interesting to see how far down this road it will be possible to go. Its loudest proponents seem to see additional connectedness as equivalent to additional energy, whereas its critics discuss the diffculties inherent in applying huge flows of information to the control of an exquisitly balanced system in real time. The security of that information is a particular concern.

But we haven't had a massive failure in more than 3 years.

I truly cannot tell you how reassuring I find this fact.

Indeed, Tainter's had a very big impact on my thinking, along with Richard Manning, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Daniel Quinn and David Abram.

So a system where each house essentially generates a couple of kilowatts on a sunny day, and warms much of its own water (in both cases without generating additional CO2 after manufacture) and is well insulated so that its heating needs are easily met by a local forest is a sign of collapse compared to an exurban McMansion whose owners drive an hour to work at a company which handles patented financial 'products.'

As Tainter defines collapse, sure. Not least because a lot of people who have electricity now could not afford such a setup.

Collapse is not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't have to mean a fast-crash Mad Max scenario. Indeed, Tainter argues that such voluntary simplification may be the best solution. The problem is generally that once headed down the path of complexity, it becomes very difficult for societies to turn around. But it has been done.

It's Jeff Vail's comment I found most interesting:

Electricity really only makes sense because it can be centralized, and therefore the people at the top of the hierarchy can profit and be empowered through its control.

Talk about a defining your cake and eating it too - any alternative, any at all, which is not more 'complex' is 'collapse.'

Not quite. Choosing to make things less complex because complexity isn't working anymore is collapse. That's hardly redefining the issue; that's the way Tainter defined it, and his study remains the most fundamental in the study of collapse today. But if that jars with your more poetic ideas about what "collapse" means, consider what the implications of such localization is. Without dependence on complex networks like these, what is to compel obedience and investment in an increasingly irrelevant large-scale level of complexity? National, state and higher levels of complexity wither away from simple obsolescence. You are left with a collapse to a lower, more local level of complexity. It is a collapse in every sense of the word.

...and locally created entertainment is not seen as another sign of 'collapse,' but instead merely a good way to live.

So, fundamentally, your issue is that "collapse" is supposed to be a bad thing? Why is this? The literary tradition of collapse comes from elites who found their wealth and power suddenly ripped away from them; hence St. Jerome, "in the one city, the whole world dies." But as Tainter showed, collapses occur precisely because they're "merely a good way to live," and they happen once people understand that.

But this is a US-centric thing, right?

As, arguably, the primary pillar of modern civilized complexity, the U.S. has probably taken this trend farther than anyone else, but I do not believe it is a uniquely American problem. European companies and states still compete with each other, though it might be a slowly process, but it still pits long-term security against short-term gain. You are still making a "bad investment" if your grid is not running very close to capacity at all times.

But I do not share his view that when things are bad enough for civilization to go, some of us will just pick up and live happily ever after in the woods.

Thanks for the compliment, Franz. On this note, I'd like to point you to "Revolution & Evolution." In order to wipe out nomadic omnivorous hunter-gatherers would essentially require the decimation of all multi-cellular life on earth, and I do not believe we're in much danger of that quite yet. Nothing outside of civilization is going to kill it; it's doing a fine job of killing itself already. That means that the question is not when something will destroy it and how we will survive such a thing, but rather, a simple question of natural selection. Many, many things will be tried, but I believe that in the end, what will survive will be hunting, gathering, and permaculture/horticulture, with tribal social structures and animistic worldviews. This is not because of ideology, but because these are what are fundamentally necessary for a sustainable human society.