In 1752 before Ben Franklin invented Pizza, Gameboy, the iPad2 or Mexican food, he was contemplating how to conquer electricity. Being the genius he was, he decided go get it at its source, this being Zeus. Strapping himself to a kite, and equipping some homemade lightning claws, he ascended through the clouds and into the realm of the Gods to battle it out with Zeus. This is a painting capturing the exact moment the battle started…
— description of the painting shown above, originally created by Jason Heuser. Posters available here.
My mother taught me how to create electricity when I was in Kindergarten. She rubbed a balloon vigorously in my hair, and then showed me how it stuck to the wall, like magic.
As she explained, this was a demonstration of “static electricity”. Not a terribly useful form of energy, unless you needed to stick balloons to the wall.
A rather different animal from the electricity you could access by poking a metal fork into a wall socket. (Mother did not demonstrate that. In fact, she warned me against it. In vain.)
Only much later (in third grade) was I taught that lightning is also a form of static electricity. Also not terribly useful, unless you wanted to fry all the electronic devices in someone’s house, or start a catastrophic forest fire. You know, the kind of thing a divine being might want to do.
People used to think lightning was controlled by the god, Zeus. To frighten or punish us, in an effort to keep us in line.
Now we think no one controls it. We still get frightened and punished, but for no good reason.
I noticed an article here in the Daily Post, by environmental writer Allen Best, who publishes the informative online journal, BigPivots.com, about the ongoing “energy transition” in Colorado and around the region. His article was titled, “Time to Say ‘No’ to Electric Rate Increases?”
It might be too late to ask that question.
He shared a comparison chart showing how much an average customer is paying in various Colorado communities. My electricity is provided by LPEA, which — according to this chart — is in the middle of the pack, cost-wise, at about $119 per month. The lowest cost was in Fort Morgan at $61. The highest cost is in Holyoke at $148.
Electricity is all around us, in 2024. We’re literally surrounded, in more than one sense of the word. I have literally dozens of outlets in my house that I could poke a fork into. (I won’t, but I could.).
But to Ben Franklin, electricity was practically useless. He had forks, but no outlets. Nor did he need any outlets.
He had a kite, but nowhere to plug it in, so he had to wait for Zeus to work himself into a bad mood.
Like most people in Pagosa, I pay my electric bill to LPEA, which got its start during the unwinding of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, back in the 1940s. The idea was to allow people in rural Southwest Colorado to use electric light bulbs.
Pretty harmless, in the beginning. Just a little light bulb. Maybe an electric alarm clock. Then came the washing machines, electric toothbrushes, microwave ovens, desktop computers, and now, electric cars.
We’re caught up in the (inexorable?) drive to replace fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels.
Does anyone have any idea what problems this is going to cause? We’ve gotten used to driving our cars everywhere — even to the corner grocery store, two blocks away — and heating our homes with fossil fuels, because Exxon and Shell and Chevron learned how to poke their forks into Mother Earth and suck out the oil and gas, for profitable purposes. (Actually, they poked with drilling rigs, but I like the “fork” analogy.)
Other people also figured out how to do this. The three biggest oil companies are no longer Exxon and Shell and Chevron. The biggest companies are China National Petroleum Corporation, Sinopec (China Petrochemical), and Saudi Aramco.
No matter how great we might want to make America, we no longer own the biggest gas cans.
There’s a lot of energy in a gasoline can. (As my mother also warned me about.) And in a propane tank.
There’s even more energy, in an oil refinery. As people have learned.
Are we crazy enough to think we can replace all this “petroleum energy” with “electric energy”?
We seem to be just going along, living our same old lives, with some of us believing that LPEA and Zeus and Ben Franklin will provide all the electricity we will need to keep our thermostats at 72 degrees, our air conditioners running all summer, and our cars topped up with electrons.
My advice: remember to turn off the light bulb, when you go out in your electric car.