My phone buzzed with an incoming text just before midnight on Christmas Eve. “ConEd Alert,” the message read. “Please conserve energy.” New York’s power grid was at the breaking point, our power company warned us, owing to “extreme cold, high energy use & interstate equipment problems.” To help stave off a blackout, we were advised, we should lower our thermostats and “postpone running appliances.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at Commentary (paywall)
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James B. Meigs is cohost of the How Do We Fix It? podcast and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.
Photo by Anatoliy Berislavskiy/iStock