But there’s an even bigger preparedness lesson in this week’s events: To protect yourself from power outages, bitch. Loudly and a lot.

You see, last year before Christmas, when temperatures were low, but not nearly as low as they were this week, the Tennessee Valley Authority subjected us to rolling blackouts. (They weren’t the only ones – Duke Energy did the same.)

The problem was, they had shut down a bunch of coal plants in favor of renewables (and also some gas and nukes under construction) but we lost the old power before they had the replacement plants online. This was basically due to a political desire to reduce carbon emissions as soon as possible. That left them with insufficient power to meet the demands during a pretty run of the mill cold snap.

There were voices in local media telling us that we should just put up with it, as it was a minor inconvenience in the service of saving the planet. Fortunately, those voices were drowned out by the much louder and more numerous voices of people (including moi) who thought that rolling blackouts due to insufficient generating capacity were a Third World solution, and that here in the First World the solution to insufficient generating capacity is more generating capacity.

[Darned straight. Texas did some of the same after the 2021 disaster, but perhaps not enough. — Ed]