Dumbing Energy Down: Interruptible Power as Social Policy

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 12, 2026

“For a while, let’s eat a cold dinner here and there. Continuity costs too much. Climate change kills, and it kills vulnerable people first. Intermittency saves lives, and it saves vulnerable people first. Let the pause take its place in continuous climate activism. (David Hughes, below)

In case you missed it (I did), here is a trial balloon from several years ago for us (normal folk) to accept the shortcomings of wind and solar and promote power outages as social policy. Rich and poor. Brown, black, white. Old and young.

“To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity,” by David Hughes (Boston Review: October 2020) came with the subtitle, “Waiting to ensure uninterrupted power for everyone as we transition away from fossil fuels will cost too much time—and too many lives.”

Or maybe just the opposite: interruptible power risks productivity and lives.

Here are some read-to-believe quotations from “scholar-activist” David Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University:

• Many decades ago electricity became the new oxygen, and the vast majority of Americans today believe they need it every moment of every waking or sleeping hour.
• For those seriously concerned about climate change, the inverse—the demand for electrical continuity—may be the real problem.
• We ought to consider enduring much more than six hours of electrical downtime every year for the sake of transitioning more rapidly away from fossil fuels….
• … each household demanding continuous electricity marginally exacerbates the climate crisis. Perhaps, then, it is critical that we not store energy for these houses.
• Self-sacrifice is not popular, especially at home…. Forgoing the stove for a few hours is a different kind of sacrifice; it doesn’t degrade our quality of life so much as reschedule or interrupt activities. Delay is the kindest form of rationing….
• In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries … when breadwinners slept, so did production and trade. Factories of the Industrial Revolution, however, moved to continuous production. High-energy manufacturing—in blast furnaces, for example—was just too costly to stop and restart. The economy of making goods thus became an insomniac while the family slumbered.
• … the privileged [Americans] consume enough energy to set the pattern for everyone else. A familiar criticism of solar energy—“Can’t store. No power after four.”—thus continues to constrain the move from fossil fuels to renewables.

And a bit of realism comes in:

• Lithium-ion batteries are moving into position to overcome that constraint, but they create problems of their own. Like most form of mining, lithium extraction produces toxins—imposed, on this case, on indigenous down-winders in Chile. Also like mining, the lithium trade concentrates power and wealth in the hands of few, corporations. Sometimes called “bottlenecking,” this process converts a resource too plentiful for profit—like sunlight—into a scarce and lucrative commodity….
• To succeed, any one of these storage solutions would require the massive financial and political investment of a Green New Deal. We need to make that investment, certainly, in generating and storing renewable energy. But we don’t need to slow down the former while the latter catches up….

Back to the question of continuous power:

• Of course, hospitals and some industries require continuous power. But some of us—those of us fortunate enough to live in houses—can tolerate intermittency. We can pause the microwave.
• In fact, planned interruptions already happen elsewhere all the time. They are called “load shedding,” and households are the load. For a stretch in the late 1980s and 1990s, I lived in Harare, Zimbabwe, where the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) brought current to my house…. So ZESA planned a rotation among the suburbs. Generally, that meant losing power for half a day per week…. Only the utility’s reputation suffered: “ZESA” became Zimbabwe Electricity Sometimes Available.
• Some of us—those of us fortunate enough to live in houses—can tolerate intermittency. In fact, planned interruptions already happen elsewhere all the time.
• Puerto Rico’s equivalent agency, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), is widely and justifiably ridiculed. In 2018, a year after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans were still attempting to reconstruct the electricity supply…. [I]nhabitants of central Puerto Rico had successfully blocked an oil pipeline some years before. In the grandest vision, the upland could power its own homes and grow its own food too.
• Homeowners and residents didn’t want the lights to go out, even briefly…. Charities were already saturating Puerto Rico with “lanterns”—cylindrical devices containing a small panel, LED bulbs, and a USB-rechargeable battery. For everything else, one would need an energy storage device at least as large as a car battery.
• Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico provide models for what we might call pause-full electricity. By abiding an interlude—by shedding their load—people can preserve life near and far.
• Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico thus provide models for what we might call pause-full electricity. Admittedly, neither Zimbabweans nor Puerto Ricans chose to accept this rationing. And in Zimbabwe, official incompetence has reduced electricity to a nearly unbearable degree. Still, Zimbabwe’s past and Puerto Rico’s potential indicate just and feasible ways of living amid intermittency. With a pause, life goes on. By abiding that interlude—by shedding their load—people can preserve life near and far. If my town’s blackout will lessen, say, the force of Puerto Rico’s next hurricane, then, please, shed us half a day per week.            
• Continuity costs too much. Climate change kills, and it kills vulnerable people first. Intermittency saves lives.
• But responsible leadership must be prepared to dim the economy with shelter-in-place orders—if not in Washington, then in Wellington. When required for safety, interruption means survival and life.
• What applies in the pandemic also applies—and also with desperate urgency—in the climate crisis. We can live with some intermittency and rationing—at least until batteries and other forms of energy storage are up and running everywhere.
• Hospitals certainly need 100 percent reliable equipment—perhaps some “continuous” businesses and cell towers too. And, in cities, elevators, streetlights, and subways must run reliably…. We don’t need Nest or permanent telecommuting.
• For a while, let’s eat a cold dinner here and there. Continuity costs too much. Climate change kills, and it kills vulnerable people first. Intermittency saves lives, and it saves vulnerable people first. Let the pause take its place in continuous climate activism.