Country-style holidays

A bit of first-hand experience with energy security and the grid

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before but December 31 is my favourite day of every year. I love it more than birthdays. It marks the end of a year and the imminent beginning of another, full of opportunities for humankind to mess itself up ever worse. In short, I love December 31. And I spend it cooking.

Making food is a big and important part of my holiday mood and on no day is that truer than December 31. This year, I’d lined up several family staples for dinner and was working on them methodically when the lights went out. Luckily, I wasn’t using the oven at that precise moment and I was determined to not let anything spoil my mood, so I brushed it off, especially since the lights came back up fifteen minutes later.

Morning morphed into early afternoon, I’d put the New Year’s Eve pie in the oven and it was turning the right shade of golden-brown when the lights — and the oven — went out again.

This was our first holiday season in the country and we’d had similar short outages around Christmas, so we’d concluded that a lot of people must be coming from the city to the villages around it to celebrate with their parents and relatives, which would necessarily involve more cooking and more heating, ergo more demand for electricity.

The change in demand was literally visible: two months ago, when the water heater kicked in, there was no change in the level of lighting in the living room and my office. Last week, the whole house knew when the water heater kicked in because the lights dimmed.

The tech-savvy half of the Slav union had already expressed a suspicion that we are definitely not getting the 4 kW we are supposed to be getting per contract and vowed to look into it. The tech-ignorant half could only shrug and hope for the best.

Fifteen minutes after the power went out that December 31 afternoon, it came back on again and my pie finished baking relatively normally, owing not least to the spring weather outside. Feeling bold, I decided to add a coconut cake to the dinner menu and while it took about 50 minutes instead of the usual 30 to bake, bake it did, quite nicely.

With all the sensitive baking out of the way, it was time for the meat feast. I popped the casserole in the oven and settled back to relax, watch “Coupling” and wait for night to fall and the countdown to begin. An hour later the lights went out. They did not come back on after fifteen minutes. And, to add insult to injury, they seemed to be out in our house only.

Tech-savvy Slav checked everything that could be checked and concluded that there is no problem with the electrical equipment of the house. A knowledgeable neighbour of the sort that’s always around to lend a hand (salt of the earth, these people) concurred. The time had come to call the power company, after I took the festive casserole out of the oven and put it in front of the fireplace, which had become our single heat source.

There are few things I can think of that I detest more than “speaking” to an automated message but this is exactly what happened. And this automated message told me something quite interesting or, rather, confirmed something quite interesting that I already knew. The grid is as delicate as a mimosa flower. One extra touch and it folds.

The literal automated message said “Please hold if you are calling to report an outage outside the following areas:…” A long list followed that included, besides our village (no, the problem wasn’t with our house alone), a dozen other villages and a couple of dozen neighbourhoods in four or five cities across the region that this power company operates.

That’s how fragile the grid is. Even a grid that does not rely heavily on wind and solar but is comfortably coal- and nuclear-heavy. On that December 31, this fragility sparked a momentary panic and I wished we had splashed on a solar system with a big battery. It only lasted for a second but it says a lot.

Now, fairness requires that I note here that villages in Bulgaria are not known for their stable electricity supply. They’re a low priority, which is probably normal. The bigger the consumer, the higher up the agenda it is.

Fairness also requires that I note that things have improved immensely over the past decade or so. Ten years ago the house was probably getting half of those 4 kW. The lights didn’t just dim when the water heater came on, they also flickered and the fridge went out. Following a large-scale line replacements and upgrades, supply became a lot better. Except, apparently, during the winter holiday season, when demand clearly surged.

The question of whether the surge could not have been anticipated naturally arises here but, again, I expect the answer has to do with priorities and with the allocation of resources, which tend to be finite, even for one of the biggest power utilities in Europe.

To its credit, the company dealt with the problem quite quickly, considering the list of outages and my grim expectations. The power was back on two hours later and we didn’t have to celebrate New Year’s Eve in candle light. Which is when the water stopped because it gets pumped to the village with — you knew it — electric pumps and if at least one pump didn’t fail after a power outage we’d be living in Utopia.

On the first day of the new year there was normal power and water supply again, and my daughter had learned an important lesson about the grid and how vital it is not just for electricity supply but for water supply as well; for life as we know and like it, really.

Few people realise this, unless they live in a Bulgarian village or, I imagine, most villages everywhere. I’m thinking crisis tourism could become a profitable industry for bored, wealthy people looking for a new experience. Also, we’re getting a generator for next winter, just in case.

On a final note, all the electricians and water utility technicians who work on holidays and in the middle of the night to bring the lights and the water back on have my eternal gratitude because I remember times when they didn’t. Nobody could be bothered in those times.

Regrettably, there are still places where the utilities cannot be bothered to send a technician in a timely fashion, such as the region served in Romania by Enel. We could only hope this changes. And we could hope the energy transition as envisioned by our brave leaders falls through because I can’t help but wonder how long the outage would have lasted had we not been receiving our electricity from coal-powered plants but from wind mills and solar panels.