The Pulse (1988)

An intelligent pulse of electricity moves from house to house. It's really a smart grid. 

It terrorizes households by taking control of their appliances. The Internet of things run amok. The pulse kills some people but others wreck their house fighting it. Then the pulse travels along the power lines to the next house, and the horror repeats itself.

The Commerce Department last week reported the gross domestic product. A major component of the GDP is personal consumption expenditures, what is spent by American households on all goods and services. Plus what is spent on their behalf, by insurance companies for example.

A tiny slice of consumer expenditures is our electric bills. How tiny? In December 2015, just 1.37 percent of expenditures were to pay for electricity. 

It was mid-July 1980, and Elizabeth Warren was busy. She both submitted her article to Public Utilities Fortnightly, and married a fellow law professor. 

Iran held our hostages, and we led a boycott of the Moscow Olympics (following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan). Her article, “The Regulatory Lag Fallacy,” was published in the mid-August 1980 issue. 

Revenues from sales of electricity were down three billion dollars, nationally, 2015 through November, per the Energy Department. Unadjusted for inflation. That’s a decrease of nine tenths of a percent from the prior year.

The prime driver was sales to the industrial sector. Revenues from industrial companies were down over four billion dollars. As a percentage, that’s a drop of 6.7 percent. Not a typo, 6.7 percent! 

Average residential rates were 12.7 cents per kilowatt-hour nationally in 2015 through November, per the Energy Department. That’s slightly above what rates were in the prior year, by 1.2 percent. Unadjusted for inflation.

Electricity sales were soft last November, per Energy Department data released last week. A combination of mild weather and a disappointing economy led to overall sales off 4 percent from November 2014 and 3 percent from November 3013. 

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. 
- David Bowie 

From the Energy Department data released last week, around 3.8 billion megawatt-hours of electricity were generated last year through November. All but three-tenths of a percent was utility-scale. The small remainder was produced by commercial and residential distributed generators using solar.

Energy Department data through November 2015 was released last week. It’s stunning how far coal has fallen. 

In November, coal’s share of the nation’s electricity generation fell to 29 percent. That’s right, a number starting with a 2.