Electricity and modern world.

 

What does having electricity mean in the modern world?

If I were to say, then the answer would be: Everything.

Why do I say so? Because without electricity, there is nothing but darkness.

And darkness brings nothing but fear and pushes us back in the time.

To understand this concept, let us try to understand what darkness means.

The life before 1880, the year when commercial operations of electricity begun, life was not pretty much safe. After the sun went down, it became dark and what does darkness brings with it? Fear. Lack of mobility. Lack of work. Possibility of crime. Almost all of the human activity goes down. I remember when I was a child and used to visit my village, the whole village would have had dinner and went to sleep by 7 pm. But now there is electricity. And things are not like the gone by years.

I have also observed that post-arrival of electricity, the level of social collaborations among the people of the village has gone down. They are mostly confined to their homes even in the evenings. Why is that?

Earlier, why did people come out of their homes and mingled with the community? What is the sociological impact of electricity on our society?

1.       Women used to wash clothes together on the river banks or the community pond. Now it has been replaced by the washing machine or electric motor pumps which gives you water in your own private courtyard.

2.       They used to come out and fetch water for collective use from ponds or rivers for cooking purposes but now electric motor suffices it. Hence low inter-mingling of the people.

3.       With sundown, their activities shut down, and with rising of the sun, their activities of sun.

4.       They used to go to freshen up early in the morning together. It still happens in the villages. But now with toilets constructed, they prefer to be at home. Although this is a good reason.

5.       When there was low mechanization, almost all of the members of the family used to do the work in the fields but now most works are being done by the tractor and mechanical equipment in part hence not all members need to be on the field. Hence less interaction.

6.       If we look at the agrarian set up and observe how the society and work had been organized,  the society was interdependent for almost all kinds of work you name it- collecting of firewoods, smoothing wheat for aata, irrigation works, etc- but with mechanization and coming up of market- there is a loosening of bond in society and rise of individualism. People don’t participate in the nuisances of the society simply because there is not enough incentives to do that. All their needs are being taken care by modern technologies and institutions.

As it has been said, everything happens in response of change. Nothing exist in isolation. There is a reason why it exists or why something is happening or why something is taking birth. At the root, there are very fundamental shifts taking place in society that would shape our collective future.

 

Okay, back to our topic after detour.

The modern world has been built on electricity. When we say the modern world, I mean to say all the systems and ideals, material and nonmaterial, the visible and nonvisible entity running this world.

For countries to run,  we have adopted a governance system of democracy. Which essentially is based on the fundamental ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity, and justice. There would be equal protection of rights of the individual from the states would be discouraged to abuse the rights of the people who elect them to power.  Remember, the ideals which we are talking has been mandated by law and has never ever been present  collectively in codified form at any single point in any era.

For for our markets to run, we have adopted the system of free-market theory i.e capitalism. Where anyone can participate in the market and market would reward as per competency, efficiency, and meritocracy. Although the system is imperfect and has its flaws, but it is what we have got for now.

Now remember, the modern standards of life has been set up by these two institutions. Democracy i.e in abstract or nonmaterial terms of rights, laws, justice, and material things i.e products of capitalism- cars, mobile phones, refrigerators, tv, oven,  entertainments’, cooking systems, and almost every single thing imaginable.

Now if you go to school, get good grades. Then you go to college then you specialize in something and then join a job and the money you earn from that job raises you standards of living and brings ease and efficiency in your life. in other words, by being an efficient or valuable contributing member in the system, you are rewarded to raise you living standards and help you family raise their life and living conditions.

But what would happen if you don’t get the opportunity to go to school in the first place?

What would have happened if you would have got the opportunity to study but there would be no power in your home for self study i.e 6pm to 5 am – 11 hours of darkness and 4 hours of study hours loss.

Thinking from opportunity point of view, how does a poor household decides that who they have to send to school and who they have to employ in the field, if there are one boy and one girl in the family? The reason why this question is important because this single decision can alter the course of the lives of the son and daughter. And in most poor and agrarian societies, the causalities are the females.

The rationality of the decision  made here about not sending her to school because it is directly related to the electricity. The important thing for the family is to utilize the day time as efficiently as possible and finish all the important task and not to leave anything post sunset. If somehow some task could be shifted post sunset and had there been electricity, the working time of the female child could be freed up and she could have been sent to the school. It could be one way of looking at things.

Now if female child is not given opportunity to go to school means a lot of things and would have a lot consequences for her for her future. In rural agrarian society, it means getting confined to the kitchen. And the kind of fuel the kitchen uses is biomass and the working temperature is somewhere 5 degrees higher than the outside temperature.  The fuel and working conditions of traditional kitchens are detrimental to health of women. But this is not just the issue. The entire day of a women gets tied to the kitchen, from finishing one phase of kitchen work they have to begin prep for another phase of the day and this routine goes on and on leaving them with almost no time for other leisure or productive activities.

With electricity or clean fuels like nat gas or some modern equipments, their work got automated and their time got released from daily repetitive chores. This is what empowerment is. They got an opp. To decide what to do with their time.

The access to opportunity as we say in the modern parlance is something skewed in the favour of societies having better delivery of electricity. They are able to enjoy the modern fruits of capitalism and are advancing further in the future. And somewhere around 3 billion people on this planet still do not have access to the power. And availability of power is one thing and stable avaiabilty of power is another things.

Availabity and stability of power in any society tells us a lot about the society, government, and political stability. In Iceland, they have stable government, per capita electricity consumption somewhere highest in the world, low population and high standard of living. They have very very stable govt sytem and hence stable power supplies. So much stable that in modern worlds one of the biggest consumer of the electricity is crypto mining networks and most of them are placed in the Iceland due to favorable climate, political system and energy laws.

Whereas in Lebanon, due to skirmishes with neighbouring countries, their power infrastructure has been attacked during airstrikes as it is a war strategy. Their political system is not so stable and hence unstable electricity supply. Per unit cost of prod of electricity of state unit is loss making avenues while the mafia generators where powerful people generate the electricity and supply electricity to the neighbourhood. So Lebanese people essentially pay two tariffs. One to the the unstable govt. companies and other to the back up generators of mafia.

In US , a lot of electricity is being utilized by the Colorado state because of the legalization of marijuara and marij entrepreneurs are drawing in huge electricity to make different products from it. In agri business, marijuana uses one of the most amount of electricity.

Iron law of nature. It simply  means that the rate at which society is evolving and hurting the environment and climate, one way is to shut everything down and go back to the dark ages. And the other things is to fund research and development to device technologies which could distribute the energy is more efficient, economical and environmental friendly manner.

That is why it is being said that an independent or community owner, green, small scale, micro grids are the future. it is being applied in Lebanon by the companies who are seeking to end the dependency on the state or generator mafia or turkish ship anchored in the ocean supplying energy to Lebanese only till the payment is coming. The infrastructure and storage parts of the grids are being sourced from china, assembled in india and then sources to Lebanon and micro grids are being set up and uninterrupted power supply is being given to the communities.

It is now that I have come to slowly understand that why electricity and infrastructure are so important. After tsunami or cyclone, if electricity is not restored in the region it almost impacts each and every citizen of the area whether they are students or business owner, it is a net loss of productivity and value and undo all the progress which the society had made. But the irony is that where watt consumption is higher, or the societies which have abundant power often use it for nefarious purpose whereas 3 billion people still do not participate in the modern economic system to produce value just because they didn’t have got opportunity to get in the system. Its irony and its strange. But we as a society need to push for alternative changes, push for better tomorrow and need for better policies which could turn the world into a more equitable place to live. How do we claim ourselves to be the best if more than 3 bn ppl are not even competing?