Nobody Calls It Rationing

Two clocks stop on the same year.

2045 is the 100th birthday of the money system built after World War II. The dollar on top. And 2045 is the year Ray Kurzweil says the machines pass us. One year, two endings. We're the people standing in the gap between them.

So imagine it's 2045. Your thermostat gives you a range, not a number. Your power bill has two prices… one if you let the grid steer your house, one if you don't. The largest building in your county has no windows and forty-one people in it. And a nuclear plant runs flat out ten miles away, every watt of it sold to someone else.

It sounds like science fiction. But every piece of it is already being built.

Data centers now eat about 6% of all US power. One turbine maker is sitting on a 116-gigawatt backlog and booking new orders into 2031. In the last big grid auction east of the Mississippi, data centers drove $6.3 billion of the bill. And towns in at least 14 states have hit pause on new ones.

Here's the thing. We are living in the last twenty years of the old world.

Each issue works the same way. First a letter from someone living in 2045. Then we snap back to now and show you the sourced numbers that make the letter possible. Fiction, then evidence. Read both.

It hit 104 today.

I spent the whole morning on the phone, and not one of those calls was to sell anything.

That's the job now. I'm a curtailment coordinator for the Green Springs Load Co-op.

It's a big title for a simple thing: I call people and ask them to turn things off.

My block covers 4,100 homes, and when the grid runs tight a message lands on my tablet.

Then I start dialing.

Today it came at 11:40. Tier 3. Ninety minutes to shed 18 megawatts.

I called Ellen Praeger first. I've known her since fourth grade, and she's 71 now, and her brick house holds heat like a kiln.

"Ellen, it's Rudy. We're in a window."

She didn't argue, because she never does.

She said okay, filled a bowl with ice, and went out to sit on the porch.

Same as her mother did in 1970.

Nobody calls it rationing. The words on my screen are voluntary flexibility.

You can say no. Say no three times in one season and your rate class changes… and then you pay the open price. Nobody says no three times.

Here's what people from your time don't picture.

The lights stay on and nothing dramatic happens. Your thermostat just quietly hands you a range instead of a number.

Twelve miles from my kitchen there's a building called Cardinal Ridge.

It has no windows, forty-one people work inside it, and it pulls 2.1 gigawatts without ever dipping.

Cardinal Ridge does not flex. Its power contract was signed in 2031 and it runs flat, day and night, hot and cold.

There's a line in that contract about firm, non-interruptible load, and I could say it in my sleep.

So when the county runs tight, it isn't Cardinal Ridge that sits on a porch with a bowl of ice.

It's Ellen.

They woke the old reactor up over in Fluvanna the year my son finished school.

The whole county threw a party. Bands, funnel cake, a man in a foam atom suit.

Then we read the fine print, and every watt of it had been sold for twenty years before the first rod went in.

We waited eleven years for a gas turbine.

Ordered in 2029, delivered in 2040. By then the load it was meant to cover had doubled twice.

You want to know what surprises me? Most days… I'm not angry.

My bill is 96 dollars, and it's been 96 dollars for four years, because flex homes get a locked rate.

Ellen's is 96 too. Our neighbor Dale wouldn't sign, and he pays four hundred and change in August.

And the money came. Lord, did it come.

New middle school. Two clinics. Roads out here better than the roads in Richmond.

My son is a coolant tech at Cardinal Ridge and he makes more than his father and I ever made together.

So it's not a horror story. It's a trade… and we made it with our eyes open.

What I miss isn't the cheap power, because power is fine if you play along.

I miss not thinking about it.

I miss leaving the air on for the dog, and walking into a cold house in July, and running the dryer at two in the afternoon because the clothes were wet and it was two in the afternoon.

In other words… I miss being a customer instead of a participant.

The window shut at 1:10 and we shed 19.4 megawatts.

I logged it and made a sandwich.

Ellen went back inside around four, and she called to tell me her tomatoes do better on the porch than they ever did in the yard.

Then she asked if there'd be another window tomorrow.

There will be. There's one most days now.