The zombies have taken over, the ice age occurred, and everyone decided to cut loose with the nukes. How much time do you have to set up the solar panels and wind turbines before the electrical grid fail? The Straight Dope takes a look…
Bottom line? My guess is that within 4-6 hours there would be scattered blackouts and brownouts in numerous areas, within 12 hours much of the system would be unstable, and within 24 hours most portions of the United States and Canada, aside from a rare island of service in a rural area near a hydroelectric source, would be without power. Some installations served by wind farms and solar might continue, but they would be very small. By the end of a week, I’d be surprised if more than a few abandoned sites were still supplying power.
I had an ultra-PC history Professorin at SDSU who was obsessed with Haiti, among other causes. She made quite a fuss about Americans’ unenlightened views about that country. (Even though I didn’t give a tinker’s cuss, ironically I ended up using that information for a brief at the Navy, an institution she roundly despises.) Anyway, she emphasized most heatedly that it isn’t “voodoo,” it’s “vu-dun,” a syncretic religion. Like I cared. And apparently the PC orthography for “zombie” is actually “zombi.” (Not to be confused with Signore Zamboni, the inventor of the ice-staking rink resurfacing machine.) A zombi(e) is, verily, a corpse come to life through the transmigration of an unsatisfied, tormented soul, or some such.
I didn’t pay much attention, despite getting an A in both courses I took with this loopy fanatic. We were supposed to feel guilty about Haiti’s plight, as well as patriarchy, the male sex drive, Madison Avenue causing women to form a negative body image, blah blah blah. Right after September 11 she said we ought to send in aid workers to diminish Al-Quaeda’s hostility. She was the epitome of a guilt-ridden white girl from the Midwest, the latter-day counterpart of equally noisome Methodist missionaries in China a century ago. The class was vile. I had never plowed through so many boring, worthless books and endured so much gibbering feminist rantage in my whole life. I didn’t care about Haiti then, and I don’t now. It’s beyond me, why someone would be interested in that sort of crap, instead of the history and culture of a country that produced, yes, the Nazi terror (but at least that isn’t boring), and, on the positive side of the equation:
Thomas Mann, Goethe, the Bauhaus, Hermann Hesse, Katarina Witt, Otto von Bismarck, Rainer Fassbinder, Frederick the Great, Robert Wagner, Siegfried, Siegfried and Roy, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, the Mercedes and the BMW, real bread, Kurt Tucholsky, Kurt von Schleicher, Heinrich Heine, Berthold Brecht, and Claudia Schiffer, –not to mention the guy who invented the “Umdrucker,” better known to us as the purple-ditto making machine.
Ach so.
If Haiti’s wretchedness is the fault of anyone, it’s the French; more than two centuries ago, they ruined the island’s environment and launched its civil society on a destructive path from which it has never recovered.