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Hospital Electricity Reliability underpins ICU operations, ventilators, medical devices, and diagnostics, reducing power outages risks via grid power and backup generators, while energy poverty and blackouts magnify COVID-19 mortality in vulnerable regions.

Key Points

Hospital electricity reliability is steady power that keeps ICU care, ventilators and medical devices operating.

✅ ICU loads: ventilators, monitors, infusion pumps, diagnostics

✅ Grid power plus backup generators minimize outage risk

✅ Energy poverty increases COVID-19 mortality and infection

Robert Bryce, Contributor

During her three-year career as a registered nurse, my friend, C., has cared for tuberculosis patients as well as ones with severe respiratory problems. She’s now caring for COVID-19 patients at a hospital in Ventura County, California, where debates about keeping the lights on continue amid the state’s energy transition. Is she scared about catching the virus? “No,” she replied during a phone call on Thursday. “I’m pretty unflappable.”

What would scare her? She quickly replied, “a power outage,” a threat that grows during summer blackouts when heat waves drive demand. About a year ago, while working in Oregon, the hospital she was working in lost power for about 45 minutes. “It was terrifying,” she said. 

C., who wasn’t authorized by her hospital to talk to the media, and thus asked me to only use the initial of her first name, said that COVID-19 patients are particularly reliant on electrical devices. She quickly ticked off the machines: “The bed, the IV machine, vital signs monitor, heart monitor, the sequential compression devices...” COVID-19 patients are hooked up to a minimum of five electrical devices, she said, and if the virus-stricken patient needs high-pressure oxygen or a ventilator, the number of electrical devices could be two or three times that number. “You name it, it plugs in,” she said.  

Today In: Energy

The virus has infected some 2.2 million people around the world and killed more than 150,000,including more than 32,000 people here in the U.S. While those numbers are frightening, it is apparent that the toll would be far higher without adequate supplies of reliable electricity. Modern healthcare systems depend on electricity. Hospitals are particularly big consumers. Power demand in hospitals is about 36 watts per square meter, which is about six times higher than the electricity load in a typical American home, and utilities are turning to AI to adapt to electricity demands during surges. 

Beating the coronavirus is all about electricity. Indeed, nearly every aspect of coronavirus detection, testing, and treatment requires juice. Second, it appears that the virus is more deadly in places where electricity is scarce or unreliable. Finally, if there are power outages in virus hotspots or hospitals, a real risk in a grid with more blackouts than other developed countries, the damage will be even more severe. 

As my nurse friend in Ventura County made clear, her ability to provide high-quality care for patients is wholly dependent on reliable electricity. The thermometers used to check for fever are powered by electricity. The monitors she uses to keep track of her patients, as well as her Vocera, the walkie-talkie that she uses to communicate with her colleagues, runs on batteries. Testing for the virus requires electricity. One virus-testing machine, Abbott Labs’ m2000, is a 655-pound appliance that, according to its specification sheet, runs on either 120 or 240 volts of electricity. The operating manual for a ventilator made by Hamilton Medical is chock full of instructions relating to electricity, including how to manage the machine’s batteries and alarms. 

While it may be too soon to make a direct connection between lack of electricity and the lethality of the coronavirus, the early signs from the Navajo reservation indicate that energy poverty amplifies the danger. The sprawling reservation has about 175,000 residents, but it has a higher death toll from the virus than 13 states. About 10 percent of Navajos do not have electricity in their homes and more than 30 percent lack indoor plumbing. 

The death rate from the virus on the reservation now stands at 3.4 percent, which is nearly twice the global average. In the middle of last week, the entire population of Native American tribes in the U.S. accounted for about 1,100 confirmed cases of the virus and about 44 deaths. Navajos accounted for the majority of those, with 830 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 28 deaths. 

On Saturday night, the Navajo Times reported a major increase, with 1,197 positive cases of COVID-19 on the reservation and 44 deaths. Other factors may contribute to the high infection and mortality rates on the reservation, including  high rates of diabetes, obesity, and crowded residential living situations. That said, electricity and water are essential to good hygiene and health authorities say that frequent hand washing helps cut the risk of contracting the virus. 

The devastation happening on Navajoland provides a window into what may happen in crowded, electricity-poor countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It also shows what could happen if a tornado or hurricane were to wipe out the electric grid in virus hotspots like New Orleans, as extreme weather increasingly afflicts the grid nationwide. Sure, most American hospitals have backup generators to help assure reliable power. But those generators can fail. Further, they usually burn diesel fuel which needs to be replenished every few days. 

The essential point here is that our hospitals and critical health care machines aren’t running on solar panels and batteries. Instead, they are running on grid power that’s being provided by reliable sources — coal, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear power — which together produce about 89 percent of the electricity consumed in this country, even as Russian hacking of utilities highlights cyber risks. The pandemic — which is inflicting trillions of dollars of damage on our economy and tens of thousands of deaths — underscores the criticality of abundant and reliable electricity to our society and the tremendous damage that would occur if our health care infrastructure were to be hit by extended blackouts during the fight to stop COVID-19.

In a follow-up interview on Saturday with my friend, C., she told me that while caring for patients, she and her colleagues “are entirely dependent on electricity. We take it for granted. It’s a hidden assumption in our work,” a reminder echoed by a grid report card that warns of dangerous vulnerabilities. She quickly added she and her fellow nurses “aren’t trained or equipped to deal with circumstances that would come with shoddy power. If we lost power completely, people will die.”

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Geothermal Power Plant Risks include hydrogen sulfide leaks, toxic gases, lava flow hazards, well blowouts, and earthquake-induced releases at sites like PGV and the Geysers, threatening public health, grid reliability, and environmental safety.

Key Points

Geothermal Power Plant Risks include toxic gases, lava impacts, well failures, and induced quakes that threaten health.

✅ Hydrogen sulfide exposure can cause rapid pulmonary edema.

✅ Lava can breach wells, venting toxic gases into communities.

✅ Induced seismicity may disrupt grids near PGV and the Geysers.

If lava reaches Hawaii’s PGV geothermal power plant, it could release of deadly hydrogen sulfide gas. That’s the latest potential danger from the Kilauea volcanic eruption in Hawaii. Residents now fear that lava flow will trigger a meltdown at the Puna Geothermal Venture (PGV) power plant that would release even more toxic gases into the air.

Nobody knows what will happen if lava engulfs the PGV because magma has never engulfed a geothermal power plant, Reuters reported. A geothermal power plant uses steam and gas heated by lava deep in the earth to run turbines that make electricity.

The PGV power plant produces 25% of the power used on Hawaii’s “Big Island.” The plant is considered a source of clean energy because geothermal plants burn no fossil fuels and produce little pollution under normal circumstances, even as nuclear retirements like Three Mile Island reshape low-carbon options.

The Potential Danger from Geothermal Energy

The fear is that the lava would release chemicals used to make electricity at the plant. The PGV has been shut down and authorities moved an estimated 60,000 gallons of flammable liquids away from the facility. They also shut down wells that extract steam and gas used to run the turbines.

Another potential danger is that lava would open the wells and release clouds of toxic gases from them. The wells are typically sealed to prevent the gas from entering the atmosphere.

The most significant threat is hydrogen sulfide, a highly toxic and flammable gas that is colorless. Hydrogen sulfide normally has a rotten egg smell which people might not detect when the air is full of smoke. That means people can breathe hydrogen sulfide in without realizing they have been exposed.

The greatest danger from hydrogen sulfide is pulmonary edema; the accumulation of fluid in the lungs, which causes a person to stop breathing. People have died of pulmonary edema after just a few minutes of exposure to hydrogen sulfide gas. Many victims become unconscious before the gas kills them. Long-term dangers that survivors of pulmonary edema face include brain damage.

Hydrogen sulfide can also cause burns to the skin that are similar to frostbite. Persons exposed to hydrogen sulfide can also suffer from nausea, headaches, severe eye burns, and delirium. Children are more vulnerable to hydrogen sulfide because it is a heavy gas that stays close to the ground.

Geothermal Danger Extends Far Beyond Hawaii

The danger from geothermal energy extends far beyond Hawaii. The world’s largest collection of geothermal power plants is located at the Geysers in California’s Wine Country, and regulatory timelines such as the postponed closure of three Southern California plants can affect planning.

The Geysers field contains 350 steam production wells and 22 power plants in Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino counties. Disturbingly, the Geysers are located just north of the heavily-populated San Francisco Bay Area and just west of Sacramento, where preemptive electricity shutdowns have been used during extreme fire weather. Problems at the Geysers might lead to significant blackouts because the field supplies around 20% of the green energy used in California.

Another danger from geothermal power is earthquakes because many geothermal power plants inject wastewater into hot rock deep below to produce steam to run turbines, a factor under review as SaskPower explores geothermal in new settings. A geothermal project in Switzerland created Earthquakes by injecting water into the Earth, Zero Hedge reported. A theoretical threat is that quakes caused by injection would cause the release of deadly gases at a geothermal power plant.

The dangers from geothermal power might be much greater than its advocates admit, potentially increasing reliance on natural-gas-based electricity during supply shortfalls.

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Kenya Power token glitches, inflated bills disrupt prepaid meters via M-Pesa paybill 888880 and third-party vendors like Vendit and Dynamo, causing delays, fast-depleting tokens, and billing estimates; customers report weekend outages and business losses.

Key Points

Service failures delaying token generation and disputed charges from estimated meter readings and slow processing.

✅ Impacts M-Pesa paybill 888880 and authorized third-party vendors

✅ Causes delays, fast-depleting tokens, weekend business closures

✅ Linked to system downtime, billing estimates, meter reading gaps

Kenya Power is again on the spotlight following claims of inflated power bills and a glitch in its electronic payment system that made it impossible to top up tokens on prepaid meters.

Thousands of customers started experiencing the hitch in tokens generation on Friday evening, with the problem extending through the weekend.

Small businesses such as barber shops that top up multiple times a week were hardest hit.

“My business usually thrives during weekends but I was forced to close early in the evening due to lack of power although I had paid for the tokens that were never generated,” said Mr John Kamau, a fast food restaurant owner in Nairobi.

Kenya Power processes up to 200,000 electronic transactions per day for power users, with 85 per cent done through its Safaricom M-Pesa paybill number 888880.

The remaining share is handled by its authorised third party vendors such as Vendit (paybill number 501200) and Dynamo (800904), which charge a premium for the transaction.

The sole electricity distributor admitted its system encountered challenges that crippled token generation across all vendors, advising customers on prepaid meters to buy the units from Kenya Power banking halls across the country until normalcy returned.

STATEMENT

“The IT team is trying to figure out where the problem was before we issue a comprehensive statement on the issue,” the firm responded to Nation queries, adding that the issue had been resolved by yesterday afternoon.

Customers who use Vendit confirmed to Nation they had successfully bought tokens yesterday afternoon.

However, there have been complaints that third party vendors process tokens almost in real time, unlike Kenya Power which, despite indicating a 30 minute delay in its service promise, sometimes takes up to six hours.  

But other users complained of inflated power bills after being slapped with abnormally high charges.

TOKENS

The holder of account number 30624694, for instance, received a post-paid bill of Sh16,765 last month, up from Sh894 the previous month.

She indulged the company and ended up paying just over Sh1,000.

There have also been complaints of tokens getting depleted too fast. For instance, one customer who normally uses Sh4,000 per month complained of her credit running out in a week.

Kenya Power maintains it cannot read all post-paid meters across the country, compelling it to make estimates for a number of customers.

The company argues it is not cost-effective to have meter readers go to all homes. The firm recently indicated plans to put all domestic consumers on prepaid meters to reduce non-payment of electricity bills and cut operation costs on meter reading and postage.

POWER CONSUMPTION

The Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed firm has also adopted a new integrated customer management system to enable consumers to self-check their power consumption and understand their electricity bill and payment obligations through a phone app.

In the past, concerns have been rife that customers often encounter delays when buying tokens through paybill number 888880, unlike through other vendors.

This has raised questions on the ownership of the vendors and the cash commissions they are entitled to, with holiday scam warnings circulating in some markets as well.

FOUL PLAY

Kenya Power has, however, denied any foul play, saying the authorisation of other vendors was to ease pressure on its payment channel, which handles 85 per cent of the nearly 200,000 transactions per day.

“In fact we have 11 vendors, including Equitel, it’s just that people are only aware of Vendit and Dynamo because they have been aggressive in their marketing,” the company said.

Kenya Power has been battling court cases over inflated power bills after it emerged that the utility firm was backdating bills worth Sh10.1 billion from last November.

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Electric weed-zapping farm robots enable precision agriculture, using autonomous mapping, per-plant targeting, and robotics to reduce pesticides, improve soil health, boost biodiversity, and lower costs with data-driven, selective weeding and seed-planting workflows.

Key Points

Autonomous machines that map fields, electrocute weeds per plant, and plant seeds, cutting pesticides, inputs, and costs.

✅ Precision agriculture: per-plant targeting reduces pesticide use up to 95%.

✅ Autonomous mapping robot surveys 20 hectares per day for weed data.

✅ Electric weeding and seeding improve soil health, biodiversity, and ROI.

On a field in England, three robots have been given a mission: to find and zap weeds with electricity, as advances in digitizing the electrical system continue to modernize power infrastructure, before planting seeds in the cleared soil.

The robots — named Tom, Dick and Harry — were developed by Small Robot Company to rid land of unwanted weeds with minimal use of chemicals and heavy machinery, complementing emerging options like electric tractors that aim to cut on-farm emissions.
The startup has been working on its autonomous weed killers since 2017, and this April launched Tom, its first commercial robot which is now operational on three UK farms. The other robots are still in the prototype stage, undergoing testing.

Small Robot says robot Tom can scan 20 hectares (49 acres) a day, collecting data, with AI-driven analysis guiding Dick, a "crop-care" robot, to zap weeds. Then it's robot Harry's turn to plant seeds in the weed-free soil.

Using the full system, once it is up and running, farmers could reduce costs by 40% and chemical usage by up to 95%, the company says, and integration with virtual power plants could further optimize energy use on electrified farms.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization six million metric tons of pesticides were traded globally in 2018, valued at $38 billion.

"Our system allows farmers to wean their depleted, damaged soils off a diet of chemicals," says Ben Scott-Robinson, Small Robot's co-founder and CEO.

Zapping weeds
Small Robot says it has raised over £7 million ($9.9 million). Scott-Robinson says the company hopes to launch its full system of robots by 2023, which will be offered as a service at a rate of around £400 ($568) per hectare. The monitoring robot is placed at a farm first and the weeding and planting robots delivered only when the data shows they're needed — a setup that ultimately relies on a resilient grid, where research into preventing ransomware attacks is increasingly relevant.

To develop the zapping technology, Small Robot partnered with another UK-based startup, RootWave, while innovations like electricity from snow highlight the breadth of emerging energy tech.

"It creates a current that goes through the roots of the plant through the soil and then back up, which completely destroys the weed," says Scott-Robinson. "We can go to each individual plant that is threatening the crop plants and take it out."

"It's not as fast as it would be if you went out to spray the entire field," he says. "But you have to bear in mind we only have to go into the parts of the field where the weeds are." Plants that are neutral or beneficial to the crops are left untouched.

Small Robot calls this "per plant farming" — a type of precise agriculture where every plant is accounted for and monitored.

A business case
For Kit Franklin, an agricultural engineering lecturer from Harper Adams University, efficiency remains a hurdle, even as utilities use AI to adapt to electricity demands that could support wider on-farm electrification.

"There is no doubt in my mind that the electrical system works," he tells CNN Business. "But you can cover hundreds of hectares a day with a large-scale sprayer ... If we want to go into this really precise weed killing system, we have to realize that there is an output reduction that is very hard to overcome."

But Franklin believes farmers will adopt the technology if they can see a business case.

"There's a realization that farming in an environmentally friendly way is also a way of farming in an efficient way," he says. "Using less inputs, where and when we need them, is going to save us money and it's going to be good for the environment and the perception of farmers."

As well as reducing the use of chemicals, Small Robot wants to improve soil quality and biodiversity.

"If you treat a living environment like an industrial process, then you are ignoring the complexity of it," Scott-Robinson says. "We have to change farming now, otherwise there won't be anything to farm."

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Global Coal Power Decline 2019 signals a record fall in coal-fired electricity as China plateaus, India dips, and the EU and US accelerate renewables, curbing carbon emissions and advancing the global energy transition.

Key Points

A record 2019 drop in global coal power as renewables rise and demand slows across China, India, the EU, and the US.

✅ 3% global fall in coal-fired electricity in 2019.

✅ China plateaus; India declines for first time in decades.

✅ EU and US shift to renewables and gas, cutting emissions.

The world’s use of coal-fired electricity is on track for its biggest annual fall on record this year after more than four decades of near-uninterrupted growth that has stoked the global climate crisis.

Data shows that coal-fired electricity is expected to fall by 3% in 2019, or more than the combined coal generation in Germany, Spain and the UK last year and could help stall the world’s rising carbon emissions this year.

The steepest global slump on record is likely to emerge in 2019 as India’s reliance on coal power falls for the first time in at least three decades this year, and China’s coal power demand plateaus, reflecting the broader global energy transition underway.

Both developing nations are using less coal-fired electricity due to slowing economic growth in Asia as well as the rise of cleaner energy alternatives. There is also expected to be unprecedented coal declines across the EU and the US as developed economies turn to clean forms of energy such as low-cost solar power to replace ageing coal plants.

In almost 40 years the world’s annual coal generation has fallen only twice before: in 2009, in the wake of the global financial crisis, and in 2015, following a slowdown in China’s coal plants amid rising levels of deadly air pollution.

The research was undertaken by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air , the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and the UK climate thinktank Sandbag.

The researchers found that China’s coal-fired power generation was flatlining, despite an increase in the number of coal plants being built, because they were running at record low rates. China builds the equivalent of one large new coal plant every two weeks, according to the report, but its coal plants run for only 48.6% of the time, compared with a global utilisation rate of 54% on average.

The findings come after a report from Global Energy Monitor found that the number of coal-fired power plants in the world is growing, because China is building new coal plants five times faster than the rest of the world is reducing their coal-fired power capacity.

The report found that in other countries coal-fired power capacity fell by 8GW in the 18 months to June but over the same period China increased its capacity by 42.9GW.

In a paper for the industry journal Carbon Brief, the researchers said: “A 3% reduction in power sector coal use could imply zero growth in global CO2 emissions, if emissions changes in other sectors mirror those during 2018.”

However, the authors of the report have warned that despite the record coal power slump the world’s use of coal remained far too high to meet the climate goals of the Paris agreement, and some countries are still seeing increases, such as Australia’s emissions rise amid increased pollution from electricity and transport.

The US – which is backing out of the Paris agreement – has made the deepest cuts to coal power of any developed country this year by shutting coal plants down in favour of gas power and renewable energy, with utilities such as Duke Energy facing investor pressure to disclose climate plans. By the end of August the US had reduced coal by almost 14% over the year compared with the same months in 2018.

The EU reported a record slump in coal-fired electricity use in the first half of the year of almost a fifth compared with the same months last year. This trend is expected to accelerate over the second half of the year to average a 23% fall over 2019 as a whole. The EU is using less coal power in favour of gas-fired electricity – which can have roughly half the carbon footprint of coal – and renewable energy, helped by policies such as the UK carbon tax that have slashed coal-fired generation.

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We believe that the problems we face on the climate crisis are systemic and that fundamental societal change is needed. We will keep reporting on the efforts of individuals and communities around the world who are fearlessly taking a stand for future generations and the preservation of human life on earth. We want their stories to inspire hope. We will also report back on our own progress as an organisation, as we take important steps to address our impact on the environment.

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Ontario Pumped Storage advances as Ontario's largest energy storage project, delivering clean electricity, long-duration capacity, and grid reliability for peak demand, led by TC Energy and Saugeen Ojibway Nation, with IESO review underway.

Key Points

A long-duration storage project in Meaford storing clean power for peak demand, supporting Ontario's emission-free grid.

✅ Stores clean electricity to power 1M homes for 11 hours

✅ Partnership: TC Energy and Saugeen Ojibway Nation

✅ Pending IESO review and OEB regulation decisions

In a bid to accelerate the province's ambitions for clean economic growth, TC Energy Corporation has announced significant progress in the development of the Ontario Pumped Storage Project. The Government of Ontario in Canada has unveiled a plan to address growing energy needs as a sustainable road map aimed at achieving an emission-free electricity sector, and as part of this plan, the Ministry of Energy is set to undertake a final evaluation of the proposed Ontario Pumped Storage Project. A decision is expected to be reached by the end of the year.

Ontario Pumped Storage is a collaborative effort between TC Energy and the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. The project is designed to be Ontario's largest energy storage initiative, capable of storing clean electricity to power one million homes for 11 hours. As the province strives to transition to a cleaner electricity grid by embracing clean power across sectors, long duration storage solutions like Ontario Pumped Storage will play a pivotal role in providing reliable, emission-free power during peak demand periods.

The success of the Project hinges on the approval of TC Energy's board of directors and a fruitful partnership agreement with the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. TC Energy is aiming for a final investment decision in 2024, as Ontario confronts an electricity shortfall in the coming years, with the anticipated in-service date being in the early 2030s, pending regulatory and corporate approvals.

“Ontario Pumped Storage will be a critical component of Ontario’s growing clean economy and will deliver significant benefits and savings to consumers,” said Corey Hessen, Executive Vice-President and President, TC Energy, Power and Energy Solutions. “Ontario continues to attract major investments that will have large power needs — many of which are seeking zero-emission energy before they invest. We are pleased the government is advancing efforts to recognize the significant role that long duration storage plays — firming resources, including new gas plants under provincial consideration, will become increasingly valuable in supporting a future emission-free electricity system.” 

The Municipality of Meaford also expressed its support for the project, recognizing the positive impact it could have on the local economy and the overall electricity system of Ontario. Additionally, various stakeholders, including LiUNA OPDC, LiUNA Local 183, and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, lauded the potential for job creation, training opportunities, and resilient energy infrastructure as Ontario seeks new wind and solar power to ease a coming electricity supply crunch.

The timeline for Ontario Pumped Storage's progress includes a final analysis by the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to confirm its role in Ontario's electricity system and in balancing demand and emissions during the transition, to be completed by 30 September 2023. Concurrently, the Ministry of Energy will engage in consultations on the potential regulation of the Project via the Ontario Energy Board, while debates over clean, affordable electricity intensify ahead of the Ontario election, with a final determination scheduled for 30 November 2023.

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