Electricity Was a Luxury under Communist Rule

Today, when I enter a public building or store where the lighting is dim, I am immediately transported to the depressing life we lived under communist rule. The immediate reaction is to exit the building.

My entire childhood, grandma’s house, six miles from the biggest refinery in the south, was illuminated by an anemic oil lamp. Years later, their village finally got electricity.

A 40 W bulb was dangling from the ceiling, too weak and inefficient to even light up grandma’s small bedroom. Things and people inside looked yellow and sickly.

The six-mile road from the city to the village remained a gravel road until the communists were dethroned. The rickety bus we traveled on to see grandma had a large hole in the floorboard and fumes and dust billowed inside. There was no running water and no septic tank, just an outhouse. We pumped water from a well.

We did not complain because there was nobody to complain to, the Communist Party bureaucrats ran everything, with the greatest ineptitude. They provided sporadically our electricity, water, hot water, gas, steam heat, food, health care, and concrete apartment housing in which we were forced to live. Their rules and governance were neither efficient nor humane.

When I left in late 1970s, people were desperate to escape the life of misery they endured under the boot of the Communist Party’s socialist republic regime, but few were able to. I considered myself lucky to leave even though I left behind everything I loved, my parents, my family, and my friends.

When people thought that life could not get any harder, it did. The dictator decided in 1981 that Romanians should sacrifice more and live by the light of candles and oil lamps - electricity was cut off daily at sunset. If people had refrigerators, food inside spoiled. Elevators for high rise apartments (nine stories) stopped between floors when the power was cut off, and the unlucky riders were left stranded inside.

In 1981 Ceausescu’s regime also invented a new program called “rational illumination.” According to this irrational program, a two-bedroom apartment could only have one 40 W bulb. An energy snitch was assigned to each bloc entry to check apartments for violators. If the bulb was 60W, a fine was given on the spot. TVs could only run two hours a day. The programs were not great, but it was the interdiction that angered the population.

This forced rationing of energy intensified in 1984-1985. It was bad enough that people had to ration food, water, gas, hot water, steam for heat, and even space, but energy? While the people tripped in the dark, Romania, a major producer of oil and gas, was exporting energy elsewhere so the country could pay its debt to the west.

Without electricity life was even harder in wintertime. Heating with steam was minimal at best. People slept with their clothes on. Windows were covered with comforters to stop the frigid air from coming in. The room temperature was 45 Fahrenheit, and people had to wash with freezing water, dress in darkness, and travel to work on streets without lights. The regime touted on its national radio the “bright accomplishments of socialism.”

Ever the survivalists, people bought large bags of candles and built a reserve in their closets. Students studied by candlelight or oil lamps inherited from their grandmas.

The bizarre situation of living in a modern city in high-rise apartments with elevators that did not work and older people stuck in their apartments because they were unable to climb stairs daily, was best described by the coined phrase “blindman’s Sunday.”

The communist system was so irrational that people kept mostly in darkness could watch their dear leader, during the two hours of television allowed, dedicate energy from power plants and hydropower plants for export while Romanians stayed in darkness and their food spoiled in refrigerators in the heat of summer. In winter, window sills became their refrigerators but had to fight the clever crows.

Restaurants and cafeterias were permitted to have three items on the menu. It is unclear why there were only three since the atheists did not believe in the Trinity. Food portions were weighed in grams and people were assigned specific caloric daily values according to the exertion in their professions. Customers ate in semi-darkness.

It is hard to imagine electricity as a luxury good or service, but it was. We take electricity for granted in this country, cheap and easily available energy. Considering the massive development of energy-gobbling data centers, we should not.

As Romania has proven, electricity was a luxury which the police state gave and took away as it pleased. One communist dictator kept twenty-three million humans in darkness for years, with light from candles, while exporting their energy abroad.

The moral of the story is, stay away from socialism, communism, and any other ism that guarantees free everything because there is no such thing as free, someone has to pay for it. 

Remember that there is no such thing as democratic socialism, it’s a Democrat Party invention, but there is socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. Communists lie and never deliver on their empty promises. Communism never ends well when their reign of misery and poverty grips peoples’ lives.

Are Germany's High Electricity Rates Coming to the United States?

Environmentalists have told us that we must reduce the escalating levels of CO2 or we risk a complete meltdown of our entire global ice cap and massive planetary destruction. Not only is the ice cap 60 percent larger this year but we have been in a cooling period for the past 16 years. Even the United Nation’s expert on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had to admit that their computer modeling predicting global warming Armageddon was wrong.

Based on this alarmist erroneous information, most countries have made and are making fundamental changes to the way they live and do business. Germany was one of the first European countries to jump on the wind and solar renewable energy bandwagon, abandoning nuclear power generation after the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Consequently, according to Spiegel Online International, Germans were forced to pay the highest electricity rates in Europe. “Germany’s energy poverty” hit the underprivileged the hardest when “electricity became a luxury good.” Welfare and pension checks were not adjusted to accommodate for higher prices. Over 300,000 Germans a year have their electricity cut off because they cannot afford to pay their electric bills. “Two-thirds of the price increase is due to new government fees, surcharges and taxes.”

The renewable energy is generating so many tax surcharges, Germans can no longer keep up – there is a surcharge to finance the power grids, and collateral damage charges from energy surplus or deficit, depending on the weather and the time of the day.

In winter time, when the wind stops blowing, the coal and oil power plants are fired up to provide electricity, releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the maligned carbon dioxide that is so necessary for plant life to thrive.

Wind turbines are turned off if there is too much electricity coming from the grid. But consumers have to pay for the “phantom electricity” the turbines are theoretically generating.

On numerous occasions, Germany pays fees to dump already subsidized green energy. Experts call this "negative electricity prices."

Plants, like ArcelorMittal steel in Hamburg that use up a lot of energy, are asked to shut down production if there is an electricity shortage in order to protect the smart grid. Ordinary electricity customers “are expected to pay to compensate these businesses for lost profits.”

Wind turbines on the offshore wind farms on the island of Borkum in the North Sea are spinning but are not connected to the grid yet – the connection cable won’t be ready until next year. The turbines must be kept running with Diesel fuel in order to prevent rusting.

There are many other hidden costs:

-          the ocean cables – and they are not cheap;

-          a giant yellow electrical socket the size of a building that is supposed to store and transport electricity through the cables at a cost of one billion euros but has a lifespan of 20 years;

-          stopping the entire wind generation operation during high seas;

-          stopping the operation when porpoises and their young are spotted (their hearing might be affected but nobody seems to care if humans are affected by the annoying hum);

-          low demand for electricity in the sparsely populated coastal regions, necessitating the installation of high-voltage power lines which transport electricity to the center and southern regions of Germany with a high population concentration;

-          no incentive for electricity storage because it may cause the smart grid to become unstable.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html

For Germany, it all adds up to a disaster in the making and an explosion of electricity prices per kWh, at least 40% or more. For those 300,000 or so Germans who cannot pay their bills annually, it is a cave dwelling existence in the dark.  If we consider Obama administration’s “War on Coal,” coal that generates 49% percent of our electricity, high prices are coming soon to our homes via the drone attached to our houses, the Smart Meter.

I recall my childhood with my grandparents who only lived 5 miles from town but did not have electricity until the mid-1970s. It was very hard reading by an oil lamp. We had to go to bed at sundown. No radio, no TV, no reading in the dark, no reading during the day, too many chores to do, nothing but a primitive lifestyle revolving around planting, weeding, and harvesting crops. We gathered in pitch darkness in the road sometimes and exchanged stories about daily happenings. Must must we go back to this lifestyle and why?