The Country That Ran Out of Power

A story with a surprisingly happy ending

One day a single mother was given an electric car by a generous rich uncle who knew she needed transportation to get to work. She was having trouble making ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck. Her previous car had broken down and she couldn’t afford to get it fixed.

The new, battery electric car made her very happy at first, although she was a little shocked at how much it cost to insure it, and how much it would cost to have a charger installed. She had a modest home with a garage. The house had been bought before her husband died, when they had two incomes. She realized she couldn’t afford a home charger and that she’d have to rely on other charging stations.

The first day she drove her new battery powered car to work, everything went fine. Her battery gauge said she had enough power left to get her home for the round trip. However, she wouldn’t have enough to get to work the next day, unless she found a charging station somewhere on the way home. She found one place, but the chargers were out of order. She had to drive quite a bit out of her way to find another. They were Tesla chargers, but only one was working, because they hadn’t been maintained since Tesla had fired their charger development team and got out of the charging business. There was a waiting line, plus even after her turn came, it took quite a while to recharge her battery.

She was not an impatient person, but she did begin to worry that by running later than usual, she might be in trouble with the Day Care where she had to pick up her five year old boy and three year old daughter. Also, running later made it a little more stressful for getting dinner ready.

As time went on, she adjusted to using the electric car and made an arrangement with the day care to pay a little extra for the times when she couldn’t help being late. She was saving enough on gas to pay the extra for day care.

Finding working chargers was getting more difficult. Thieves had discovered that there is a lot of copper in the charging wires, and they had started cutting and stealing the cables. She found this out one day when she pulled up to a charging station and saw that all the cables had been stolen. She had to check online for the next closest station that was working, and the lines were longer than ever, and she was home later than ever.

When winter came, a new problem came up. The electric car battery was slower to charge and wouldn’t go as far. It got to the point where she sometimes had to recharge the battery twice a day if it was really cold out. When this happened, it made her late to work and she began to worry about her job status, especially after she was 3 hours late one day because the battery went dead before she made it to a charging station. She called AAA but they said she would have to pay extra because of the liability that the car might catch on fire. They had a special fire-proof tow truck bring her car in to a special fire-proof charging area.

The charging stations weren’t free, and the price kept going up because the price of electricity was going up. All the EVs and the new data centers in the country were using so much power that they were putting a strain on the whole electric grid.

She started getting behind and had to use her credit card more and more. The debt built up because she couldn’t pay it off at the end of the month. The credit card company charged her 26% interest on the balance. Between the rising costs of electricity, insurance, and debt, things began to look very bleak.

She also had to spend more money for warm winter clothes for her and the children because in the cold weather, she couldn’t run the car heater because then the battery would go dead all the faster.

Then things got worse. Her car unexplainably caught on fire and exploded while it was just sitting in the garage. It burned the house down. They had been sleeping. She was able to save her children by throwing them out an upstairs window.  They all had to go to a shelter, which was very crowded and smelled bad. The homeowners insurance wouldn’t pay anything because they had started putting a clause in the fine print that fires caused by batteries weren’t covered.

About this time, something very unusual happened to the whole country. It was very cold out – colder than anyone remembered. The electric grid went down. The whole country was out of power. No one had any electricity except rich people who had installed off-grid solar systems. But even for them, the electricity didn’t do them much good, because with no grid, there was no internet, no online shopping and no banking. Credit cards wouldn’t work and they couldn’t recharge their cell phones.

At the shelter, candles and lanterns were brought out, and extra blankets for everyone. Food was either served cold or heated on little camp stoves. Water was collected in rain barrels.

Some of the data centers had seen this coming and they had built their own power plants. They tried to keep going, but their computer banks overheated and blew up because of the extra load when so many other data centers were down.

But there was a bright side. People couldn’t use money with the banks out of commission, so they traded things and helped each other. People in the countryside paid more attention to their gardens and even people with houses in the city dug up their grass lawns and planted little gardens. It was kind of nice not having to worry about mowing their lawns, and not having to pay those very high electric bills or interest on their credit cards. In fact, they didn’t have to pay any bills at all with the internet down because no transactions could be recorded.

The electric cars were all pushed out of their garages after folks heard about the single mom’s house burning down. Of course all the batteries were dead with no way to recharge them. The wind turbines had stopped turning when it got so cold that the gears and the blades froze up. The solar plantations were all smashed by giant hailstorms.

The rich people could still get around because most of them had 10,000 gallon storage tanks for their gas and diesel cars and trucks which they had kept for backups for their electric cars.

The government collapsed and the 100 million people that worked for government agencies lost their jobs. They had to find useful things to do instead. But after a while a funny thing happened. Without any drag from government bureaucracies and taxes, the country started to prosper.

Farmers started removing all the solar plantations and getting back to farming. They still had their tractors that ran on diesel fuel which they had stored in big tanks.

People began to be happy again because they didn’t have any bills to pay and they were learning to enjoy the simple life and to trust God instead of the government.

The single mom and her children went to live with the rich uncle and worked on his farm. She home-schooled the children and taught them useful things that they never would have learned in public school. The boy was happy to just be a boy and the girl was happy to just be a girl. They were never taught that they could choose 100 other genders, which would have made them miserable trying to be something they’re not.  

Their mom met a wonderful man that also worked on the farm and they fell in love and got married and they all lived happily ever after.