Electricity is something that comes into use in our daily modern lives. Almost everything, ranging from our fitness tracker to our mobile phones, to our home appliances needs electricity. Now, even our automobile industry is going green and electric.
In scientific terms, electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Earlier, electricity was considered as being unrelated to magnetism.
Later on, many experimental results and the development of Maxwell’s equations indicated that both electricity and magnetism are from a single phenomenon: electromagnetism. Various phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges, and many others. Out of these, lightning is the most dramatic effect of electricity.
Some Facts About Electricity
As history is a major reason for boredom for many readers, let’s not delve into it much, except the fact that ‘Thales’ was the earliest known researcher into electricity. During the 1980s, there was an approximate electricity consumption of 7323 billion kilowatt-hours annually. By 2017, this figure increased to 22347 billion kilowatt-hours annually. This shows that there is a surge north of 300% in less than 50 years, 37 years to be exact.
Taking an average, it can be calculated that there is an increase of almost 8.11% annually. Using this average, we can approximate this year’s global electricity usage which would obviously be ‘a whole lot of electricity’ billion-kilowatt hours annually. Most probably around 25500 billion kilowatt-hours annually.
As per 2017 data, China is No.1 electricity consumer on a global level and as per 2018, India ranks 3rd in this race. Imagine what will happen when the lights go out all around the world for one whole day and there’s no backup electricity to support the functioning temporarily.
Let’s talk about international borders first. Since there will be no lights, the army won’t be able to look out and there will be absolute bloodshed and endless disobeying of cease-fire orders all over the world. There might be subsequent nuclear attacks and thus, a grave threat to the global economy.
Some More Facts
Many factory workers will die inside the factories themselves as they always have to deal with dangerous machinery and form new materials for the specific industry.
In India, there are almost 70000 ICU beds and in the United States, there are 226942 consecutive admissions to ICUs. Let’s estimate that there are 1000000 beds for ICU available globally. Many patient’s lives will be under defying threat as some are being treated on ventilators would die due to stoppage in the functioning of the machine. Thus, the patients surviving through the ventilators would die the most painful death possibly. The doctors won’t be able to help the emergency cases. Many ICU patients would be in danger and would die if treated in an ancient manner without electricity.
The Stock Market would crash, rather plummet to unthinkable numbers and would result in extreme financial losses worldwide. Railways would halt globally as there are some portions which are electricity operated and thus trains running on that portions use electric means. Metros would stop, local trains would stop.
Global financial accounting would end momentarily. Banks and other financial institutions won’t function and there might be loads of robberies in major banks. The staff won’t even be able to call the police as the cell towers also run on electricity and the towers would die, hence, there would be no signals left to function with mobility as a factor either.
Households would obviously stop functioning even one bit. To prevent looting and vandalism, off-duty police personnel would be ordered to come back and help maintain the law and order. The whole world would essentially come to a screeching halt. But, hasn’t it come to a halt at the time of this pandemic as well?
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Also, during the global blackout, most of people would rely on torches and candles. Once the torch runs out of juice, people would surely need those thick candles. With the usage of so many candles worldwide, there would be loads of Carbon-Dioxide emissions in the air, which would worsen the global warming situation prevailing in our world. These candles would probably emit more CO2 than the powerhouses themselves (talk about small packages carrying big surprises).
Now that the whole day has passed, electricity comes back and everyone is more pleased than ever. But, is that the end?
The moment the power comes back, there would be such a sudden demand for it that there are high chances of powerhouses crashing and therefore leading to a subsequent shortage of electricity for another day or 2 days as the powerhouses won’t be able to cope with such an immediate and explosive surge in demand.
Electricity is a necessity that is taken for granted, but unforgotten nonetheless. We must conserve electricity and also switch to environmentally friendly methods of electricity generation rather than conventional methods.