Quadra ICAN asks ‘What will we do when the grid goes down?’

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - When Jan Zwicky talked about the need to be independent of the grid, she mentioned a 60 second outage at 4 AM last year. Zwicky wasn’t aware there was a problem until she went into the basement three days later. Her freezer, which had been packed with food, was off. Most of the contents were ruined.

Zwicky said she is not dependant on a computer and has a back-up system that can keep the lights on, “ But boy, I don't want that freezer to fall apart!”

“So I think I can, can encourage all of us as it were to do that kind of energy inventory. Where do you really need it? What would it take to keep you functional?” she said.

Mike Gall added, “We've we've learned very quickly in the past two years, And then in particular, in the last two months, the how fragile our systems of sustaining our society truly are.”

Quadra Island receives its electricity from Vancouver Island.

“All the takes is a severing of that artery and suddenly we're into a 2, 3, 4 week scramble to try and live with literally no electricity available to us other than what we can do by running generators or some secondary means of supplying our electrical requirements,” he said.

Jan Zwicky and Mike Gall are members if Quadra Island’s Energy Self Sufficiency team, one of several groups that came out of the community meeting that launched ICAN, in March 2020.

“It was suggested that we divide up into interest groups and energy was one of them. I ended up talking with Rod Burns and Jack Segal, those were the two folks most interested in energy. I'm really aware of the places where for me electrical energy is essential and I don't trust the grid staying up,” Zwicky explained.

She remembers Quadra losing power for 10 days, when a hurricane struck in 2014.

Zwicky was living in Edmonton in 1994, when the Northridge earthquake in California took out Alberta’s grid.

That was when it dawned on her, “This is a continental system. You can't count on it's being there if there's a crisis somewhere else.”

“We believe that there will be upcoming stresses on the energy system. There's going to be a way more price hikes , but also a lot of our energy contributes to climate crisis, said Zwicky. “We’re encouraging awareness of ways in which energy can be conserved to make your life less dependent on the grid and then awareness of alternative ways of satisfying your energy needs to make you even more independent of the grid.”

The energy self sufficiency team is working on a number of projects right now. They're putting solar panels on the roof of Quadra Elementary School and intend to hold workshops on: an inexpensive DYI window insulation; testing cleaning, and recharging batteries; and on the pros and cons of various solar heating systems.

They also supported the recent Canoe Pass Tidal energy project on Quadra Island which, according to the Quadra ICAN website,” hinged on government’s willingness to allow a non-profit island energy co-op to participate in BC Hydro’s net metering program.”

However the Energy Self Sufficiency team says Quadra residents will need to do more than just produce more energy.

“The first steps is the conservation mode learning all the techniques that you can possibly garner to bring your energy consumption levels down,” said Gall.

Photo credit: firewood, an alternate energy source used in many Cortes and Quadra Island homes - courtesy Quadra Ican