Modern Living
Editorial
Beaver County Times
November 9, 2007
If we want the conveniences of modern living, we should be willing to pay for them - and not just financially. That's especially true of electricity.
We couldn't live as we do without electricity because it powers virtually all of our modern conveniences. Anyone who has been without power for more than a few hours knows how miserable and inconvenient the experience can be.
Most often, these outages are weather-related, and power is restored in a relatively short period of time. However, if the United States does not address its increasingly stressed power grid, blackouts and brownouts are going to be commonplace in the not-too-distant future.
Electricity gets from there to here via transmission lines, and current facilities are in terrible shape. The American Society of Civil Engineers reports the U.S. power transmission system is in urgent need of modernization and that existing facilities were not designed to handle the current level of demand.
But while everybody wants electricity, not many people want the power lines that carry it into (and through) their communities. The latest example of that is Pennsylvania's challenge to the federal government's inclusion of 52 Pennsylvania counties in a regional corridor for high-voltage power lines.
Unless someone develops another way to transmit electricity, these lines are the price we pay for modern times. They're not pretty, but they're needed.
