Coming Soon to Southern California: Rolling Blackouts

Every summer has its own story. For residents of Southern California, this summer’s story is going to include a chapter about rolling blackouts. The L.A. Times wrote the prequel earlier this month. To summarize, the natural gas leak this winter at the Aliso Canyon Underground Storage Facility has left Southern California short on natural gas, which means that, come summer, the region’s utilities could be unable to generate enough electricity to meet demand. To prevent the entire grid from, power managers will institute rolling blackouts by cutting electricity to certain individual sectors of the grid at moments of peak demand.

To many, the possibility of a blackout seems quaint. Who doesn’t enjoy the occasional candlelit dinner? And what parent doesn’t wish their kids would watch less television? The reality of blackouts, however, is deadly serious. Electricity provides us with more than just entertainment. We depend on it to, among other things, refrigerate our food, power hospital equipment, and illuminate traffic signals. We hardly notice it when it’s there, but without electricity are lives are much less safe.

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Who buys these fans anyway ?

customer-map
Map of Whole House Fan Sales

Where are all those fans going?

We wanted to find out where our fans from 2008 ended up.  This map has a dot for every zip code in which we have shipped at least one whole house fan.  As we expected, California is the leader, for a couple of reasons: great opportunity for night time cooling, and great, big electrical bills (thanks  Enron).

What surprised us is the amount of activity in other states.  In fact, the distribution of our whole house fans looks very similar to the US population distribution.

We think a couple of factors are at work.  People are rediscovering whole house fans as electrical prices rise (electricity seems to be recession proof BTW).  Another factor (according to our surveys) is that people are looking for fresh outside air as an alternative to air conditioning.