Over the past two days there have been a flurry of news reports about the reiability of the power grid (or lack of reliabililty) and how solar PV and battery backup are becoming a solution for those who can afford it.

There is a story in the NY Times, Gizmodo, Inside Climate News, a paper in Nature, Energy News Network, and so on. Each of these is a locally produced story – with the main one’s likely picked up in the next few days by news outlets all over the country.

This is the sign of public relations planted stories – which some how magically appear in multiple news outlets over the course of 48 hours. These often tied to a just published paper, as this episode did.. And of course, the power grid issues are “due to climate change”, social equity and possibly racism. There is no mention of lack of maintenance, for example.  (To get a research grant today requires the investigator use a near universal seof buzz words in their grant proposal with the resulting conclusions. This study on power infrastructure was done as a public health study, not a power engineering study.)

This is how news is manufactured. It starts with story ideas carefully curated by public relations agencies. This might be promoted by those selling home battery banks or solar or wind generation systems. Or even promoted by utility companies that are being forced to shut down fossil fuel generation systems. It’s battle space preparation to set the public’s expectations of a worsening, centralized utility grid – and prep’ing us to spend money to build our own household power systems.

Again, this is how news is manufactured and why.

Ass of 6 May 2023, this is the link to Google News that, on that day,  pulled up a number of stories on this topic.