Let The Power Be With Us: Glow-Tubes Map EMF Exposure

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As reported in the New York Times , “Like the nation’s highways and bridges, the network of transmission lines has not been maintained and expanded enough to meet growing demand, the United States Department of Energy says. In areas where there are not enough lines to transmit electricity from the most efficient generating stations, utilities must find other sources. Sometimes they have to buy from costlier power plants nearby, like drivers forced by highway bottlenecks onto slower side roads”.

An alternative to transmission corridor expansion would be to conserve energy, for society to become more efficient: a demand reduction strategy. Another would be to decentralize power generation: the so-called distributed power option. The path seemingly favored by highly centralized utilities and the US Federal government is to increase the capacities of existing transmission lines, to build new lines, and to interconnect them all. The latter choice is not all bad. New lines are necessary if we expect to see successful deployment of massive wind farms in the “between the coast” states that will be capable delivering power to the major consuming areas.

The bad news comes when people's lives intersect with high power transmission lines. Even if residential growth were flat, you’d expect that by increasing greatly the miles of high capacity transmission lines, more people would be exposed to electromagnetic fields.. Add to this prospective scenario the real estate boom of the last decade, and you have the formulae for multiple conflicts around ElectroMagnetic Field or “EMF” exposure issues.

Exemplifying just such a conflict, see the night scene at the top of this post, in which people are holding 8-foot fluorescent tubes...powered only by the electromagnetic field from overhead transmission lines that pass near the newly-constructed Sonoran Trails Middle School, located in Cave Creek AZ, USA. NOTE: We strongly suggest a look at the streaming video, "Glow In at STMS Campus", which shows several “glow-testers” on parade, at this site: “Students First....Safety Always”. For the exposure scenario details at Sonoran Trails, see the side links at the Students First site.