Tomás stood up, cleared his throat, and opened his folder like it might bite him.
"My name's Tomás Reyna. I'm a line superintendent with Blanco Ridge Electric Cooperative," he said. "On April nineteenth, 2022, at the member's written request, my crew permanently retired electric service to 418 Larkspur Bend. We removed meter number," he read off a long number, "installed a blank cover and a co-op seal on the meter socket, opened pad-mount transformer T-2216, disconnected the secondary conductors serving that address, and capped them. The service lateral is abandoned in place. It's not connected to anything on either end." He looked up. "I checked it again myself on Monday. I opened the transformer. The caps are still on. That house isn't connected to the co-op. It's not connected to anything. It couldn't pull power from this clubhouse or any other place on our system if it wanted to." He paused, then added, a little awkwardly, "Also, she trained me. She's the best lineworker I ever worked with. If she wanted to steal power, she'd be a lot better at it than this."
There was a laugh. Not a big one. But a real one.
Arlette went next. She put her tablet up on the projector with Lamont's help. My permit. My final inspection. Photos of my utility room, my battery rack, my inverters, my generator, my label-maker labels.
"This is a stand-alone power system," she said, "permitted and inspected under the electrical code by the City of Calder Springs. Sixteen point four kilowatts of solar, about sixty-one kilowatt-hours of lithium iron phosphate battery storage, two inverters, and a propane generator for backup. It was designed to run the house without any connection to the utility, and that's what it does. I inspected it in 2022. It was, and I don't say this often, gorgeous." She smiled at the room. "If anybody here has solar and went dark in May, by the way, that's not because your system was broken. Grid-tied inverters are required to shut down when the grid goes down, to protect the line crews. Hers didn't, because there's no grid for it to shut down from. That's the difference between net-zero and off-grid. Net-zero is a bank account with the utility. Off-grid is not having a bank."
Then I put up my own logs. I showed them the night of the storm, my batteries carrying the house and then filling back up in the sun. I showed them the two extension cords: power going out of my house, to Ozzie's insulin and the Arreolas' baby. Ines Arreola stood up in the third row without being asked and said, loudly, "That's true," and sat down again. I showed them my mower, eleven hundred watts, twice a week, at noon, coming out of my own batteries.
"My mower uses about three kilowatt-hours to charge," I said. "The Association's bill went up by about seventeen hundred dollars a month. That's more than ten thousand extra kilowatt-hours a month. You'd need to charge my mower from dead about three thousand times a month to do that. That's a hundred times a day. I don't mow that much."
More laughter. Bigger. Glenda wasn't laughing. Her hands were flat on the table.
"Which brings me to where your money's going," I said. "Lamont?"
Lamont stood up. He did not look at Glenda. He clicked a key on his laptop, and the interval graph came up on the screen, the whole year, the breathing shapes of a clubhouse and a pool, and then that slab coming up underneath everything, flat and hard, on March sixth.
He explained it the way an accountant explains things, slowly and without adjectives. Fifteen-minute data, obtained directly from the co-op on the Association's account. A constant additional load of approximately thirteen point six kilowatts beginning at 4:15 p.m. on March sixth. Unchanged by time of day, weather, or season. Dropped to zero during the May outage along with the rest of the amenity center, and returned the moment the co-op restored power. Unchanged during the forty-eight hours after Ms. Sundquist's property was removed from her lot.