Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
“Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.”
-Benjamin Franklin
July 24th, 2019
You never know who you might share a cab with…
Barely three months into a new career in software business development, I caught a jet to the west coast to attend the Mid C Seminar in Wenatchee, Washington.
After I dropped my bags off at the hotel, I shared a cab to the conference with Randy Hardy, former head of Bonneville Power Administration (1991-1997).
Though we never met before, I decided to use my ten minutes of energy celebrity time to ask him the central question of the day in the Pacific Northwest.
“What do you think about the recent E3 study that projects a near-term capacity shortage in the PNW of up to 7000 MWS by 2025 and 10,000 MWS by 2030?”
“It’s a real concern to everybody focused on reliability”, he replied. “I am attending the conference to share some thoughts, but we need to get moving quickly on this issue. We have some smart leaders in the region already looking at this problem.”
I left the brief conversation feeling hopeful that pragmatic politically agnostic people focused on serving electricity reliably and affordably would not allow reliability to be jeopardized.
In fact, the Pacific Northwest has indeed collaboratively taken positive steps on this matter during the past four years.
Other areas of the United States, not so much.
Is it too late to stop the end of affordable reliable electric power in the United States?
Simple math and polarized political dialogue say’s we are in trouble indeed.
According to FERC Commissioner Mark Christie, “I think the United States is heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability.”
Dunning Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a psychological phenomenon that describes the tendency of individuals with low ability or knowledge in a particular domain to overestimate their confidence in that domain.
In other words, people who are incompetent or have limited experience in a subject often have an inflated sense of their own abilities, believing they are more skilled or knowledgeable than they are.
As I wrote in More Engineers Please in April, 2021, very few people own the technical expertise to fully understand all the implications of public policy decisions created by incompetent people with limited or zero engineering experience.
What has changed in the past two years?
Money.
Lots of money.
The “Inflation Reduction Act” created a $1.2 trillion bonanza for Wall Street and private equity firms and ushered in a race for subsidies and tax credits not seen since the chaotic and confused Land Rush of 1889.
Do you think for a minute that anybody writing or voting that bill considered the fragile nature of the electrical grid or that anybody remotely understood how load and generation need to be balanced in near perfect equilibrium?
The stuff about the importance of specific frequency and 60 HZ ?
Never underestimate the impact of money and stupidity in any decision.
It is certainly a core reason why we are headed straight into a catastrophic situation.
But there is one more unspoken reason as well.
Please Do Not Cancel Me
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
One of the great tragedies of the current state of divisiveness in American politics is that we have lost the ability to reasonably disagree. Rather than discuss our societal issues -- and they are many -- we tend to divide into camps and declare war on those with whom we disagree.
For a while, the energy industry seemed immune from polarized binary dialogue simply because almost nobody outside the reliability experts could even begin to remotely explain the delicate mystery of our electric power grid.
That time is sadly gone.
Cancel culture is a slippery slope that breeds intolerance as people systematically exclude those who hold different opinions.
So even though we knew it was painfully obvious that we were retiring generating resources far too quickly, people stayed silent because they did not want to see their careers damaged.
As we begin to witness the devastating impacts of Europe’s tragic energy policy decisions unfold, government officials are now ringing the alarm bell.
But is it too late?
It is one thing for NERC to underestimate the retirement of coal plants, but its quite another thing for anybody to stay silent when the war on natural gas began four years ago.
If the demand for electricity triples by 2050, what rational person would advocate that nuclear power and natural gas must join coal on the retirement list?
What is left to balance the intermittency of solar and wind and maintain that fragile balance between load and generation?
Batteries?
Perhaps rolling blackouts?
Capital Expenditures Matter
In the NFL draft, if the General Manager picks extremely poorly in just one season, you can set the franchise back at least five years.
As a lifelong NY Jets fan, I consider myself an expert on this subject.
In the same vein, when our country fails to make necessary annual capital expenditure commitments to electric transmission and distribution infrastructure, we set up the forecasts for catastrophic consequences for the next decade.
Decisions to not build more transmission or natural gas pipelines is a self-afflicted wound which will result in the degradation of the reliability of our power grid.
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) deceptively uses the public’s money to cut off capital to the oil and gas industry, not to generate the highest returns for retirees, pension holders, and taxpayers.
When we tell the natural gas industry to be gone by 2030, or thereabouts, what company would today make the desperately needed capital expenditure decisions in this hostile environment by regulators and the federal government?
The assault on natural gas is strange for two reasons.
Firstly, the United States led the planet in carbon emission reduction for fifteen years due to fracking. How so?
The abundance of cheap natural gas caused coal to be uneconomic and forced the first wave of retirements.
The free market took coal away. Not regulatory policies.
Secondly, natural gas is the best friend of intermittent resources like solar and wind.
Perhaps the only friend.
Other than pumped storage, no other resource can be turned on and off quickly to handle the inevitable time when the sun stops shining or the wind stops blowing.
Take that away and you have blackouts.
Hope?
Photo by Alex Wigan on Unsplash
Hope is a shield and a path.
Hope can empower you to create and sustain a more positive future.
Hope can help you navigate through fear and greed.
Hope can empower you to pragmatically achieve carbon emission reduction goals without endangering the safety of our citizens and detonating the economy.
Hope is the belief that circumstances will get better. Its not a wish for things to get better-it’s the actual belief, the knowledge that things will get better, not matter how big or small.
Hope will allow us to overcome the barriers of divisive political rhetoric and binary thinking.
Hope is the belief that we have more in common that we realize.
When it comes to maintaining a stable electricity grid, hope is all we got right now.
The captain has turned on the “fasten your seatbelt” lights.
Turbulence ahead.