Blizzard Exposes Perils of “Electrify Everything,” Angwin on the Blackouts, hermit thrushes!
This Blizzard Exposes Perils of “Electrify Everything,” Meredith Angwin on the Texas Blackouts, media hits, and hermit thrushes
Holy smokes! What a week.
The coronavirus, a blizzard, and then a blackout. I’ve bought a couple of cans of Raid because I’m starting to think that swarms of locusts may be next.
As you probably heard, it was crazy cold here in Austin. Lorin and I lost power for 45 hours. But we did have natural gas (thank God) so we could have hot coffee and hot food. We also had hot water, stacks of firewood, and plenty of añejo tequila. Many people had it far worse than we did. As I write this on Friday afternoon, some of our friends in the city don’t have water, others don’t have water or power.
I have spent the past four and a half years thinking, speaking, and writing about electricity. I wrote a book on it and co-produced a documentary about the topic. But in my life, I was never as happy to have juice as I was on Tuesday at about 11:30 pm. In fact, we jumped out of bed and started dancing around we were so happy. Four items this week:
My Forbes piece on Monday
Meredith Angwin on the podcast on ERCOT’s grid mismanagement.
TV and podcast appearances
Backyard bird update: hermit thrushes in the 'hood
(I took the photo at the top of this note last night at sunset. Ice had covered nearly every outside surface, including the trees and cacti.)
Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about the ongoing push by environmental groups and climate activists to “electrify everything” and the technical challenges and systemic risks that would come with any such effort. I worked on the essay over the weekend and on Sunday night, as the weather got worse, I planned to post it on Forbes on Monday morning. I did, but had to rely on the little bit of juice available on my laptop’s battery and by connecting to the internet via my mobile phone. Here’s the lede:
The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come. That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels. But attempting to electrify everything would concentrate our energy risks on an electricity grid that is already breaking under the surge in demand caused by the crazy cold weather. Across America, countless people don’t have electricity. I’m one of them.
I made several points in the piece, but these may be the most important ones:
This blizzard proves that we have not been taking our energy security seriously enough. The concept of energy security has many aspects. But the most fundamental one is that we all have enough reliable and affordable energy (of whatever type) so that we don’t freeze to death during cold spells like the one now wreaking havoc across the continent.
This blizzard proves that during extreme weather winter, solar panels and wind turbines are of little or no value to the electric grid.
This blizzard proves that our natural gas grid is part of our critical infrastructure and that we shut it down at our peril. The natural gas network is essential because it can deliver big surges in energy supplies during periods of peak demand. In January 2019, U.S. natural gas demand set a record of 145 billion cubic feet per day. That record will be smashed during this blizzard, and daily volumes will exceed 150 Bcf. That is an enormous amount of energy. In fact, on the coldest days of winter, the amount of energy delivered by the gas grid is roughly three times as great as the energy consumed during the hottest days of the summer.
I concluded:
Events like the September 11 attacks, Superstorm Sandy, and the coronavirus proved that we need to must make our society more resilient to threats of all kinds. A robust natural gas grid helps our resilience. Electrifying everything will do the opposite.
I have been pleased with the reaction to the article. If you have a moment, give it a read and pass it along.
Meredith Angwin, makes her second appearance on the Power Hungry Podcast to explain the Texas Blackouts
Meredith Angwin is among my favorite people. She was on the Power Hungry Podcast last November to talk about her new book, Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid. In that episode, she laid out the many problems that are facing electric grids across the country and warned that the regulatory systems that manage America’s grid do not have sufficient accountability when it comes to the key issues of reliability and resilience. In particular, she warned about the “fatal trifecta”: over-reliance on renewables, just-in-time natural gas, and imported electricity. Those factors, she said, were to blame for the blackouts that hit California last summer.
On Wednesday, I invited her to come back on the podcast to talk about the Texas Blackouts. She made a bunch of great points, including why economic incentives are needed to assure reliability and why the grid must have power plants with on-site fuel storage. My first question to here was simple: What happened Her reply was straightforward: “Grid mismanagement...The rules that set up the grid do not care about reliability.”
I am proud of all of the episodes of the Power Hungry Podcast. My colleague, Tyson Culver, has done a great job in producing the episodes and he was able to turn around the episode with Meredith in a few hours and get it published.
The two shows with Meredith are among my favorite episodes for several reasons: She’s charming, funny, has a lifetime of knowledge about the electric grid and how it works, and she doesn’t look or sound like the typical pundit who would opine on these issues. If you 55 minutes, let Meredith explain the Texas Blackouts. You won’t be disappointed.
Media Hits
My Forbes article hit at an opportune time and led to several media requests. On Wednesday, I was on Newsmax TV talking about the Texas Blackouts. My segment is in the second hour, and starts at about 1:18.
On Sunday, the 14th, I was on US Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s podcast, Hold These Truths, talking about electricity and energy.
On Wednesday, I was back on Crenshaw’s podcast talking about the blackouts, the rules that govern ERCOT, and in particular, how the two Texas nuclear plants proved their importance during the blizzard.
I also have several media hits coming up over the next few days, including on the show America’s News HQ, on Fox News (national), on Saturday at about 12:40 pm ET; Fox 26 News in Houston on Sunday at 7 am CT, on What’s Your Point?, hosted by my longtime friend, Greg Groogan; and I’ll be on The Dan Proft Show on the Salem Radio Network, on Monday morning at about 8:30 am CT.
The Rush of a Thrush
The blizzard has brought flocks of visitors to our feeders and birdbaths. (We have been dumping the ice out of the birdbaths every morning and filling them with warm water.)
A new bird, one that Lorin and I failed to identify, showed up right before the blizzard. In birding parlance, it's what's known as an LBJ, short for “little brown job,” a small brown bird that can't be ID'd quickly. But thanks to my iPhone camera (I took the pic above) and an email to my birding mentor, Frank Kurzawa, we got a positive ID: the new visitor is a hermit thrush. We’ve also been seeing large numbers of American robins, yellow-rumped warblers, cedar waxwings, and others. They have been a delightful diversion during the deep freeze that is now, finally! starting to end.
Okay. Enough for now. The sun is out, the snow and ice are melting, and I am going to go outside and enjoy not being cold for the first time in a week.
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