My Senate testimony, Richard Herrington on minerals, American Robins

Oct 29, 2021

My US Senate testimony, Richard Herrington on mining "green" elements, American Robins

A lot of travel this week. I’m back in Austin for a few days before heading to Florida next week for a speaking engagement with the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. A lot of my time this week was spent prepping for my testimony for Wednesday’s hearing in front of the US Senate Government Operations & Border Management Subcommittee. I was in Little Rock yesterday, talking to the Arkansas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners. An interesting note from that meeting was this: despite the big runup in natural gas and oil prices, none of the companies at the meeting were planning to drill any new wells. That’s of a piece with what I’ve been hearing from other people in the oil and gas sector: prices may be up, but drilling hasn’t responded as it has in the past due to constraints on capital availability and the demands from investors that the upstream companies live within their cash flow. If that trend continues, it portends higher oil and gas prices for a long time to come. Four things today:

My testimony from Wednesday’s Senate hearing
Richard Herrington of the Natural History Museum in London on the podcast
Media hit with Emmet Penney
The most abundant bird in N. America

The photo of the American Robin was shot by Dakota Lynch in 2013.

Talking electric grid resilience and reliability at the US Senate

As mentioned above, on Wednesday, I testified before the US Senate Government Operations & Border Management Subcommittee. (It is part of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.) Preparing for the hearing, which was captioned “Strategies for Improving Critical Energy Infrastructure” was a three-fold process. The first task was to finish my written testimony, which had to be submitted to the committee by Monday afternoon. I submitted a 10-page document that had about 2,700 words and three figures, including the one above, which I derived from an August report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

You can read my written testimony here. (My new friend, Tom Popik, from the Foundation for Resilient Societies, was a great help in preparing my testimony.) For some reason, the links in my written testimony are not live on the Senate website. If you want to see the linked documents, I’ve also posted the testimony on robertbryce.com.

After finishing the written testimony, I had to cut the 2,700 words down to about 700 words, which is the length needed to fit the five-minute time limit allowed during the hearing for spoken remarks. The final task was to read it aloud several times, make sure it sounded right and didn't exceed the time limit. The subcommittee is chaired by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The ranking member is Sen. James Lankford (R-OK). Here’s what I told them:

America’s electric grid is our most critical piece of energy infrastructure. The grid is the Mother Network, the network upon which all of our critical systems depend. But the affordability, reliability, and resilience of our electric grid are being undermined. Over the past few years, the fragility of our grid – and its vulnerability to cyberattacks, physical attacks, and extreme weather events – has become ever more obvious. I have experienced this decline in reliability first hand. In February, my wife and I were blacked out in Austin for 45 hours during Winter Storm Uri.

I then explained that the grid is being undermined by increasing reliance on weather-dependent and intermittent renewables, like wind and solar, the premature retirement of dozens of coal-fired power plants as well as several nuclear plants, and mismanagement by regional transmission organizations like ERCOT in Texas and CAISO in California are not providing enough incentives to assure the reliability and resilience of the electric grid.

What must be done? I said:

First, Congress should prevent the closure of any more coal and nuclear plants until regulators can be certain that their closure will not reduce the reliability and resilience of the grid.
Second, the federal tax incentives for wind and solar energy – the PTC and the ITC, which are costing taxpayers billions of dollars per year – must be eliminated. These subsidies distort wholesale power markets, make the grid more reliant on the weather, and undermine the financial viability of the thermal power plants that are essential for grid reliability. For years, renewable advocates have claimed wind and solar are the cheapest option. It’s time for them to prove it.
Third, Congress, along with federal regulators, should develop rules that incentivize on-site fuel storage at power plants... Power plants with on-site fuel are essential for resilience. If a regional grid fails, the grid operator must perform a “black start” to re-energize the grid. Those black start generation units must have onsite fuel.
Fourth, Congress must act to stop the closure of existing nuclear plants, including Diablo Canyon in California. The closure of our existing fleet, including the April closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York, was a travesty.

I concluded:

The grid is our biggest, most complex, and most important piece of energy infrastructure. We take it for granted at our extreme peril. We cannot allow our electric grid to fail. The writer Emmet Penney had it right when he declared earlier this year that “there’s no such thing as a wealthy society with a weak electrical grid.” America cannot afford to have a weak electric grid.

If you want to watch my testimony, it begins at about 50:30. Here’s a link to the hearing, including the video. Both Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Sen. Lankford asked good questions. Those can be heard in the latter part of the two-hour hearing.

Richard Herrington on a "metals-and-minerals-based" economy

The latest podcast (#76!) came out on Tuesday. My guest is Richard Herrington, the head of the Earth Sciences Department at the Natural History Museum in London. I came across Herrington’s work back in 2019 and wrote about it for the New York Post. Of course, many other analysts have since latched onto the issue of how the “green” transition will require increased amounts of mining, but few, if any of them have given proper credit to the work that Herrington and some of his colleagues did back in 2019.

During the podcast, Herrington said that “the demand for metals and minerals has skyrocketed as a result of us revolutionizing our energy business. So we're effectively moving from a carbon-based energy economy, to effectively a metals-and-minerals-based energy economy with renewable technologies, all of which need materials, metals, and minor elements to make them work.”

We discussed many topics, including China’s dominance of many of the elements needed to supplant hydrocarbons in the energy and power sectors. Herrington said, “we've been happy to accept China having a stranglehold on those resources, because everybody's played ball to date and we've been able to get the metals that we need.... as times get squeezed, like we've seen with the power prices, you know, and places like Russia, perhaps slowing down the gas supply to Europe, because they have an agenda. [But] you do have a concern when you've only got one country supplying materials, that they – I’m not saying they will -- but they could have that ability to say, ‘you know, what, we'll, we'll just squeeze the supply a little bit.’”

We also discussed Richard’s recent paper in Nature Reviews Materials, published in May. In that paper, he wrote, “The green energy revolution is heavily reliant on raw materials, such as cobalt and lithium, which are currently mainly sourced by mining. We must carefully evaluate acceptable supplies for these metals to ensure that green technologies are beneficial for both people and planet.”

It was an interesting discussion. Please give it a listen and share it. And if you haven’t done so, please put a rating up for the Power Hungry Podcast.

Media hit with Emmet Penney

Yesterday, my pal, Emmet Penney, released the latest episode of his new Nuclear Barbarians podcast. I was his guest. We talked about my so-called career, Enron, the electric grid as a societal commons, and, of course, electricity. Give it a listen and follow Emmet on Substack. He’s sharp thinker and writer.

An American Robin

Yesterday morning in Little Rock, while on a short walk near the hotel, I walked next to a large forested area. I caught glimpses of sparrows and a Northern Mockingbird, as well as a single American Robin (Turdus migratorius). (The Robin photo above is from Wikipedia, it was taken in Toronto in 2005.)

There was nothing distinctive about it, nothing remarkable. But during my walk, I realized that as a child, the Robin was one of the first birds I learned to identify. I recall being told it was a “Robin Red Breast.” It also led me to recall the times where I’ve seen a “worm” of robins. (The collective nouns for Robins include worm, riot, and several others.) About two decades ago, I saw a worm of American Robins at Mohawk Park in Tulsa. I remember watching them for 10 minutes or more as the individual birds took turns drinking in a boggy area near the hiking trail. More recently, maybe two and a half years ago, Lorin and I saw a worm of Robins, with maybe 200 birds, perching near a small creek in the Hill Country. They took turns drinking and bathing. I can still remember the sounds of their wings and their quiet chirping as they went about their business.

Until this morning, I didn’t know that the American Robin is believed to be the most abundant bird in North America. Had I been quizzed about that, I probably would have guessed the Common Grackle or maybe the Starling.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the American Robin:

a migratory songbird of the true thrush genus and Turdidae, the wider thrush family. It is named after the European robin because of its reddish-orange breast, though the two species are not closely related, with the European robin belonging to the Old World flycatcher family. The American robin is widely distributed throughout North America, wintering from southern Canada to central Mexico and along the Pacific Coast. It is the state bird of Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin. According to the Partners in Flight database (2019), the American robin is the most abundant bird in North America (with 370,000,000 individuals), It has seven subspecies, but only one of them, the San Lucas robin (T. m. confinis) of Baja California Sur, is particularly distinctive, with pale gray-brown underparts. The American robin is active mostly during the day and assembles in large flocks at night. Its diet consists of invertebrates (such as beetle grubs, earthworms, and caterpillars), fruits, and berries.”

Have a good weekend.

Want to help?

1. Share this email to your friends and colleagues. Or have them email me so I can add them to my distribution list.
2. Subscribe to the Power Hungry Podcast.
3. Rent or buy Juice on iTunes or Amazon Prime.
4. Buy A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations and give it a positive review.
5. Follow me and Juice on Twitter.
6. Need a speaker for your conference, class, or webinar? Ping me!

Watch Juice for free on Roku!

If you haven't seen our documentary yet, here's a reminder: you can watch Juice: How Electricity Explains the World, on Roku Channel, for free. Just click this link. If your friends haven't seen it, send them a link. Or if you have a prime membership, you can watch it on Amazon Prime.