Two new Forbes, Irish on the podcast, Tufted Titmouse

Two new Forbes pieces on ERCOT, Simon Irish on the podcast, Tufted Titmouse at the feeder

I haven’t watched any of the TV coverage about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Lorin and I decided about two weeks ago to unplug. We did so after Google Fiber quit providing TV service. We got YouTube TV, but it has a lousy interface and to add insult to injury, we can’t watch the San Antonio Spurs. We are huge Spurs fans and even though we bought the NBA League Pass, or whatever it is, we still can't watch our favorite team. So we decided to ditch the whole stupid business. Now that Putin is aiming for Kyiv, and Tucker Carlson apparently wants to ride shotgun with him, the decision to unplug feels like the right one. But enough about that. It has been a full week. The news is jammed with energy-related stuff, including, of course, Ukraine. 

I have been prepping for three upcoming speeches, one in Denver on Monday to the International Electrical Testing Association, and then another in Nashville, and another in New Orleans. March will be busy. I’m excited to be going to Steamboat Springs to participate in an event sponsored by the Steamboat Institute. Lots of interesting people are going to be there including Steve Koonin, Bjorn Lomborg, Alex Epstein, and Patrick Moore. (The first three of those people have all been on the Power Hungry Podcast.) The event is on March 11 & 12. You can find more info here. I also recorded two podcasts over the past two days, including one with Heather Stancil, a county supervisor in Madison County, Iowa. I’m looking forward to releasing that episode next Tuesday. Stancil’s fight against the wind industry is a remarkable one – one you won’t hear about on National Public Radio. Now to business. Four items today: 

• Forbes: civil engineers point to ERCOT’s market and renewable subsidies

• Forbes: Magness points finger at Abbott for keeping prices at $9,000 during crisis 

• Simon Irish on the podcast talking molten-salt reactors

• Tufted Titmouse at the feeder

The photo of the Tufted Titmouse above was taken by Dawn Huczek in 2009. 

Last Sunday, I published a piece in Forbes about the excellent report the Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers issued about the Texas Blackouts. I began: 

•  Many reports have been published about the causes of the deadly blackouts that hit Texas a year ago. But a new report from the Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers contains one of the best — and most succinct — analyses of the reasons why the ERCOT grid came so close to collapse on February 15, 2021. The executive summary of the 123-page report says, “This assessment concludes that 1) revenue insufficiency from ERCOT’s energy-only market model, influenced by federal and state  subsidization of intermittent resources, fails to adequately pay for reliable dispatchable generation and, 2) that these market model deficiencies are the leading contributor to making the ERCOT system less reliable.” There it is. In plain English. Some of America’s top engineers — not politicians, or journalists, or renewable-energy promoters — are declaring that ERCOT’s market design simply doesn’t ensure reliability. That assessment rhymes with what Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston wrote in a piece published last month. Hirs said the ERCOT system failed because generators did not invest in winterization. Why not? Simple: they weren’t making enough money to justify doing so. He wrote, “For eight of the 10 years prior to 2021, the average wholesale price of electricity in ERCOT was too low for generator companies to earn returns on capital. Consequently, they had every incentive not to invest in winterization. The ERCOT market rewarded 
  .”volatility at the expense of reliability, despite a decade of warning." 

I concluded the piece:

• In the body of the report, the engineers recommend the formation of a market mechanism that “rewards reliability, whether a unit is dispatched or not, balanced with reasonable electricity prices for consumers to replace the current flawed energy-only market, with subsidized intermittent generators, that solely depends on scarcity pricing to provide revenue sufficiency for reliability investments.” The report goes on, saying that weather-dependent renewables are reaching the tipping point in their share “of the energy market and should bear the cost of negative reliability impacts on the system through a reliability standard that requires funding reliability payments to dispatchable generation with the system.” The report is comprehensive, clearly written, and full of great data. (Texas has 7,056 water systems, the majority of which serve fewer than 500 people.) It covers the need to invest in black start capability, “the growing interdependency between infrastructure sectors,” (read: gas producers/pipelines and electricity generators), water and wastewater infrastructure, the “water-energy nexus,” and the need to prioritize a “reliability and resilience culture.” About the last item, the report says “reliability and resilience are not performance outcomes that can be inspected or audited into the system. Reliability must be integrated into daily operations like how a business successfully approaches safety.”...I’ll close with one other sentence that jumped off the page: In a summary of chapter four, which discusses the need to establish a “foundation of reliability-focused regulations and incentives,” the engineers declare that “Subsidizing activities that result in negative impacts to reliability must be eliminated.” Amen to that.

Here's a link to the Forbes piece.

On Thursday, I published another piece in Forbes about the testimony emerging from the bankruptcy case of Brazos Electric Coop. I began:

• In the annals of awful electric grid management, the decision to keep the wholesale price for electricity on the ERCOT market at $9,000 per megawatt-hour – and leave it there for three days longer than needed – during the electricity crisis that slammed Texas a year ago, will go down as one of the worst.

• Who made that decision? In testimony in a federal bankruptcy court in Houston, former ERCOT CEO Bill Magness pointed the finger at Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The testimony was made in the bankruptcy trial of Waco-based Brazos Electric Cooperative, which is challenging $1.9 billion in costs it incurred during the crisis that forced it into Chapter 11. Magness’s testimony is giving gigawatts of ammunition to Beto O’Rourke, the likely Democratic nominee for the governor’s race in November. O’Rourke has made the failure of the Texas grid a major campaign theme. Magness’s testimony will also bolster claims that ERCOT (and/or the Public Utility Commission) mismanaged the electric grid and therefore the costs incurred by Brazos and other electricity providers during the crisis, are invalid and should be reversed. That could mean that Texas ratepayers will be on the hook for any losses incurred by generators during the crisis. 

I concluded:

• The testimony from Magness and Walker is emerging at about the same time that some Texas electricity providers are securitizing the debt they incurred during the crisis. As Llewelyn King reported in these pages last week, Rayburn Country Electric Cooperative “closed on Texas’ first cooperative securitization bond, arising out of Winter Storm Uri.” The coop will pay off the $908 million bond (the legal work was done by Clinton Vince, chair of the U.S. energy practice at Dentons) by adding surcharges to its members’ monthly bills until 2049. But as King also explained, Rayburn “reserves the right to sue and may do so.” 

• O’Rourke and other critics are claiming that Abbott made the decision to keep prices high to serve his donors. But was the decision to keep the price at $9,000 per megawatt-hour a conspiracy, or incompetence? There are no clear answers to those questions, at least, not yet. But the testimony from Magness and Walker are adding plenty of intrigue to the legal battles over who is to blame for the Texas electricity crisis, and of course, who will end up paying the bill. Rest assured though, one way or another, it will be ratepayers.

Again, here's a link to the piece. 

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Simon Irish, CEO of Terrestrial Energy, on molten-salt reactors, Canada, and why nuclear needs more policy support         

Back in 2015, I interviewed Simon Irish the CEO of Terrestrial Energy, a Canadian company that is developing a molten-salt reactor for commercial electricity generation. We agreed that that conversation was for background purposes so I didn’t publish any articles about it. A few weeks ago, I caught up with Irish again for the Power Hungry Podcast. One of my first questions was to ask him about the latest timeline for commercial deployment of Terrestrial’s reactor. I did so because, back in 2015, he told me that company was hoping to have “our first plant operating by "2023 or 2024.”
 
That is not going to happen. Instead, he now expects the company will be able to enter the commercial market in about a decade. That long delay is, unfortunately, typical for nearly all of the companies that are trying to commercialize new reactor designs. As you may recall, I wrote about that very issue in Forbes a few weeks ago, shortly after Oklo’s application was rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The regulatory hurdles, and staggering costs, that applicants face at the NRC drove Terrestrial to seek initial licensing in Canada instead of the U.S. (Speaking of the NRC’s anti-nuclear attitude, see this news item from yesterday about the agency rescinding a license extension for the Turkey Point nuclear plant in Florida. The Bidenistas say they are concerned about climate change. Given their clear anti-nuclear attitude, I’ve yet to see real proof of that.) 
 
But back to Simon: we had a good conversation. Simon is sharp and engaging and did a good job of explaining different reactor designs and why molten salt holds promise. Here’s a link. And don’t forget, all the podcasts are available on my YouTube channel, including the video with Simon. 

Tufted Titmouse: "A rather tame, active" bird

Lots of birds come to our feeders, including Northern Cardinals, Carolina Wrens, Black-capped Chickadees, and White-winged Doves. But the Tufted Titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor) is among the most regular of our visitors. They are gregarious and fast-flying birds. (The picture just above was taken by Magnus Manske in 2011.) The Audubon Society describes the Titmouse as a

• rather tame, active, crested little bird [that] is common all year in eastern forests, where its whistled peter-peter-peter song may be heard even during mid-winter thaws. It is related to the chickadees, and like them it readily comes to bird feeders, often carrying away sunflower seeds one at a time. Feeders may be helping it to expand its range: in recent decades, Tufted Titmice have been steadily pushing north...Pairs may remain together all year, joining small flocks with other titmice in winter. Flocks break up in late winter, and pairs establish nesting territories. Male feeds female often from courtship stage until after eggs hatch. Breeding pair may have a "helper," one of their offspring from the previous year. Nest site is in hole in tree, either natural cavity or old woodpecker hole.

Wikipedia says: 

• The lifespan of the Tufted Titmouse is approximately 2.1 years, although it can live for more than ten years.  On average, these birds will have a clutch size of five to seven eggs. Unlike many birds, the offspring...will often stay with their parents during the winter, and even after the first year of their life. Sometimes, a bird born the year before will help its parents raise the next year's young...will occasionally hybridize with the black-crested titmouse; the hybridization range is very narrow, however, due to genetic differences.

Have a good weekend. 
 

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