Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Human civilisation is all about harnessing energy. Which is why the so-called ‘Green’ is hell-bent on destroying the system that provides cheap and reliable energy – be it electricity, gas, coal or oil. And they especially hate nuclear power generation. They promote hopelessly unreliable wind and solar not because they want you to have power (they don’t) but because they want to starve their countrymen of energy, and make it so unaffordable and unreliable the only an educated elite will ever be able to afford it (ie, them, not you).
Human civilisation is all about harnessing energy. Which is why the so-called ‘Green’ is hell-bent on destroying the system that provides cheap and reliable energy – be it electricity, gas, coal or oil. And they especially hate nuclear power generation. They promote hopelessly unreliable wind and solar not because they want you to have power (they don’t) but because they want to starve their countrymen of energy, and make it so unaffordable and unreliable the only an educated elite will ever be able to afford it (ie, them, not you).
At heart, these human-haters are all misery, rage and resentment. Much like their late hero, Karl Marx.
A dip into the Communist Manifesto provides a pretty clear picture of the source of that rage and resentment and their ultimate object: the abolition of private property, the destruction of the family unit, church and every other existing social institution there is – which “can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”.
In this interview with Dr Jordan Peterson – The Devil and Karl Marx – Dr Paul Kengor posits that Marx’s bitter rage and destructive resentment was laid out in his poetry and plays – where Marx gives his hero, Satan top billing – long before he reduced it all to a Manifesto aimed at wrecking everything and ruining our lives.
Strip away all the guff about ‘fairness and equity’ and you’re left with an angry, ignorant and ill-educated class who blame everyone else for their own inherent failings in life and love.
However, give them their due, by pretending to care about the environment, they’ve attracted plenty of useful idiots and beguiled plenty of voters, apparently keen to be seen doing ‘the right thing’.
Now the voters, at least, are waking up: they know they’ve been had, they’re angry and they want revenge.
Even in Germany, where the hard-left ‘Greens’ have dominated politics over the last generation or so, anti-energy (which means in reality anti-human) policy has turned politically toxic, as The Australian’s Adam Creighton outlines below.
Europe’s electoral earthquake sounds warning for Greens The Australian Adam Creighton 27 June 2024
It used to be said Australia was a few years behind the US and Europe when it came to politics. The Australian Greens Party appears to be hoping that’s still the case with the launch of its new “No coal. No Gas. No Nuclear” campaign in the wake of the Coalition’s decision to support the development of domestic nuclear power for electricity generation. I couldn’t help but fill in the next logical item in the series: “No economy”.
In the US and Europe, more people are doing the same thing, as it becomes increasingly evident that an electricity grid powered mainly by wind and solar power is a costly pipe dream.
A “greenlash” is coming, as voters throughout the developed world realise how duped they’ve been by years of unscientific, uneconomic nonsense spouted by much of the media and the so-called “experts”.
The marketing genius of referring to wind and solar power as “renewable”, when the associated infrastructure needs to be replaced more often than for nuclear or fossil fuel power stations, is wearing off.
The recent European parliament elections should be a wake-up call for radical climate change evangelists. In France, support for local Green parties more than halved to 5.5 per cent. In Germany, it collapsed almost 50 per cent to 12 per cent.
Among voters under 25, the German Greens did worse than the so-called “hard right” Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, as veteran US political analyst Ruy Teixeira pointed out last week.
“There’s no doubt concerns about immigration were key to the right populist surge in these elections, but the role of backlash against green policies should not be underestimated,” he said.
In 2019, just five years ago, the Greens did seven times better than the AfD. That’s a political earthquake if there ever was one.
“Voters really don’t want to be forced, directly or indirectly, to get an electric vehicle when they’re perfectly happy with their internal combustion car,” Teixeira added. “Rather than fighting climate change, voter’s strong preference is for cheap, reliable, abundant energy.”
In the US, support for nuclear energy for domestic power surged from 43 per cent in 2020 to 57 per cent in 2023 after flatlining for years, according to Pew Research, published in August last year.
The prospect of even higher energy prices at a time when prices in general have risen at least 20 per cent and house prices even more – all directly as a result of rampant money printing and stimulus during the Covid-19 pandemic – is proving politically toxic.
The Labor government’s childish anti-nuclear campaign built around three-eyed animals should be regarded as an international embarrassment. The number of nuclear reactors in the US, which provide around 20 per cent of the country’s electricity, declined from a peak of 111 in the late 1980s to 93. But as the anti-nuclear hysteria wears off, more reactors are being proposed. Now the Biden administration has embraced nuclear power as the only realistic way to provide reliable zero-carbon dioxide energy.
France, which has safely produced the bulk of its electricity via nuclear fission for years, has announced it is building at least six and up to 14 new nuclear power stations in coming years. India is building at least 18 by the early 2030s, and China is planning at least 100 new reactors by 2035.
Yes, new nuclear power stations will be expensive until the tempo of production increased and local industry climbed the learning curve. In any case, the cost argument is laughable given state and federal governments just sprayed around $400bn of borrowed money against the wall during Covid-19 for a cumulative excess deaths outcome that was scarcely different from Sweden’s, a country that spent barely anything by comparison.
As for safety, far more people tragically died at a South Korean electric battery manufacturing plant last week, at least 22, than have died from nuclear power related accidents since the poorly run and designed Chernobyl plant broke down in the 1980s.
Anyone who grew up near Sydney’s Lucas Heights reactor (as I did) knows nuclear power can be very safe. Whatever the case, transition to “net zero” by 2050 is a delusion. As eminent Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil pointed out in a recent essay, it hasn’t even started – despite all the trillions spent. “Since the world began to focus on the need to end the combustion of fossil fuels we have not made the slightest progress in the goal of absolute global decarbonisation,” he points out.
Since 1997, fossil fuel consumption in absolute terms has increased 55 per cent. Its share of the total has declined from 86 per cent to 82 per cent. “All we have managed to do halfway through the intended grand global energy transition is a small relative decline,” Smil writes.
For affluent nations to achieve the net-zero carbon goals outlined in the international treaties they have signed, they would have to commit to annual expenditure of at least 20 per cent of GDP, for decades. To put it in perspective this is even more than the Soviet Union spent for a few years in its existential struggle to defeat Germany in World War II.
More than 80 million kilometres of new transmission lines (equivalent of redoing the entire global grid) would need to be built by 2040, the International Energy Agency has noted.
None of this is obviously going to happen, and Australia’s policies won’t make a scintilla of difference given our tiny contribution to global carbon dioxide emission.
If the mainstream media focused more on retailing these important facts, rather than dwelling on hot days in summer, we’d have a better chance of avoiding massive economic costs for zero environmental benefit.
Adam Bandt’s Greens better hope Australia is still a few years behind the rest of the world. If Australia’s electoral dynamics come to resemble Europe’s even a little bit come the next federal election, they should be worried. The Australian
There are many reasons why grid experts within the electric utility industry have not spoken out when unrealistic “green” goals were being developed and promoted over the last 20 years or so.
There are many reasons why grid experts within the electric utility industry have not spoken out when unrealistic “green” goals were being developed and promoted over the last 20 years or so. A more open debate during this period might have helped provide a more realistic foundation for future development. This posting describes some reasons as to why at the corporate level electric utilities did not speak out more in defense of grid reliability. Collectively these factors tended to eliminate grid experts from playing any role in the development of policies impacting the grid.
Speaking Out Risked Negative Consequences
Utilities have many stakeholders with varying degrees of power. Utilities depend on good relations with Public Service Commissions, other regulators, consumers and policy makers. The stereotype of electric utilities as uncaring, selfish, greedy destroyers of the environment tends to make utilities very cautious and careful in critiquing anything perceived as “green”. The media and press attention from any such statements would likely not be favorable.
Utilities need support to acquire right-of-way, for financing, for cost-recovery and to avoid adverse legislation. Poor press and the associated public disapproval loomed as strong disincentives for speaking out. Furthermore, as will be discussed later, expressing concerns over emerging reliability issues, could be interpreted by some as implying that perhaps you were not as capable as others appear to be.
The Waiting Game: Short-Term versus Long-Term Goals
The short-term consequences of objecting to “green” initiatives impact were swift and near and would be specifically painful to the offending party. The potential benefits of speaking out on reliability would be collective, diffuse and farther into the future. Who as one of hundreds of utilities would want to be the first to speak out? The near-term burden of “green” goals at very low penetration levels was small enough that it might seem prudent to wait for others to speak up.
It can be observed already how these reasons worked together to stifle dissent. Areas with greatest pressures for green initiatives were held back because speaking out would have more severe consequences for them. Areas with lesser pressures were also less likely to be impacted in the near term, so they were less incentivized to speak out. Many hoped that maybe they could ride this out and learn from the mistakes of others. Unfortunately, mistakes and problems don’t seem to be slowing things down.
Utilities Are Not Experts, But Rather a Collection of Experts
There is not a common single body of expertise commonly shared by the many experts that make up an electric utility. Rather than are many experts with differing areas of expertise with demands that can place them at conflict with those operating within other areas of expertise. Effectively managing an electric utility is highly dependent upon balancing the input of many competing “experts”. The goals and priorities of large areas such budgeting, rates, maintenance, operating, environmental, planning, construction, compliance, marketing, R&D, legal, strategic planning. as well as sub areas within these, will often be in conflict as to the actions a utility should take. Leaders have to weigh the inputs from these areas to provide direction and make decisions.
Competing Experts and Goals
Healthy competition is good and necessary. The goals of maintenance are worthwhile, but sometimes in order to best utilize our resources and address other concerns, utilities might need to temporarily depart from what the maintenance experts advocate. The experts in projects tell us how long it should take to complete a project. But in emergencies, other experts might insist that this project must be completed in a much shorter time frame to allow for an upcoming summer peak. Transmission planning and distribution planning experts within the utility might favor different solutions for correcting an area problem: do you beef up the area distribution or do you add more support from the transmission system? With conflicts of this sort, sometimes you find a compromise, but in others one set of experts must give in.
There are many incentives for increasing wind and solar generation (if it works). For some areas of expertise, wind and solar integration pose no special problems. Experts and executives from these areas often were wind and solar boosters. Similarly to academics as described in a previous post, some utility experts argued that (some) problems with wind and solar could be solved, and it was often mistakenly interpreted to mean all problems could be solved.
During my career I would manage several different areas that at times would be in conflict. I would tell my key people, “You are the experts here. You must be a strong advocate for your area of responsibilities. Sometimes I and others in upper management will have to place other concerns over yours. You will need to be a team player and accept the situation. That doesn’t mean you should be any less of an advocate for these concerns in future situations.” Good management balances the inputs of different experts. Utilities found that near term imperatives were in conflict with more distant reliability concerns. Unfortunately, it was almost exclusively the case that emerging reliability concerns were judged as something better addressed later.
Margin, Experts, and Who Are You Going to Believe?
In advocating for their specific areas of concerns, often experts will build in a little margin. I’ll use the example of budgeting here. Although it took me while to get on board, many people are probably familiar with how that process works. Initially when we I would hear of dire budget woes, I would heed the call and cut things as close to the bone as I could. Those of you who are not as naïve as I once was, know that the next step is to squeeze even more out of EVERYONE. At that point it didn’t matter what you had given up in step 1, more was needed and everyone must contribute. My nature was to be a team player and head the original call, but after getting burned a few times, I learned that I must play the margin game.
Competing experts should be “expected” to build in margin within their various areas of expertise. The projects area may pad their schedules with some extra time to give themselves some flexibility. Maintenance might aggressively schedule maintenance and replacement so that they are ok if hard times later put a cut in their resources. Initial designs of projects may be “Cadillac” level to better survive cost pushbacks which might emerge under review.
In the area of grid reliability, the grid depends on margin. It should survive without a hiccup for once every 50-year events, because hundreds or more of those type events can and will happen in the normal operation of a system. Conflations of equipment outages, extreme weather, and other unanticipated events hit the grid many times during a given year. The consequences can be huge. However, if you push back on reliability for a short time in one area, there’s a good chance you will be fine. Negative consequences will likely be unobservable. But continue to do so and severe consequences will begin to emerge.
The large chorus of outside “experts” saying that wind and solar can be integrated successfully complicated the situation. Executives with other responsibilities see that government, academics, consultants, consumers, policy makers, and experts within parts of the utility industry are all pushing higher levels of wind and solar. Similarly, the industry sponsored research arms did not help much, but rather pushed new technology as well. Perhaps because they saw a “gold mine” in potential “green research projects”. This all lead to confusion around grid capabilities.
Lastly, grid experts were disregarded partly due to their great success in the past. The fact that modern power systems have a high degree of margin makes it harder to argue that the system is not sufficiently robust to allow for high penetration levels of wind and solar. The ability of grid engineers to meet emerging challenges to-date have led many to believe they could continue to do so, not matter what might be thrown at them.
Specialization and Silos
In additions to problems of breadth of expertise, problems around specialization also confound attempts at expert consensus. Understanding the full extent of emerging grid reliability problems requires an understanding of generation planning, transmission planning and systems operations. Intermittent, asynchronous wind and solar energy sources impact generation planning, transmission planning and system operators. These three areas have differing expertise and experts within these areas that are not always well informed of the concerns of the others. Generation planners are concerned with providing generation 24 hours a day 367 days a year far into the future. They assume transmission planners will take care of delivery problems. Generation modelling is focused on energy production and they look at megawatt-hours. Transmission Planners are worried about the transmission system during peak times of stress. They make efforts to understand the implications of potential generation, but intermittent sources make that challenging. Their focus is based on demand levels so they look at megawatts. System Operators worry about issues of generation and transmission but they operate day to day and in the near term. Their focus is on dealing with the system as it is, not determining what it might be or handle scenarios in the far future. Further within these areas, there are specialists who go deep and do not well understand the problems within their own broader area.
Within critical areas around grid reliability, there are various specialist who may not see the big picture. For example, those who model the transmission system who may see problems now, may be optimistic or agnostic as to how future versions of wind and solar may work to better support the system. Those who work more directly with wind and solar and know their inherent capabilities probably don’t fully understand their impact on the transmission system. It takes an understanding of both areas to see the emerging problems that are confronting the system.
Hope and the Benefit of the Doubt
Despite what you may have heard, most engineers want to be environmentally responsible. Instead of being opposed to new technology, most of us have sought to support potential “green” applications that had at least small hopes of promise. I was never aware of anyone stacking the deck against “green” options, but the reverse frequently occurred. It’s evident that conventional generation options are productive many years longer than competing solar or wind options, but most comparative analyses assumed 30 year lives for all alternatives including Green ones. I don’t know of any significant objections to wind and solar leaning on the system a little for support, or raising costs a little. The concerns only came when the impacts are particularly egregious or approaching unsustainability.
The support for “Green” options extended to optimistic assumptions about future development, performance and capabilities of those resources. Often instead of focusing on what might be probable in the future, utilities hoped for what might be possible. Many have hoped that maybe wind and solar coupled with batteries and a lot of technological development will allow asynchronous intermittent wind and solar to replace higher levels of conventional synchronous generation. Such hopes have for many clouded the clear evidence that increasing levels of wind and solar presented reliability threats.
FERC and NERC’s Impacts
In the U.S., the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the reliability oversight organization (NERC) that they empowered, have served to inhibit the industry from voicing reliability concerns. FERC’s open access policy and the resultant standards of conduct in 1996 have segregated the functions of generation planning and transmission planning. FERC’s goal was to prevent generation providers, who owned transmission as well, from having any competitive advantage over other generation providers. Previously, managers and VPs might have responsibility for both groups (as I did at one point), but FERC required that those functions be separated and it was important that information not be shared between them. FERC effectively shut down reliability discussions between in-house generation experts and transmission experts. Coordinating a reliable grid was well served by interplay, dialogue and coordination between those planning and managing generation and transmission. Understanding emerging problems similarly is best served by having experts with a sound grounding in both generation and transmission.
NERC and the regional reliability entities initially were formed and controlled by the utilities to coordinate reliability efforts amongst the participants. In 2006 FERC established NERC as the national reliability organization with enforcement powers. Making NERC the master over utilities versus their servant has had various consequences. Beginning in 2007, NERC and the regional entities could impose large fines for violating NERCs’ reliability criteria. Before that time, utilities would share any problems that they were seeing at reliability meetings, they were seeing as well as emerging concerns in an open and frank manner. Despite utilities differences in some areas there was a strong joint commitment to reliability and all felt it was best to learn from each other’s mistakes. But when the regulators had the ability to impose fines of a million dollars a day, it no longer made sense to share reliability concerns. Publicly expressing reliability concerns might predispose NERC to lean towards findings of noncompliance should problems emerge.
Perhaps the greatest impact came in the shift of responsibilities. Utilities used to have responsibility for ensuring reliability. They had skin in the game. They had a number of tools including generation and transmission options to better ensure reliability. But regulation by FERC through NERC, took the reliability function away from utilities. Utilities are no longer responsible for ensuring reliability. They are responsible for compliance with reliability standards. That was a profound and consequential change. Utilities are no longer developing reliability experts; they are developing experts in standards compliance. When outages occur, it’s hard to figure out where blame lies now. Will there ever again be grid experts who have skin in the game again?
Summary and Conclusions
There were a lot of utility experts with grid concerns. You might ask, “Why didn’t more people speak up?” But maybe the better question is, “Why would anyone speak up?” A lot of people could have said the type things I started saying about a decade ago, but they had no incentives to speak out and there were few influential people who cared to listen. In summary:
There were few to no near-term incentives for individual utility experts or for utilities corporately to speak up as regard planned threats to reliability
There were significant near-term disincentives for speaking up
Limited to no platforms for voicing concerns
Waiting and hoping for others to speak up seemed a prudent path for many
Competing “experts” and diverse areas of specialization confused understandings of risk
Past success of grid experts made it harder to take future reliability threats seriously
Strong widely present desires support “clean” wind and solar
Federal Actions served to quite dissenting voices and eventual remove dissenting experts
The days of utility-based grid experts who’ve had skin in the game are over. Utility experts are charged with complying with reliability standards rather than maintaining reliability. Where utilities once had variety of tools at their disposal to better foresee and forestall reliability problems, utilities now follow compliance standards and hope for the best.
Lots of people support climate action – but that support wanes dramatically when the proposed actions are personally inconvenient, like giving up your automobile.
Many Europeans want climate action – but less so if it changes their lifestyle, shows poll
Exclusive: YouGov survey in seven countries tested backing for government and individual action on crisis
Many Europeans are alarmed by the climate crisis and would willingly take personal steps and back government policies to help combat it, a survey suggests – but the more a measure would change their lifestyle, the less they support it.
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Measures entailing no great lifestyle sacrifice were popular, with between 45% (Germany) and 72% (Spain) backing government tree-planting programmes and 60% (Spain) and 77% (UK) saying they would grow more plants themselves or were doing so already.\
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Even more radical proposals, such as voluntarily eating no more meat and dairy and having fewer children than you would like, were supported by between barely 10% (Germany) and 19% (Italy), and 9% (Germany) and 17% (Italy) respectively.
Changes in car use, a major contributor to carbon emissions and an area in which many European governments are already legislating, also drew responses that showed a close correlation to the impact they might have on people’s lives.
What a surprise – not. Personally I blame greens for this dissonance between people’s expectations and what greens think is required to save us from the carbon demon.
So why all this talk of personal sacrifice and lifestyle changes? If green is easier and cheaper, why should anyone need to make any sacrifices?
You can’t have it both ways greens. Either green is cheaper and better, which eliminates the need for significant personal sacrifice, or someone has been telling a few fibs.
“Green” ideas and their proponents can create problems. Like the antagonist in Terminator 2, green arguments and proponents don’t go down easily. With serious challenges, they retreat, hibernate sometimes, morph, transform and come back. It’s hard to argue with many “green” energy ideas. They are often huge in scope but severely limited in details. Focusing on a couple key factors and ignoring or leaving so much to be worked out later. Painfully naïve or unaware of so many factors associated with the provision of energy, feedback and often even human behavior. They see the flaws in current efforts, but are blind to the drawbacks which will necessarily emerge from their proposals. The offer conjectures with a lot of dots to still be connected. They speak of things that may be possible, without any handle on the probabilities.
Usually, “green” ideas are packaged with threats of doom, promises of superior technology or both. The media are drawn to both those themes and many policy makers are attracted as well. Attention is a great thing for new ideas. The themes of urgency and the scope of change, gives these ideas more weight and seeming gravitas. Unfortunately, the needed incentives to dig down and look critically as these ideas are generally lacking. Woefully, those promulgating “green” ideas don’t have much incentive for engaging with their critics or broadening their understandings. They generate the feeling that we need to move forward with the big, new important thing – no time for distractions.
Death of the Grid
Consider the following example. Predictions for the death of the grid have held some prominence during the last decade. It started around 2012 with forecasts of ‘death spirals” for utilities. The theory was that as customers found self-generation options preferable, more and more would leave the grid, thus raising costs for those who remained. This grid defection or load defection would lead to rising costs which would lead to further load/grid defection. Searching “grid defection” and/or “load defection “brings up a host of warnings proclaiming a coming green energy transition which would be accompanied by the demise of the grid.
Morgan Stanley, Clean Tech, Utilities & Autos [March 2014] “Our analysis suggests utility customers may be positioned to eliminate their use of the power grid.”
Barclays, Utilities Credit Strategy Analyst Report [May 2014] “We see near-term risks to credit from regulators and utilities falling behind the solar + storage adoption curve and long-term risks from a comprehensive re-imagining of the role utilities play in providing electric power.”
Goldman Sachs, Analyst note on Tesla stock [March 2014] “…decreased reliability from an aging distribution infrastructure, a broadening desire to reduce the carbon footprint, and perhaps most importantly, the reduction of solar panel and battery costs could also work together to make grid independence a reality for many customers one day”
Creating Challenges for Transmission Project Approval
This “idea” or “forecast” of potential grid obsolescence caused challenges in the real world of electric utilities planning. At the time, I was seeking the approval of annual grid construction budgets running into the hundreds of million dollars per year. My Board asked: why are we putting so much into a grid that Morgan Stanley and others say might go away? I shared my perspectives with the board, arguing the need for continued grid expansion. Some of those perspectives can be read in these two articles I co-authored some years later, titled Reports of the Electric Grid’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated and The Grid End Game.
At the time, our Board (and many others) were in a tough position. Who are you going to believe? Academics, government experts, renewable specialists and recognized financial experts, or your own local guy? From my perspective, I had a strong understanding of electric supply, consumer needs, issues around availability and deliverability, and I worked hard to understand what the arguments of the other “experts”. The renewables people seemed to have so much faith in themselves that they didn’t need to be bothered by the details of providing electrical service or understanding why their predictions might be wrong. Financial experts were relying on renewable experts without paying attention to many of the broader issues involved in power delivery. While to me it seems clear, that considerable respect should go to those in the field versus the potential disruptors, that has been a hard argument to make historically. Despite their poor record of forecasting in the past, those who’ve made bad predictions continue to gain considerable attention and respect.
What did we do to help our board? At strategic planning meetings we took the other side. We assumed the need for the grid would wither away. We looked at what might happen to our billions in investment. We argued that our resources would still have value. For example, some of our transmission ties would be valuable for energy exchanges between distributed networks. Many of our transmission substations could house batteries and serve to support smaller networks. Other right of ways we owned might have value for communication pathways, pipelines, roadways or the like. That provided enough comfort for going forward with continued transmission investment in the interim.
Overwhelmingly it’s a good thing that many entities continued to build transmission, despite the dire warnings of grid obsolescence. Less optimal results likely ensued when project support was stymied by the cautions of “experts”. The “green” consensus now seems to be that enhanced robust grids are essential to increasing the penetration of renewables. The existing grid elements , including projects completed back then despite the warnings, are foundational to any serious efforts at expanding renewable resources.
Experts at Conferences
Back then, there were various conferences, symposiums and working groups centered around the demise of the grid. I went to several to make sure I was aware of their best arguments and well informed on recent and potential developments. At one sponsored by the Department of Energy, Ernest Moniz in 2013, the US Secretary of the Department of Energy welcomed us. Unfortunately, such gatherings usually failed to provide significant platforms for dissenting views and were a little heavy handed in touting grid fears. My experience with one large “working group” illustrates generally how these meeting would go. Here to the best of my memory is what happened at a working group held at Duke University, which had around 100 participants, government sponsorship and was run by high priced consultants. I asked questions suggesting the grid had a lot of value and that distributed “green” resources would struggle mightily in its absence. Those on the agenda were super confident, they had it all figured out. Those questioning the “wisdom” were seen as oddballs, but some people would come up and whisper to me during breaks that they were wondering the same things.
One task introduced for the large working group in attendance was figuring out what we might do to make the grid more relevant as demand for the grid decreased. I sensed a disconnect, if the group felt the grid did not have value, why work to preserve it? I passionately explained, “I work for a transmission only entity. I believe the grid had great value and will continue to provide great value. But if you are right, perhaps the grid should be allowed to fade away.” I explained that, “my goal is to meet the needs of our distribution customers and end-use consumers. If they have better options than retaining the grid – I would encourage them to use those options. ” I asked then, “Why if you think the grid is not needed, do you care about its continuance? What’s the purpose of this working group? Why isn’t our goal to help the transition?” The room got silent and eventually the facilitator noted that was an interesting perspective worthy of consideration.
What the group decided to do (likely pre-ordained by the facilitators) was model a bunch of different future generation scenarios showing where new generation would come from to see what they showed about timing and the need for the grid. There were a number of different scenarios proposed, some dominated by large distant wind, other more supported by dispersed solar and so on. All potential scenarios were heavily or exclusively renewables based. I asked shouldn’t we have one scenario where new natural gas plants played some role. (Much like what has actually played out in the last decade.) The leaders quickly came back and said, “NO, fracking might be banned! So, gas scenarios may be worthless.” I replied that I certainly understood that as a possibility, but that every other scenario suggested faced similar challenges and roadblocks. Wouldn’t a scenario showing some addition of natural gas plants be worthwhile for comparison purposes? When we broke into smaller working groups with differing tasks, I wasn’t assigned to the one refining and selecting the the scenarios. Not surprisingly additional natural gas resources were not included in in any of the scenarios. ( I suppose I don’t need to tell the readers that any additional nuclear wasn’t represented as a possibility in any of the scenarios either.)
Real work responsibilities prevented me from attending the follow up sessions. While I looked forward to reading the reports that came out of the group, no reports or formal outputs ever materialized. By the time they were finishing up, I suspect the handwriting was on the wall and it had becoming clear enough that the findings they originally anticipated would not be defensible. Unfortunately, it’s often the case that when these type groups don’t find the results they want, they don’t admit mistakes or publish a lesson learned from their endeavors. They just move on to something else.
Deja Vu: The Ideas Changed but the Same Experts Remained
I recognized many of the individuals and groups who were pushing the end of the grid, from various conferences, symposiums and working groups I had attended years earlier on the topic of Integrated Resource Planning (IRP). It was like seeing the same actors in a slightly different play. Reading new scripts but still ushering in “green” change and creating problems for those actually trying to support the grid.
One of the entities involved in both was the Rocky Mountain Institute. They, like many of the other “experts” pushing the demise of the grid, earlier were busy pushing Integrated Resource Planning. The Rocky Mountain Institute touted the great value of negawatts (a unit of electricity save by conservation). They characterized the traditional utility approach to planning as blindly looking at load growth and building resources as needed. They proposed that considerable benefits would accrue from treating load, generation, efficiency and distributed resources on equal footing in all stages of planning. The argued that utilities could see significant savings by paying customers to improve efficiency and thus lowering their need for costly infrastructure improvements. They thought negawatts should be a prime option for addressing system needs and avoiding infrastructure. Buying negawatts could save on infrastructure.
They encouraged the expectation that forecasts of expensive upgrades for transmission lines should preferably be addressed by targeted localized efficiency programs. It’s hard to estimate potential efficiency gains on a system wide basis, let alone in targeted load areas. Deploying programs with such precision is huge problem because of all the uncertainty in load growth, efficiency program impacts and other interrelated factors. Due to the complexity and unknowns, it was likely impossible for any utility to do defer individual projects by using the recommended IRP approaches.
Back in the mid-90s, regulators would ask if you looked at delaying a transmission uprate by implementing a program to incentivize replacements of older refrigerators with more efficient ones. They were not impressed when you told them, this did not seem like a workable solution. All these experts were telling everyone utilities should do this, but looking across the nation (and globally) no one had achieved any kind of success suggesting this was remotely possible. I was very pleased when I heard the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) was undertaking a huge program to demonstrate the state of the art as to how such things could be done.
EPRI selected a community in Oregon and they were going to follow the best advice of “experts” to demonstrate the proposed concepts. I naively felt that either they would give us guidance as to how this might realistically be accomplished, or more likely force them to publicize the limitations of such approaches. I expected they would encounter numerous unwieldly real-world challenges. The program was launched with a big fanfare at with a considerably large budget. I followed the early efforts as the program implementation began. The early documentation was frequent and very impressive, explaining the great things being undertaken. As results should have been emerging, suddenly there was silence. I heard the program was having some trouble, but nothing was being published. I searched and searched over time. Finally, years later, I found a comprehensive listing of cancelled EPRI projects. For the targeted efficiency program there were only about two lines in that listing. It stated the project name and said only that the project was cancelled because the target city had become the wind surfing capital of the east coast and the resultant load growth in the area had made the project infeasible.
That’s the way the world works most of the time. Something big comes along that you didn’t anticipate, or many small things, or a combination of factors. Having overly complicated plans dependent on getting multiple variables right, is not a good recipe for success. I wish EPRI had provided some follow up. With all the investment and efforts put into place, before they realized their hoped-for plans were dashed, they could have provided some documentation of the challenges and successes (if any) they encountered before the project “blew up”. But unfortunately, it is not common for to write of the demise of their cherished ideas. The promoters just withdraw and let their dreams hibernate to maybe come back another day. The obvious lessons aren’t learned. The experts that pushed for these ideas found a new wagon to hitch to their horses, and for many of the IRP/negawatt experts it was the idea of grid defection.
It’s a Game
What was gained by forecasting the death of the grid? What was gained by making utilities prioritize using negawatts? Claiming disaster or a new superior approach grabs attention. Extreme criticisms of existing approaches can get attention as well. This attention can help entities promote other related objectives. Predicting the end of the grid is pretty bold and it attracted a lot of press. It helped focus attention on “green” projects and industries and no doubt helped their funding. If the claims are bold and the consequences large, it seems that the strength of supporting evidence is irrelevant.
Historically we’ve had an excellent power system, but there will always be emerging needs and challenges. Arguing for continued incremental improvements makes sense. Saying the grid is worthwhile and will be needed for a long while, though is not as exciting as forecasting the grids end. Looking at the world more realistically is suitable for boring articles in the trade publications. Talk of enhancements to existing technology while carefully nurturing new technology is not near as exciting as most “green” proposals. It perhaps should not be surprising that such plans do not garner as much attention or support. But that is unfortunate, because projects conceived with such understandings have proven, and will likely continue to be proven, to be the best options in the future.
When green ideas seem credible to unquestioning minds, they have shown that they can attract crowds, attention and money. With political support their proponents can avoid engagement with critics. When the real world intrudes and some ideas seem less credible, the appropriate lessons aren’t learned; rather the same flawed ideas merely hibernate. Those pushing the discarded ideas then find new ideas to push. Sometimes “green” advocates switch gears to advocate renewable energy ideas that are directly contradictory to what they were advancing before. That type thing goes on untouched without observation or notice.
By now almost all “green” advocates have figured out that the grid is central to allowing the increased penetration of renewable resources. Rather than proclaiming the death of the grid, they see the grid now as needing their help. They don’t praise the grid for what it has done, but rather are critical of the supposed shortcomings of the grid. They speak of modern grids as being “third world grids”. They insist that new ideas are needed and they encourage the expansion of the grid with the development of enhanced capabilities. Suddenly they are the defenders of the grid and the experts who know what must be done with the grid to protect us from the looming crises.
The truth is that integrating increasing amounts of solar and wind is complicated, expensive and poses reliability risks. Renewable advocates want to blame the grid for the problems inherent in asynchronous intermittent wind and solar generation. Their ideas for the future grid are more about transferring and hiding costs rather than about providing technical solutions to the problems posed by integrating wind and solar.
The grid has seen substantial changes over the years. It has become stronger, more robust and continues to use new technology to enhance its functioning. The grid is “smart” now, it was “smart” in the past and it will continue to be “smart” in the future. Nevertheless, integrating large amounts of wind and solar will create significant problems for the power system. Changes to the grid can help integrate more wind and solar, but only with increasingly greater costs and increasing reliability concerns. It’s not an exciting message, but it’s one that should be heard. We shouldn’t let talk of emerging technological breakthroughs or apocalyptic threats distract us from serious considerations. The grid should grow and evolve as it always has by balancing economics, reliability and public responsibility. That will likely happen slowly and bit by bit, not by a top-down politically mandated grand redesign.
Postscript: Just after completing this posting it was reported that California is considering moving to fixed rate billing (based on income) which would completely uncouple electric consumers from usage concerns. I remember that once upon a time smart meters giving real time data to customers paired with real time pricing was the key for efficiency and better use of of distributed resources. In fact, RMI wrote in 2015 that:
“The grid of the future will be centered on the customer, enabling customers to understand and manage their energy use more efficiently. Personalized, transparent, and actionable data availability to customers and to the marketplace is a key factor enabling that transition… (P)ersonalized feedback has been described as the “holy grail” of energy efficiency, and yields the greatest percentage of customer responses and energy savings.”
I’m afraid that emerging problems triggered by California’s “green” efforts are behind this terribly ill-conceived proposal. I wait to see how RMI and other “green” advocates will react to California’s fixed cost proposals. My guess is that they may like fixed costs billing because consumers can be completely separated from the consequences of their personal energy use allowing “green” energy initiatives to be pursued with less transparency and interference.
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