The Energy Question Episode 46: Meredith Angwin, Author of “Shorting the Grid”

 

David Blackmon [00:00:03] Okay, here we go. Hello, welcome to the Energy question with David Blackmon. I’m your host, David Blackman. And with me today is Meredith Angwin, who is an expert on the electricity grid and power sector and the author of a wonderful, wonderful book on the subject, Shorting the Grid. Meredith, how are you today?

Meredith Angwin [00:00:26] Fine, thank you. Happy to be here.

David Blackmon [00:00:28] Well, I’m just thrilled that you were able to do another episode with us today. It’s always such a pleasure talking to you and I learn so much from it. And for those not familiar with your book, this is it. Charting the grid. Tell everyone where they can find you and and where they can. More importantly, where they can buy this this excellent book.

Meredith Angwin [00:00:56] Well, you can find me at Meredith and Qualcomm and you can write me at Meredith Angwin, all one word at Gmail. So that’s pretty straightforward. Or you can find me on Twitter at Meredith Angwin. One word. Okay. The book is available all sorts of places. You can buy it through Amazon.

Meredith Angwin [00:01:17] You can go to your local store, which will almost certainly not carry it, but will be able to order from Spark. It’s got a great audiobook with it. Oh, I am so happy with the person who read Eric Meyer, read the audio book and you can get that various places audible, you know, from Amazon and many other places.

Meredith Angwin [00:01:44] So it’s very available and it’s been getting a lot of interest. I mean, it surprises me that I get an email from somebody, you know, like somebody in Europe and saying it’s a similar year and tell me about this, you know, And I’m like, well, I guess it’s getting well,.

David Blackmon [00:02:05] Unfortunately, we’re having the same issues in more and more places every day that you discuss in your book. And I want to also put in a plug for your narrator of the Audible book. I listen to it as well as read it, and he did a just a tremendous job. And as you know, the quality of the narration can make or break an audible book. Oh, he really did a fine job. I hope he does more, though.

Meredith Angwin [00:02:34] Well, he’s a very busy man. He founded Generation Atomic, and so he’s often doing things to keep that natural profit going and also to be making a difference. I mean, in other words, in writing campaigns, when there is a building somewhere that should or or showing up in front of a plant is going to be closed and holding a little less, let’s keep this plant open, demonstration, things like that.

Meredith Angwin [00:03:07] And he was in a well, anyway, little I mean that because I don’t I don’t want to talk too much about job. He was in a movie because and I need to tell you how to get a hold of the movies anyway, so I could well do that next time.

David Blackmon [00:03:26] We’ll do that our next recording. So when we talked, I guess it was in late January, I think the New England grid was struggling to keep the lights on and homes heated during a very cold time up there in the region. And I guess she got through it all. They were burning an awful lot of fuel at the time. Right. And.

Meredith Angwin [00:03:50] Oh, yeah, a lot of fuel oil. And there were two reasons for that, partially because natural gas was oversubscribed and also because that was kind of at the height of the price of natural gas and LNG. And you just don’t have very many pipelines that bring natural gas.

Meredith Angwin [00:04:10] You know, we’re close to a lot of natural gas at the Marcellus, but they don’t have pipelines to bring in. And so we buy a lot of natural gas for LNG. So we’re in the worldwide market competing for LNG. And so, you know, at that point, actually oil was cheaper than LNG, natural gas.

Meredith Angwin [00:04:36] So there were a lot of reasons we were burning a lot of oil. Now the the the prices of LNG natural gas has come down, you know, what about the gas markets than I do. So I do not know if this is something that’s going to be temporary or back in next winter. We’ll be back. Oh, well, all oil’s cheaper. Let’s get some.

David Blackmon [00:04:59] Yeah. You know, so it’s so interesting. We have so much we produce so much natural gas in the United States and have such enormous reserves that the price here, the domestic price, if you could get the pipelines built in the Marcellus, is very cheap.

David Blackmon [00:05:16] I mean, it’s the Henry up. Prices hovering around $2. And they may be to you right now, but on the international market, it’s in very high demand and there are only so many LNG tanker ships to to move the stuff around the world.

David Blackmon [00:05:32] And so, yes, I mean, right now, because you’re in a period of diminished demand, because it’s going into summertime here in the northern hemisphere, where most of the demand is processed, or for international LNG or fairly low, not nearly as low as the domestic price, but as winter starts to come around.

David Blackmon [00:05:56] And and Europe’s need for natural gas grows again. And as the months grow cold, I suspect the price will go back up again. And, you know, that’s, of course, the worst time of the year when you need it the most.

David Blackmon [00:06:09] And in New England. So it’s a difficult situation without those pipelines and I. You know, without a change in government in New York State, I don’t I don’t think those pipelines are ever going to get built. So,.

Meredith Angwin [00:06:24] You know, there was a I don’t know what happened to the lawsuit, but there was a lawsuit against New York State saying that by refusing to build pipelines, it was actually interfering with the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. It was blocking another state, getting what it needs from a third state.

Meredith Angwin [00:06:45] But you know, that that I don’t think that’s going to win because when you get right down to it, you could say that about any state planning or rail, road or road or highway or highway or anything. And the states are definitely very protective of their powers to say yes or no to certain kinds of infrastructure within their state.

David Blackmon [00:07:10] That’s right. And, you know, it’s all of it is facilitated due to the court’s deference to the regulatory agencies and the federal government to issue or deny these permits. And it’s because of the Chevron deference doctrine that’s in, you know, a part of a Supreme Court decision made 40 years ago now.

David Blackmon [00:07:35] And that doctrine is actually up for reconsideration by this court next year. And if that doctrine gets repealed by the court in that case that’s pending there, that could have a very significant impact on the ability to get these infrastructure projects done across state lines.

David Blackmon [00:07:56] But, you know, it’ll all take years to make its way through the courts and get decisions made. But it’s such a ridiculous situation and it’s sad that that exists.

Meredith Angwin [00:08:11] I totally agree with that. I mean, yeah, we shouldn’t have. Such dependency on outside sources of energy. Now, a lot of energy here. And yet when you get right down to it, New England is tremendously dependent on outside outside sources. I mean, out of the country sources now.

David Blackmon [00:08:35] Yes.

Meredith Angwin [00:08:36] Out of New England.

David Blackmon [00:08:38] Yeah. And of course, another part of that has to do with the Jones Act. Right?

Meredith Angwin [00:08:43] Right.

David Blackmon [00:08:43] That prevents the movement of goods between from one year port to another, unless it’s on ships that that are U.S. flagged vessels and crewed by U.S. citizens. And, you know, that prevents you at least being able to get cheaper LNG from, you know, Texas or Louisiana, one of the export facilities shipped up to New England, because none of those vessels are U.S. flagged vessels. And we don’t we don’t make LNG tankers in the United States.

Meredith Angwin [00:09:20] I know, I know. There’s the crazy law that is actually I think that the bigger issue is why aren’t we making things like tankers? I mean, to do that, that wasn’t something that was I mean, during, you know, during World War Two,  we were making ships like crazy and planes like crazy. And and and now it’s, you know, we don’t we don’t do it. I don’t know if you know Jack Varney, He’s he’s a nuclear. Well, I shouldn’t call him a nuclear guy. He writes a blog which is about nuclear.

David Blackmon [00:09:57] Oh, yes.

Meredith Angwin [00:09:58] Also, he was a supervisor in a Korean shipyard for many years. So he has very clear ideas of why why we take. So long to build a ship and so expensive. And it’s because of how we do it. In his opinion, there are many reasons, but one of the big ones is how we do quality control, which is not really by having people looking at what’s going on on the on the site, building the ship.

Meredith Angwin [00:10:32] But by having lots and lots of paperwork that has to be filled out to keep your certificates up to date. And again, that’s all a product of public policy. And yes,.

David Blackmon [00:10:48] Which I write about and talk about all the time. You know, people get tired of hearing me, preach about it. But it’s it impacts everything we do in the energy space. And you just can’t you can’t talk around it and you can’t get away from it. I know that one of the solutions the policymakers are pursuing in New England for four more generation capacities has to do with the potential for offshore wind projects.

Meredith Angwin [00:11:18] Oh yeah, There’s a lot of hope about offshore wind projects and and maybe they will even get built. But there are problems. Let me just say that it took decades to get the BLOCK Island project up because, you know, it was being and many projects there was Cape Wind and then a lot of people on Cape Cod were like, I’m sorry, that’s going to ruin my view and so forth.

Meredith Angwin [00:11:46] So that they that was the end of Cape Wind. And then there’s the other thing and I don’t know, I’m not a marine biologist, but the there are whales that are. Very endangered. It’s something called the right whale. And it was called the right whale back in the whaling days was that it tended to hang around near the coast and it was easy to catch and it didn’t sink right after you caught it. You know, it floated for a while and so after you killed it.

Meredith Angwin [00:12:21] So they were they were hunted almost to extinction because it was like, that’s the right way. Exactly. And but now they’re breeding grounds are oddly near the coast again, because they haven’t changed just because a couple hundred years have gone by. And so they’re in an area where the wind turbines are going to be sited.

Meredith Angwin [00:12:47] And there’s and so the training thing is, I am not a marine biologist. I can tell you that when I read about it, you’ve got marine biologists and say, no, the wind turbine stuff isn’t really going to affect them that much, no problem.

Meredith Angwin [00:13:02] And they’re really affected by fishermen. And then you have other people saying, are you kidding? You’re you’re setting off underground explosions in order to understand by the reflections what it’s like underground where you can actually put these the pilings through these. These wind turbines. And of course, this is this is wreaking havoc on sea creatures that depend on their hearing.

David Blackmon [00:13:33] You know, sonar.

Meredith Angwin [00:13:35] And sonar. And anyway, so I don’t there have been a lot more whales of various kinds washing up on shore in New England. And a lot of people have reasonable reason to believe that this is because of the explanations for putting in the wind turbines.

Meredith Angwin [00:13:58] Yeah.

Meredith Angwin [00:13:59] Then there are other people who say, no,, that’s not no problem. But.

Meredith Angwin [00:14:04] Well. You know what? What what strikes me about all of it and I’m obviously not a marine biologist either and don’t know the science about it all, but there’s a principle in in U.S. law called the cautionary principle. That says that when when there’s a question that endangers peoples rights, ah, life or animal life, that that the regulatory agencies and permitting agencies are supposed to take a first do no harm approach to development.

David Blackmon [00:14:41] And that cautionary principle has been applied to oil and gas offshore developments for decades. Yes. And and for good cause, for good reason. To ignore that now. I mean, one city council, I don’t remember if it was Bayonne or Jersey City in New Jersey, you know, as requested formally requested, the Biden administration simply stopped development for 60 days while the matter is being studied and the administration refuses to even listen to that complaint.

David Blackmon [00:15:19] To just abandon that principle just to facilitate the development of a wind farm seems to be pretty extraordinary, callous and a real departure from from past practice by the federal government. And, you know, if nothing else, they ought to be at least adhering to what their own rules and statutes advise them to do, it seems to me.

Meredith Angwin [00:15:46] Well, I would think so, too, but I have to admit that I actually like the natural world more than I worry about whether these forces are going to make a huge difference. I mean, I definitely am concerned with the greenhouse gases, but I really like the natural world. What happens with the with the. With the idea that we have to get to 100% renewables is that anything goes, whatever you want to do. It’s expensive.

Meredith Angwin [00:16:16] Well, you know, you’re going to save the planet. It’s going to kill right whales. Whale right whales are in trouble anyway. What do you. At least we can save the planet. I mean.

David Blackmon [00:16:29] Well, and you know, onshore they get, you know, dozens of permits every year to kill bald eagles and other endangered migratory birds, which is, you know, they’re just devastating the migratory bird populations in south Texas.

David Blackmon [00:16:46] They’re, you know, building wind farms that there’s literally no need for on the Texas power grid. But, you know, just because it’s green and they can do it and it makes a profit for the companies developing them. And it’s it’s really.

David Blackmon [00:17:07] You know, you talk about Jamie Dimon just last month advocated that the government to facilitate all this just start began exercising eminent domain to take people’s land from them, to facilitate transmission lines and new wind farms. And, you know, that’s that’s a dangerous road to go down, it seems to me.

Meredith Angwin [00:17:33] Well, I agree with that. And I find that it is really. Distressing to me when I was in geothermal. There was some difficulty. At the time I was there in putting new well pads in in some areas because there were. There was a plant called streptococcus that was growing and it was considered to be in danger.

Meredith Angwin [00:18:06] And the thing is that it was endangered because it is there’s a kind of. Green rock known as Serpentine in the Hills. And that rock has so many minerals in it that it’s not good for most plants, and only plants can live on it and stripped down. This is one of those adapted plants.

Meredith Angwin [00:18:35] So it was really an immense amount of trouble to get permission to, to drill a well and. And but but actually that, you know, if you went to one of the serpentine outputs, the area was just colder with these plants because they didn’t have very many competitors who could live on that kind of rock.

Meredith Angwin [00:18:59] And I think  when I remember how that was going and I think about. The right whales, which if they go away, we’ll never be back. I mean, only there’s less than 400 of them left. And I think it’s and and also they are one of the whales that hangs closest to shore. So in my opinion, they have their ecological niche, which until humans begin hunting them or drilling near them, was doing fine for them.

Meredith Angwin [00:19:38] And. It just bothers me that there was so much fuss about stripped houses. And yet here are these, which, as I see, if you found some serpentine rock, you could almost always find some of it. I mean.

David Blackmon [00:19:56] Right. And I’ll give you another great example of how ridiculous to the dichotomy is among the federal regulatory agencies. While they’re ignoring the issue with the whales in the North Atlantic and just allowing this this development to proceed willy nilly and kill all the whales. Or maybe perhaps we don’t know.

David Blackmon [00:20:22] The same federal government has been holding up a lithium mine in Nevada. Lithium is endemic to all renewable forms of energy and electric vehicles. It goes into the batteries. You have to have it. They’ve held up a proposed lithium mine for four years now to protect ten acres of buckwheat, a subspecies of buckwheat. That ten acres of it lies adjacent to the mining operation.

David Blackmon [00:20:51] And the Center for Biological Diversity in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and have coordinated to to delay that project for four years now because they’re worried about some buckwheat. Yeah. But we’re not worried about the right whales that they’re about to go extinct. It’s just. It’s just really amazing to me the hypocrisy surrounding all of this.

Meredith Angwin [00:21:18] Sometimes things bother me a great deal about. About how people see the natural world in the sense that somebody says, well, it’s a subspecies that’s only available here. And I’m like, Well, yeah, but there are other subspecies that are available here. I mean, pretty soon you can’t build anything anywhere because nobody is subspecies there.

Meredith Angwin [00:21:46] I mean, I think there’s a whole lot of difference between the fact that plants and animals will adapt to a small area in a certain way. And but that doesn’t mean that some other plant couldn’t adapt to it or that they won’t adapt to a nearby area in a slightly different way. and there are 400 of these right whales that swim along the shore, and we don’t seem to care about them.

David Blackmon [00:22:11] You know, it’s really amazing. You know, another piece of this has to do with transmission and, you know, way to facilitate the energy transition. We’re going to have to build thousands of miles of new high power transmission lines in the coming years, In just a few years, really.

David Blackmon [00:22:34] At the same time, though, we’re having this this supply chain issue with the transformers that are part of any transmission system. How do you see that as a real looming kind of train wreck coming in in the power generation space? I’ve talked to some others recently who are very concerned about it.

Meredith Angwin [00:23:00] Well, I’m very concerned about or partially because we don’t build the transformers on shore anymore. We import them. And I consider that that’s kind of a dangerous thing. And the other thing is that when somebody says we’re going to need more transformers, my feeling is absolutely, we’re going to need them, but not because we need more or. Transmission lines we need as backup in case there’s a huge attack on our grid.

Meredith Angwin [00:23:34] I mean, the simplest way to attack the grid would be to have an impulse in the in the stratosphere or maybe lower. I don’t know enough about it to say exactly where it has to be, but that would just blitz out all the transformers. And once you’ve done that, you have to replace them. And we don’t have any way to replace them.

David Blackmon [00:23:56] Yeah.

Meredith Angwin [00:23:57] So if you want to invest in Transformers, the best thing to do is just invest in backup transformers, which in case there’s an MPV won’t be energized and probably won’t be affected. But I could or at least I that’s as I understand it now, somebody who’s an electrical engineer can say, oh, that could still be affected. But if they’re not energized, they’re not going to be quite affected the same way.

David Blackmon [00:24:23] Yeah, no,I think that’s right. That’s what I hear, too. In hurricane season, we’re going into hurricane season and you have a major, major hurricane landfall that knocks out a big part of the grid. I know that the folks in the industry itself are very concerned that we don’t even have enough of of an inventory of transformers on hand to really efficiently repair the system for like a Hurricane Harvey or Hurricane Katrina kind of event, much less of an impulse event.

Meredith Angwin [00:24:59] So it really bothers me about these things because people don’t understand that if we don’t keep our grid going, people will die. And not just like 200 people, which is bad enough. I need thousands. I mean, possibly millions.

David Blackmon [00:25:15] Yeah.

Meredith Angwin [00:25:15] And so what we need is the ability to fix the grid quickly. And for that, we should be hardening the grid and getting transformers and having them sit around waiting for a hurricane to strike somewhere because there will be another hurricane if they do keep happening.

David Blackmon [00:25:38] Yeah.

Meredith Angwin [00:25:38] And I it it just strikes me as backwards. It strikes me as, you know, with the. When you were a little kid, somebody told you about the grasshopper and the ant and how the grasshopper didn’t save anything. And so it died. And the aunt had all kinds of food for the winter.

Meredith Angwin [00:25:59] I mean, that’s a little kid story, but it’s an actually, it’s a reasonable story because the thing is, if we go like grasshoppers, we’re like, we’re going to save the planet, but we’re not going to bother to put aside things so we can save ourselves in case there’s a major storm or there’s a major a Carrington event or whatever. Carrington events are natural, right?

David Blackmon [00:26:25] Yeah. From the sun. Yeah, from the sun.

Meredith Angwin [00:26:29] I just. I think we have to begin looking at what really happens and how we prepare for it. And, yes, what really happens can be increased problems due to global warming. However, those problems will not be huge for 50 to 100 years from now.

Meredith Angwin [00:26:54] I mean, they will begin to happen, but not not hugely. And a Carrington event could cause a yes really soon. And from my point of view, keeping people who are alive now alive is a very important thing. And I’m not just saying that because I’m older and if I go away tomorrow, you know, I’ve had a good life. But I have grandchildren that are like in I started school in college and actually grandchildren in third grade.

David Blackmon [00:27:25] Yeah. My grandchildren are my big concern now, too. It’s amazing how that happens to every generation, right? You get to our stage in life and you start worrying about, well, how my grandkids going to live.

David Blackmon [00:27:36] But for those, you know, who don’t know, I mean, the character, that is a very real potential circumstance. I mean, we haven’t had one in a long time, but not that long. I mean, it was just the mid 19th century, right, where there was a 40 something, 1847, I think knocked out almost the entire telegraph system in the United States, which, you know, I mean, fortunately, people’s lives weren’t as dependent on electricity then as they are now, obviously.

David Blackmon [00:28:11] But if you had a similar event today and knocked out the power grid, my gosh, in Texas, we had 300 people die because of blackouts two years ago that lasted four days. Imagine. And we have backups in the transformer supply chain now that are going on for years, not not weeks or months, but it’s taking years to get transformers in many instances.

David Blackmon [00:28:38] So just think about if you had an event like that impacting our power grid, how many people could die. It’s it’s it’s a very real thing. It’s really depressing thinking about these things sometimes, actually.

Meredith Angwin [00:28:51] Like I want to take people and shake them and say, look, you guys are you got to help the people that are alive today survive. And then you and, and the next question is so, you know, helping the future because there won’t be a future.

David Blackmon [00:29:10] All right.

Meredith Angwin [00:29:11] All right. Of course, there are people who think of a future without humans would be the best possible future. But I’m not sure where they’re coming from. And so that’s never been my feeling about the future.

David Blackmon [00:29:25] Well, unfortunately, people with that thought process are having increasing influence in the energy transition, and climate change movement every day. And it’s becoming a more and more accepted philosophy within that part of our society. And that’s a pretty frightening prospect.

Meredith Angwin [00:29:44] Oh, man, you know.  I had I met when I was in high school. I mean, in college, I met someone who explained to me why she didn’t want to have any children because this is just too terrible world to bring children into. And I was like, Oh, wow, that’s a weird way to look at it.

Meredith Angwin [00:30:11] But I mean, you know, because at the time I remember we were actually treating ourselves to a nice meal out to chat, I mean, which was very unusual in college. So I just worry about that whole thing kind of spreading. I mean, at the time I was like, man, it’s just the world is really lovely. I mean, you know, it is it’s so many beautiful things and the opportunity to love people and to be loved and to enjoy music.

Meredith Angwin [00:30:43] I mean, how how can she say that? Such a terrible world. You can’t bring people, children into it. Anyway, it’s distressing. And meanwhile, I have been trying to keep the grant going in my own little way by writing a book. Because if people do, you know, one part of me said, Well, I should have written a book about what could happen if the grid goes down, but there are already some good books on that.

David Blackmon [00:31:09] Yeah,.

Meredith Angwin [00:31:10] There really are. One of the problems is nobody understands how the grid is managed. When I told people I was writing a book about the grid, they sort of like, Well, that sounds sort of dull and innocent, I mean, because they don’t know anything about it. So they thought, well, are these people who set policy and they said good policies and then these other people carry for it.

Meredith Angwin [00:31:31] And I’m like, no, you have no idea what’s going on over there. And it’s nothing but, you know, lawsuits and and and trying to keep your own particular age favored technology to the top of the heap. And I mean, it’s it’s it hasn’t got anything to do with the general policies for the general good.

David Blackmon [00:31:55] Yeah.

Meredith Angwin [00:31:55] So anyway.

David Blackmon [00:31:56] Well and that’s why I’m so high on your book is because you took what could be a very dull subject. Right. But you weave it into this narrative, it makes it very, very interesting and it’s a real page turner. It’s it becomes hard to put it down because you can’t wait to find out what happened next.

David Blackmon [00:32:15] And that’s that’s why it’s such a work of genius, I think. And, you know, it really is. I truly mean that. And I really appreciate you taking the time to to do this with me today.I’m afraid we’re running out of time.

Meredith Angwin [00:32:30] Yeah. Good. Running out of time. I want. Very much for inviting me here.

David Blackmon [00:32:35] Oh, gosh. Yes. And let’s do it again soon. There’s. You know, we’ll get into the middle of the summer, and there’ll be a lot more to talk about. Hopefully nothing disastrous and hopefully cycle back then.

Meredith Angwin [00:32:49] Yes. Yes.

David Blackmon [00:32:51] Well, thank you so much. And thanks to everyone who joined us. You can find our podcast anywhere podcasts are available, Spotify, Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, etc. You can find Meredith’s book Shorting the Grid at Amazon and 100 other places. Please go out and buy it. It’s a wonderful read and thanks to the Sandstone Group and Stuart Turley for hosting our podcast and our extraordinary producer, Eric Parel. I’m David Blackmon, signing off for now.

 

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