Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid

Shorting the Grid, by Meredith Angwin, could have made great bed-time reading — put you right to sleep! Could have been. But it isn’t. I honestly don’t know how anyone managed to write a book like this, but she did it. The complexity of the multiple layers of policies and their relationships in much of our grid governance is truly unbelievable. Markets that aren’t really markets, “deregulation” with ever-growing mountains of regulations, renewable energy credits (RECs) and zero emission credits (ZECs), forward capacity auctions, jump-ball filings… Oh my!But the complexity is the point. It isn’t a bug, it’s a feature! Angwin begins by stating the obvious: People expect reliable, inexpensive, plentiful, and clean electrical power using a diversity of fuels, and a resilient and well-balanced grid. But in the Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) areas, none of that matters. This left me frankly gob-smacked. Nobody has responsibility for maintaining a reliable grid. There are no adults in the room. There is no consumer choice, no transparency, no accountability. “The buck never stops anywhere," as she aptly points out. And this is our wake-up call.The problems are too many to enumerate in a review, but I will mention a few of them:* Grid-scale storage is forever a thing of the future — like fusion power, always “about twenty years away.” And extremely resource intensive.* Renewables are “cheap” because they make their real money on “out-of-market revenues.” This allows them to bid to sell power at very low, even negative, prices, which drives down the grid prices for everyone else. Further, renewables are intermittent, unpredictable, and unreliable, due to the fact that the sun is not always shining nor the wind blowing. They must always be backed up with load-following generation, and the best load-followers are fossil plants. And the higher the penetration of renewables, the greater the instability of the grid.* The FERC requires RTOs to be fuel-neutral. This leads to shortages, as happens when dual-fuel gas/oil plants cannot be required to stock oil on site, and eventually to rolling blackouts.* Simply selling kWh to the grid is not the least bit lucrative. The most reliable power generators that we have, nuclear plants, cannot be profitable by doing what they do best. This leads to closure of highly reliable and non-pollutung power plants. And once a nuclear plant is closed, it does not reopen. Further, the reliable power is almost always replaced by whatever is the next most reliable source — namely, fossil fuels.* Markets are supposed to be about customer choice. In an RTO area, there is no choice — the “customer” is really just a “ratepayer."* RTOs attempt to solve almost any problem with another kind of auction. Perhaps the most startling thing about the auctions is the way in which the “clearing price” is determined. This is the price that all generators receive. And the price is not set at the lowest bid, it is set at the highest! But wait, renewables can bid the grid prices way down. Confused? You are not alone! Remember, confusion is a feature.And at the end of the day, electricity prices tend to be higher in the “deregulated” RTO areas. It simply has not worked out the way telephone and airline deregulation did. None of these problems are about the power generators, technology, fuel choices, or carbon footprints. The problem is in the governance. The question, as always, is: who profits? Follow the money. And the result is an expensive, fragile, and high-carbon grid.I could go on, but as Meredith wanted to write a readable book, so I want to write a readable review. I do want to mention her coverage of the difference between choices made by Germany and France (as well as Sweden and Ontario). Germany tried to decarbonize by building massive renewables — and closing their non-emitting nuclear plants. The result has been an expensive and high-carbon grid. France, in contrast, successfully decarbonized in ten years by going nuclear. Same with Sweden and Ontario. The choices made by governments are what make the difference, not individual behaviors. Organizations that push consumers toward what I call energy austerity encourage us to make personal sacrifices in order to do our part. This is just another case of passing the buck. If you are of the belief that taking personal responsibility for using less energy will lead to lower emissions, then the author with the lesson of Germany, will disabuse you of this notion. The RTOs push us toward the German model. Our role models should, rather, be France, Sweden, and Ontario.Meredith says that this book was ten years in the making. I can believe it. She insisted that she could not and would not produce a book that was unreadable or would put the reader to sleep. Fear not! She writes in a conversational way, as if you are talking over dinner, or sharing coffee and brownies. (Never forget the brownies!)The grammar is pristine, with no strange idiosyncrasies of capitalization or punctuation. As a self-appointed proof-reader, I notice these things. Throughout the entire 400 pages, I think I counted all of three very minor typos that did not obscure the meaning in any way. Every word is obviously chosen with care. There is no arcane language, and every industry term, buzzword, and practice is carefully explained. It includes extensive endnotes — 292, to be exact. I recommend following many of these references, especially to her blog posts.Finally, she concludes with a chapter on actions that we can take. She does not tell us all about these shocking problems without leaving us with great suggestions for what we can do about them. This was entirely expected — her previous book, “Campaigning for Clean Air,” which I also reviewed, is the best book on advocacy and activism I have ever read, and having been a political activist in my time, I have read a few.Do yourself a favor — buy and read this book. And then share it.

I also write about the electric grid and energy in general. The one thing I could never understand were the Volt-Ampere Reactives (VARs), a property of electric current few know about. I'd have included them in my book "When Trucks Stop Running" if I had only understood them, since that is an issue with renewables and the long-term future of the electric grid. Here's an excerpt from the book: "The BA must keep voltage within a narrow range and balance demand on the grid (amps). The BA must also make sure the VARs are in balance. Alternating current has electromagnetic properties that have to be kept in balance. When a person attempts to explain VARs, they often end up giving incomprehensible explanations. It is like riding a bicycle. The energy you put into the pedals will move the bike forward, but you also have to put some energy into maintaining your balance, or you’ll fall over and won’t be able to move forward at all. If you are a good bicyclist on a smooth road, the “maintaining your balance energy” will be small. If you are a poor bicyclist who swerves around a lot, or if you’re on a bad road, the “maintaining your balance” energy will be larger. In either case, the “maintaining your balance” energy is necessary. That energy is also a parasitical drain on your energy effort: it doesn’t move the bike forward. A well-run grid is like a good bicyclist on a smooth road. Rotating electric machinery puts VARs on the grid, and if the entire grid was thermal (nuclear, gas, coal) and hydro units, there would rarely be a problem with VARs. These systems all run with rotating electric machinery. But wind turbines and solar make direct current that needs to be changed into alternating current, and that process does not put VARs on the grid in the same fashion. (Some older and bigger wind turbines do put VARs on the grid.) Messing up the VARs can also mess up the grid, so this is another place where the BA must be aware of what is happening on the grid.It is yet another reason why the the electric grid can't be 100% "renewable", just ReBuildable. Wind, solar, and nuclear are not renewable beyond oil decline because every single step of their life cycle depends on fossil fuels, as I explain in energyskeptic post "55 reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels".Nor does electricity substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, such as natural gas fertilizer which keeps about 4 billion of us alive, and oil is the substance of 500,000 products (plastics, paint, medicine...), nor can electricity generate the high heat required in manufacturing for smelting of metals, glass, and other components, or replace the diesel fuel used by heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships. Plus even more as you'll see in my May 2021 Springer book "Life After Fossil Fuels".Take wind turbines for example. They will never be able to reproduce themselves using the energy they made with a positive net energy return, or at all really, since electricity can't run transportation or manufacturing. And global oil peaked in 2018 (read "Life After Fossil fuels" for citations and evidence).Turbines (and solar panels and nuclear power plants) are far from renewable or sustainable! Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fueled ships take the ore to a facility that will use fossil fuels to crush it and permeate it with toxic petro-chemicals to extract the metal from the ore. Then the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter so intermittent electricity won’t do). There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fueled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.When the energy return of wind and solar are calculated, no one includes the energy to build the transmission lines, substations, roads, and the energy/cost of the absolutely essential natural gas powered generation plants that back them up (the energy storage)."When trucks stop running" explains why if trucks stopped, civilization would end within a week. And explains why heavy-duty trucks can't run on electricity. Basically, the batteries are too heavy, and overhead catenary wires far too expensive and impractical.So in the end, this is a great book to understand how the grid works NOW, but electricity generating contraptions can't replace the fossils used in transportation or manufacturing. And hey! Fossils still power two-thirds of the electric grid, and nuclear nearly 20%. Wind and solar aren't even making a dent!The only thing that has saved us since 2005 is fracked natural gas, and the IEA and EIA both see it as peaking and declining by 2025. Yet it is absolutely essential, as this book documents, to balancing intermittent, variable, and unreliable wind and solar.

I have not written reviews of books and have delayed writing this for too long. In fairness, I've been interested in the subject for some time and was concerned my comments would just echo back that Angwin had been singing to the choir, so to speak.And then Texas had blackouts during a winter cold snap. I had a much richer understanding of the reporting on the causes, costs, and political maneuvering to avoid responsibility in Texas for having read 'Shorting the Grid'.I enjoyed this book. It felt like the other side of a conversation with a friend politely communicating the complexities of what's been called the world's biggest machine, Some of it did buttress my prior knowledge but never was it work to get through familiar topics as Angwin's pace, content and delivery kept me in the conversation throughout.I won't summarize the content, because I think the author has done a far better job on that than I could.I recommend this book to anybody with an interest in knowing more about electricity systems; from the roles a functioning system needs to fulfil to the politics of the entities active in working to profit, or serve, within the system. This should be most people as electricity is critical to our personnel lives and our society.

Ever wondered about the headwinds blocking innovation and efficiency in the American electricity grid? This book exposes the often ludicrous and scandalous policies governing the management of critical fuel supplies and the greed that renders the grid difficult to maintain, causing shortages and unnecessary expense to the public.