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How the Electrical Grid Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
0:04
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
0:13
Speaker 1: Josh Spuzzing Clark, and there's Chuck Zippy Zap Bryant. Okay,
0:21
Speaker 1: there's just the two of us. Don't have to come
0:23
Speaker 1: up with any more stupid electricity based names. Jerry Jerry, Yeah,
0:29
Speaker 1: she's we don't not here. She just zipped off into
0:33
Speaker 1: the ether absent who knows. Yeah, we should call Roll Chuck. Okay, yeah,
0:40
Speaker 1: Josh here, Chuck present, Jerry Jerry, She's not here, dude.
0:51
Speaker 1: I just had a shower today for the first time
0:53
Speaker 1: in a few days because we didn't have water in
0:55
Speaker 1: our house. No, And I put this on the Movie
0:59
Speaker 1: Crushers page just to get some feedback. I was like,
1:01
Speaker 1: would you rather not have power or water? And that
1:03
Speaker 1: kind of figures into today's episode, and you know, of
1:07
Speaker 1: the people are very sensible and said would much rather
1:10
Speaker 1: not have power than water, But there were a handful
1:13
Speaker 1: of psychopaths that said they'd rather be I guess just
1:18
Speaker 1: buying dozens of gallons of water to to flush toilets
1:23
Speaker 1: and wash hands and not bathe. At what point? At
1:28
Speaker 1: what point though of going without water and maybe you
1:30
Speaker 1: reach this point and you can tell me. Do you
1:33
Speaker 1: get to where you're like, well, we're just gonna save
1:35
Speaker 1: water and dig a dig a pit and be in
1:39
Speaker 1: the van a latrine. Well, I mean we were letting
1:42
Speaker 1: the yellow mellow, you know what I'm saying. Unfortunately, uh,
1:46
Speaker 1: you know the brown you gotta flush down. You should
1:51
Speaker 1: trademark that. And it really hits home how much water
1:55
Speaker 1: a toilet uses when you have to fill it up
1:57
Speaker 1: with those huge, like arrowhead five gallon jugs. And it's
2:03
Speaker 1: just shameful. But you know, I was happy to take
2:05
Speaker 1: that shower, I gotta tell you. Yeah. But you go
2:07
Speaker 1: through three of those five gallon jugs before you realize
2:10
Speaker 1: that you're accidentally stepping on the handle and they're just
2:12
Speaker 1: going right down the drain. You're like, man, this is
2:16
Speaker 1: not my week. But this isn't about water. It's about power,
2:22
Speaker 1: which you know, it's a it's a really good question,
2:24
Speaker 1: and I'm not surprised that the um you've got the
2:26
Speaker 1: response that you got from it, because like we we
2:30
Speaker 1: tend to think of, like, you know, electricity is you know,
2:33
Speaker 1: a really nice modern luxury, and that is basically not
2:38
Speaker 1: the case anymore for most of the climates in the
2:41
Speaker 1: United States, electricity is an absolute necessity. It's not a luxury,
2:45
Speaker 1: like you need it to survive in the modern world.
2:49
Speaker 1: You could try to do the take Kazinsky thing, go
2:52
Speaker 1: off grid. People do it successfully, But even then, if
2:55
Speaker 1: you look into what they're doing, I would guess something
2:58
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood of of those people are still using
3:02
Speaker 1: something like solar power or wind power. They just aren't
3:05
Speaker 1: connected to this grid that we're going to talk about today. Yeah,
3:09
Speaker 1: and I should caveat the question I posted the movie
3:11
Speaker 1: Crushers was whether aside like obviously, in the hot, hot
3:16
Speaker 1: summer people can and do die from outages, and in
3:18
Speaker 1: the winter they do as well. But it was you
3:22
Speaker 1: know that wasn't the case here in Atlanta. All that
3:24
Speaker 1: is cold today. Yeah it is very cold, but I
3:27
Speaker 1: mean not deadly cold, but it gets deadly cold once
3:30
Speaker 1: in a while here. Um, but even beyond like heating
3:33
Speaker 1: and cooling just to stay alive, Like, electricity is so
3:36
Speaker 1: interwoven with our lives that you know, you you're like, okay,
3:40
Speaker 1: I can wash dishes by hand. You know it's not
3:42
Speaker 1: my preference, but whatever, or um, you know, I can,
3:46
Speaker 1: I can use the old gas powered lawnmar and so
3:48
Speaker 1: the electric lawnmar But there's also like can you keep
3:51
Speaker 1: up in school or at work without you know, electricity?
3:55
Speaker 1: That like it's it's really just a it's a fundamental
3:58
Speaker 1: necessity in my modern industrial life. And um, we get
4:04
Speaker 1: this based on this huge, sprawling, rickety old black and
4:10
Speaker 1: white cartoon donkey of an engineering marvel that we call
4:15
Speaker 1: the electrical grid. It's crazy how held together with like
4:20
Speaker 1: duct tape and bubblegum this thing is. But it's still
4:23
Speaker 1: literally delivers the juice for us. Yeah, and it is
4:27
Speaker 1: funny how we it's so like power and water you
4:30
Speaker 1: know here in the United States is so ingrained. Is
4:33
Speaker 1: just something we kind of take for granted that when
4:35
Speaker 1: you don't have it, this is the only time you notice.
4:38
Speaker 1: And like, the only fun thing about the past few
4:41
Speaker 1: days was hearing Emily scream from another room because you know,
4:46
Speaker 1: your instinct is, oh, I have grease on my fingers,
4:49
Speaker 1: let me go watch it off, and just hearing her
4:52
Speaker 1: like flick uh, you know, some faucet or something somewhere
4:55
Speaker 1: in the house over the past three days and nothing
4:57
Speaker 1: comes out because you just forget, say, when the powers
5:00
Speaker 1: if you're constantly flicking a switch and going I hate life.
5:03
Speaker 1: It's not there. Yeah. Well, but that's why you'll see
5:06
Speaker 1: in a lot of different like power companies, UM names
5:09
Speaker 1: the word reliability because that is key, Like you can't have,
5:14
Speaker 1: you know, an electric company that's just kind of like, oh,
5:17
Speaker 1: you work a lot of the time, you know, don't
5:19
Speaker 1: we get credit for that. It's like, no, people want
5:22
Speaker 1: you to work basically a hundred percent of the time.
5:25
Speaker 1: You don't want to sign up for a company, and
5:27
Speaker 1: it's called partial credit exactly you want. You want the
5:30
Speaker 1: full credit one the real ambitious types that like with
5:33
Speaker 1: their hands shoot up into the air at every question.
5:35
Speaker 1: That's the kind of energy company you want. So should
5:39
Speaker 1: we talk about this big, antiquated system. Yeah, so, like
5:43
Speaker 1: I said, it is considered a modern marvel. And part
5:45
Speaker 1: of the reason why it's considered a modern marvel is
5:48
Speaker 1: just from its sheer enormous size. Yeah, I mean big time.
5:53
Speaker 1: We're talking uh nineteen thousand generators and in this case
5:58
Speaker 1: it is literally generating the power or like a coal
6:00
Speaker 1: plant or a National natural gas plant or a wind
6:03
Speaker 1: farm that kind of thing. Uh fifty five thousand substations,
6:07
Speaker 1: transmission substations, and we'll we've talked about this before and
6:11
Speaker 1: we'll get to it later. But this is when you're
6:13
Speaker 1: stepping up and stepping down power to get it in
6:15
Speaker 1: and out of your house. I guess not out of
6:18
Speaker 1: your house. It only comes in. It depends if you
6:20
Speaker 1: have a good solar rain. Like a power wants your stuff.
6:25
Speaker 1: It's uh six miles of um transmission lines. It's a
6:31
Speaker 1: six point three million miles of distribution lines. And these
6:34
Speaker 1: are like the power poles, unless you're lucky enough to
6:37
Speaker 1: have buried power lines. I know, it looks so much better.
6:40
Speaker 1: They're doing that actually in our neighborhood finally, and they
6:44
Speaker 1: approached us with a dollar figure to say, can we
6:47
Speaker 1: put this huge, big green thing in your front yard?
6:51
Speaker 1: And we said thank you, No, Um, try someone else. Yeah,
6:56
Speaker 1: you're you're like not these neighbors. We like them, but
6:58
Speaker 1: three doors down they really sucks. So try that well,
7:02
Speaker 1: I mean something. It doesn't have to go in our yards.
7:04
Speaker 1: So I think they're just taking volunteers who want to
7:06
Speaker 1: make a little scratch. But you can't, like plant bushes
7:09
Speaker 1: in front of it or anything in our front yard
7:11
Speaker 1: is very exposed. It would look really bad. Yeah, well
7:13
Speaker 1: we'll talk about what those are, but they are seriously
7:16
Speaker 1: dangerous too if you end up getting into one of those,
7:20
Speaker 1: the one the things that kids play on all the time. Yeah,
7:23
Speaker 1: it's crazy. Those are really really dangerous. Basically many power stations,
7:27
Speaker 1: they're transformed. They just happen to be like on the
7:30
Speaker 1: ground rather than up on a pole where everybody's used
7:33
Speaker 1: to them. Yeah. I mean I felt kind of bad
7:35
Speaker 1: at first because I thought, am I not doing my
7:37
Speaker 1: part to make sure our neighborhood gets buried? But they
7:40
Speaker 1: said that you know there, it doesn't have to go there,
7:43
Speaker 1: and they can just that there are a lot of
7:45
Speaker 1: people that are gonna want that, however much money it
7:48
Speaker 1: was were. They like, okay, well, you know, we understand
7:50
Speaker 1: your decision, but we noticed you have an empty lot
7:53
Speaker 1: behind your and you keep walking. You know what's funny
7:57
Speaker 1: we found out once we assume oimed that property that
8:01
Speaker 1: we were squatting on, that two weeks later, Georgia Power
8:04
Speaker 1: got in touch with them. So no, I know, that's
8:06
Speaker 1: why I made that joke, but that was exactly what
8:08
Speaker 1: was going to happen, right, Yeah, for that's not a joke,
8:11
Speaker 1: I know, but I was joking about how close she came.
8:14
Speaker 1: Oh goodness me. All right, so let's talk about the
8:17
Speaker 1: nationwide network. Uh. And when we're talking about this, keep
8:20
Speaker 1: in mind we're talking about the lower forty eight. Obviously,
8:24
Speaker 1: Hawaii and Alaska have their own grids and systems. Yeah,
8:28
Speaker 1: they were strangely left out of this, the poor poor DearS. Yeah,
8:32
Speaker 1: but we're thinking about them. But on the lower forty eight,
8:35
Speaker 1: we have basically three big separate grids that are called
8:40
Speaker 1: inter connections, and really it should just be two. There
8:42
Speaker 1: should be the Eastern interconnection, which is basically everything west
8:47
Speaker 1: of the Rockies or east of the Rockies, a lot
8:50
Speaker 1: of the um Great Plain states up to the northeast,
8:54
Speaker 1: the southeast all that's the Eastern connection. Then you've got
8:57
Speaker 1: the Western interconnection, which is west of the Rockies, and
9:02
Speaker 1: then you've got Texas. Those are the three inter connections
9:05
Speaker 1: of the United States electrical grid. Yeah, here's my question,
9:09
Speaker 1: is it is Texas literally no longer connected at all? No,
9:14
Speaker 1: that's the big about the whole thing. They're connected to
9:17
Speaker 1: God and everybody. They're connected to Mexico. Mexico saved there,
9:20
Speaker 1: took us in two thousand eleven. They're connected to everybody.
9:23
Speaker 1: They just somehow are being left out of the law.
9:26
Speaker 1: It's ridiculous. No, but they are connected, like okay, yes,
9:30
Speaker 1: because I was gonna say, is it the lower forty seven?
9:32
Speaker 1: But technically they are connected, but they're just Texas is
9:35
Speaker 1: gonna do Texas now? And there's even that's exactly right.
9:38
Speaker 1: And then there's even parts of Texas, including El Paso
9:41
Speaker 1: and some parts of the Panhandle, that are connected to
9:44
Speaker 1: either the Eastern or the Western inter connection. But most
9:47
Speaker 1: of Texas by far is its own interconnection, its own
9:52
Speaker 1: separate grid. Yeah. Even know even more than that, I
9:55
Speaker 1: would say it's probably closer like percent, like almost all
9:59
Speaker 1: of it. Okay, all right, Well this is good though,
10:02
Speaker 1: that we're interconnected. Uh. And there are a lot of
10:05
Speaker 1: big benefits to that, chief of which is probably reliability
10:08
Speaker 1: because when you have such an interconnected grid, um, you
10:12
Speaker 1: can work together and there's a lot of backups and
10:14
Speaker 1: redundancy is built in, so if there's a big demand
10:17
Speaker 1: in one place, or if power goes down in one place,
10:20
Speaker 1: you can reroute and have get some help from your neighbors.
10:24
Speaker 1: Basically right, exactly, um. And that actually came about, as
10:28
Speaker 1: we'll see from a little bit of deregulation, but also
10:33
Speaker 1: it kind of developed from from power producers realizing like, well,
10:37
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that in a minute. There's also flexibility, right,
10:40
Speaker 1: So if you have like a bunch of different sources.
10:43
Speaker 1: So you've got a wind farm offshore in in Um, Florida,
10:47
Speaker 1: and then you also have you're getting power from like
10:51
Speaker 1: a damn in Georgia, and all of these are providing
10:54
Speaker 1: power to the southeast, and you have all sorts of
10:56
Speaker 1: coal fire power plates and nuclear power plates. You can
10:59
Speaker 1: kind of put all these two gather into an energy portfolio,
11:01
Speaker 1: and all of them are providing electricity to do the grid.
11:04
Speaker 1: So the fact that it's like interconnected, it can accept
11:08
Speaker 1: electrical um production from generators all over the place and
11:12
Speaker 1: from different varieties and types. But as far as you're concerned,
11:15
Speaker 1: it's all just it all just turns into electricity after
11:18
Speaker 1: it's generated, right. Uh. And then the last advantage is affordability.
11:24
Speaker 1: And this is kind of what you were hinting at.
11:27
Speaker 1: You know, deregulations sort of has giveth in taken away
11:31
Speaker 1: in some ways. Starting in the eighties, the grid was
11:34
Speaker 1: open to wholesale competition and private power companies started investing
11:40
Speaker 1: in certain efficiencies and that made that did really make
11:43
Speaker 1: electricity affordable in the US. But it also when it
11:46
Speaker 1: comes to like like insulating pipelines like Texas did not do. Um,
11:52
Speaker 1: it makes companies more reticent to invest in money like
11:55
Speaker 1: that because they're like, you know, why would we want
11:58
Speaker 1: to unline our pockets? You know, envy. And so you
12:01
Speaker 1: put all this stuff together. You put the power generation plants,
12:05
Speaker 1: you put the transmission lines, you put the distribution networks
12:09
Speaker 1: that all go into like people's homes and businesses and
12:12
Speaker 1: end up as like an outlet or socket or something
12:15
Speaker 1: like that, and that all together, all those components is
12:19
Speaker 1: the electrical grid. And that's that's it. But uh so
12:24
Speaker 1: let's take a break and um we'll come back and
12:27
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about the history of the grid.
12:28
Speaker 1: How about that. Let's do it, okay, Chuck. Also, before
13:02
Speaker 1: we talk about the history, I want to direct everybody
13:04
Speaker 1: to what I think is one of our better science
13:06
Speaker 1: based episodes, How Electricity Works. Yeah, it's a good one.
13:11
Speaker 1: We cover some of this stuff in there. But um,
13:14
Speaker 1: like we really got into electricity. It was electrifying. Bo
13:21
Speaker 1: you've laughed. I know, I'm just laughing because you're my friend.
13:25
Speaker 1: I can't punch you right now because you're in a
13:27
Speaker 1: different place, that joke in the same room, right, you
13:34
Speaker 1: learned from the last one. Uh so, And then then
13:38
Speaker 1: we talked, like you said about part of this in electricity.
13:40
Speaker 1: But our earliest power grids were built in the eighteen eighties,
13:44
Speaker 1: and they were all very local and specific, and this
13:48
Speaker 1: was a time and place when Edison and Tesla were
13:51
Speaker 1: duking it out in a very public, sometimes a grotesque
13:54
Speaker 1: way to prove that they're uh. In Edison's case, DC
13:58
Speaker 1: system or Tesla is a c Alternating current system was
14:02
Speaker 1: better and gruesome, meaning electrifying large animals. That s ob
14:08
Speaker 1: You always got to say that, right, Oh yeah, he
14:10
Speaker 1: should go down in history. That Yeah, he's a terrible
14:13
Speaker 1: guy in that respect for sure. But Tesla went out,
14:17
Speaker 1: um in large part due to a lot of financial
14:20
Speaker 1: backing from George Westinghouse. Right, Um, but not just that,
14:23
Speaker 1: Like direct current has better in some ways, but it
14:28
Speaker 1: also has some serious disadvantages to alternating current, which was
14:32
Speaker 1: the Tesla Westinghouse version. And um, we'll talk about exactly why,
14:38
Speaker 1: but just you know, remember that alternating current is way
14:42
Speaker 1: better for long distance transmission. So the fact that we
14:45
Speaker 1: went with alternating current meant that we could create this huge,
14:48
Speaker 1: extensive grid with hundreds of thousands or millions of miles
14:52
Speaker 1: of transmission and distribution line. That's all thanks to Nicola
14:56
Speaker 1: Tesla's alternating current. That's right. So really part of the
15:00
Speaker 1: twentieth century, there were about four thousand individual electric utilities
15:05
Speaker 1: with all these tiny grids, and then World War Two
15:08
Speaker 1: rolls around and there's a big spike in demand for
15:11
Speaker 1: more power because it was just after World War Two.
15:14
Speaker 1: There was a big boon, lots lots of new appliances
15:17
Speaker 1: and fancy new things that needed power. And uh, the smaller,
15:23
Speaker 1: little independent grids looked at each other and said, I
15:26
Speaker 1: guess we gotta hold hands now and start working together
15:29
Speaker 1: to to meet this demand. Yeah, there was this really
15:32
Speaker 1: big push to electrify America that FDR took up pretty
15:35
Speaker 1: early in his presidency, and he like took on these
15:38
Speaker 1: really like powerful electric utilities and got a bunch of
15:43
Speaker 1: black eyes as a result of it, but ended up
15:45
Speaker 1: winning UM passing the Federal Power Act, of which basically
15:51
Speaker 1: put a leash on the UM the holding companies that
15:55
Speaker 1: there was like a handful of very large powerful holding
15:58
Speaker 1: companies that basically ran and electricity in the United States UM,
16:03
Speaker 1: and they weren't really innovating. They weren't doing much too
16:06
Speaker 1: to electrify the US. So the federal government got involved
16:09
Speaker 1: in UM basically took over and so we're gonna regulate
16:12
Speaker 1: you guys from now on, and the United States became
16:15
Speaker 1: UM very much electrified, like as a whole country. But
16:19
Speaker 1: in return for this, it wasn't just the UM nanny
16:23
Speaker 1: state taking away from the corporate state. They said, how
16:26
Speaker 1: about this. We'll give you guys monopolies that we're gonna
16:29
Speaker 1: keep a really close eye on, and we're gonna regulate strongly,
16:32
Speaker 1: but you guys can make your costs back and a
16:35
Speaker 1: reasonable profit. And so owning an electric company became UM.
16:41
Speaker 1: It was like printing your own money, you know, like
16:44
Speaker 1: you had so many customers that you were making gobs
16:46
Speaker 1: of money. And every year your your growth, the growth
16:51
Speaker 1: of the growth of the entire industry was about eight
16:53
Speaker 1: percent each year. That's really good, and it was also
16:56
Speaker 1: money in the bank. They knew that America was just
16:59
Speaker 1: going to keep consuming and consuming and consuming, so they
17:01
Speaker 1: would just build more and more power plants and they
17:04
Speaker 1: were just going to sit back and collect eight percent
17:06
Speaker 1: a year, and actually everybody was happy. There's a lot
17:08
Speaker 1: of innovation and everything UM, but one of the things
17:12
Speaker 1: that these different power monopolies learned early on is that
17:17
Speaker 1: everyone expected power on demand twenty four hours a day.
17:21
Speaker 1: If somebody wanted to plug their vacuum cleaner in at
17:24
Speaker 1: three am, they better have power. There wasn't like downtime
17:28
Speaker 1: that these guys could factor in. And as we'll see,
17:31
Speaker 1: there was no storage capacity. That's something that we need
17:34
Speaker 1: to get that we don't have, which means that power
17:37
Speaker 1: has to be generated constantly and you also have to
17:40
Speaker 1: have backup power. Was really really expensive to build a
17:43
Speaker 1: backup power station, and so these early UM companies figured
17:47
Speaker 1: out that they could buy power from other rival companies
17:52
Speaker 1: that had some surplus right then, cheaper than it would
17:54
Speaker 1: be for them to generate it or to build a
17:56
Speaker 1: backup generating plant. And in this way, the early independent
18:01
Speaker 1: grid started to connect to one another to kind of
18:04
Speaker 1: buy and sell power as needed, and this kind of
18:07
Speaker 1: wholesale power market developed, and that's where the grid started
18:11
Speaker 1: to connect together, right And we should also point out
18:14
Speaker 1: that in nineteen thirty five, with the passing of the
18:17
Speaker 1: Federal Power Act. That's when Texas said, nah, ye said,
18:21
Speaker 1: we're gonna do our own thing. We're gonna make our
18:24
Speaker 1: own power, we're gonna keep our own power, and we're
18:27
Speaker 1: gonna have our own our own body to oversee it.
18:30
Speaker 1: Called the URCOTT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Millions
18:35
Speaker 1: of listeners just WoT boo uh. They created that in
18:39
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy and they manage about of the grid in Texas.
18:44
Speaker 1: And um, we use a lot of power in this country. UM,
18:48
Speaker 1: I think the US consumed there's a couple of years ago,
18:50
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen three point nine trillion kill a lot hours,
18:54
Speaker 1: which is about thirteen thousand kill a lott hours per human.
18:58
Speaker 1: And you'd think, like, that's got to be the most
19:00
Speaker 1: in the world. There's about a dozen countries ahead of US,
19:04
Speaker 1: but those are countries where it can get really really
19:06
Speaker 1: cold or really really hot, not places like the United States,
19:10
Speaker 1: where comparatively to other places like US, we use a
19:14
Speaker 1: lot more per person. Yeah, so thirteen thousand kilowatt hours
19:18
Speaker 1: per person, It sounds like a lot, and it is
19:19
Speaker 1: a lot. But in Iceland they use fifty three thousand
19:24
Speaker 1: kilowatt hours per person on average, they gotta heat those
19:27
Speaker 1: soundests and that crazy. But for for in their defense,
19:30
Speaker 1: they're making most of the electricity from geo thermal, so
19:35
Speaker 1: who cares? Use as much electricity as you want. And
19:38
Speaker 1: then we I know some of our other listeners don't
19:40
Speaker 1: just live in the US, so Canada actually beats the
19:42
Speaker 1: United States and per capita consumption, they use fifteen points
19:46
Speaker 1: six thousand killed watt hours. Australia is um better at
19:50
Speaker 1: it than we are. They use ten thousand. New Zealand's
19:53
Speaker 1: nine thousand kill watt hours. And then for our three
19:56
Speaker 1: German listeners seven thousand kilwatt hours. And then in the UK,
20:01
Speaker 1: I think it's about five thousand kilwater yeah, exactly. Volcomb
20:06
Speaker 1: the end, What was that Cabaret? I think, Okay, yeah
20:12
Speaker 1: it is Cabaret. I think it's like the opening of it.
20:16
Speaker 1: I just know Cabaret from Ship's Creek right same here.
20:21
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm gonna watch it before but uh but yeah,
20:24
Speaker 1: that's where I've seen most of Cabaret from that episode
20:28
Speaker 1: of Ship's Creek. Yeah, Emily and I were both are like,
20:31
Speaker 1: we need to see Cabaret though, Now dude, I started watching, Um,
20:34
Speaker 1: what we do in the Shadows again from the TV Yes,
20:38
Speaker 1: it's so. It's one of the best comedies ever put
20:41
Speaker 1: on television. Yeah, and it's sort of a rare case
20:44
Speaker 1: of taking a movie changing the cast up for television
20:48
Speaker 1: and it's just as good. Yeah, the movie was great.
20:52
Speaker 1: The TV show was great. I I have to I
20:55
Speaker 1: haven't seen all of the movie, but from what I
20:57
Speaker 1: saw the movie, I prefer the TV show. I love him.
21:00
Speaker 1: I think for good six months after the TV show,
21:03
Speaker 1: we would walk around the house saying these iffing gay
21:08
Speaker 1: that like every dude, every single character. And that's just
21:11
Speaker 1: so it's just great. Thank you people who made what
21:14
Speaker 1: we do in the shows. Than uh, it is wonderful.
21:18
Speaker 1: So as far as what we use that power for
21:21
Speaker 1: here in the States, uh, and I guess this is
21:24
Speaker 1: lower forty eight. Who knows what they're doing in Alaska, Hawaii,
21:28
Speaker 1: but thirty eight percent of that power consumption is residential
21:33
Speaker 1: people like you and I and or you and me.
21:37
Speaker 1: And the bulk of that is that is is heating
21:43
Speaker 1: and cooling our homes and making hot water or washing dishes,
21:48
Speaker 1: and then the rest is you know, running appliances, charging
21:50
Speaker 1: your laptop, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Um, The other
21:54
Speaker 1: sixty one point five percent is non residential stuff commercial
21:58
Speaker 1: things like office buildings, and then industrial, which is mostly
22:02
Speaker 1: um used for running motors or because America loves its lathes.
22:11
Speaker 1: I thought of that earlier, and I was like, oh, yeah,
22:14
Speaker 1: I've I've seen pictures of lathe accidents before. So I
22:16
Speaker 1: spent a good twenty minutes looking at lathe accident photos.
22:21
Speaker 1: I do not recommend, but I didn't see that coming
22:24
Speaker 1: up when I started researching this. I used a lathe
22:27
Speaker 1: back in industrial arts in high school. Dude, once I
22:30
Speaker 1: found out how dangerous those things were, I would never
22:32
Speaker 1: go near near one. That's you have all your baseball
22:35
Speaker 1: bats made by someone else. Now, yeah, I subout that
22:40
Speaker 1: part of my life. So the good the good news
22:44
Speaker 1: is with energy efficiencies, they've really come a long way
22:47
Speaker 1: over the past couple of decades, the whole Energy Star
22:50
Speaker 1: program and just appliances being made much more efficiently than
22:54
Speaker 1: they used to be. Um, it's only going to increase
22:57
Speaker 1: I think the demand by one percent a year from
23:00
Speaker 1: now to which is good, but that's still thirty increase,
23:05
Speaker 1: which is a lot. But it's astounding that as we
23:08
Speaker 1: keep consuming more and more electricity and we do, um,
23:11
Speaker 1: we we use a lot. They figured out, like these
23:15
Speaker 1: Americans are nuts, They're just gonna keep consuming and consuming.
23:17
Speaker 1: We better figure out how to make our stuff more
23:19
Speaker 1: energy efficient. And that they've managed to offset all but
23:22
Speaker 1: one percent of that growth per year, because I can
23:25
Speaker 1: only imagine if we were still working with you know,
23:27
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties style blenders and vacuum cleaners. Good lord, we'd
23:32
Speaker 1: be suck in the cold directly out of the earth,
23:34
Speaker 1: like straight into your vacuum cleaner. Would be so used,
23:37
Speaker 1: so wasteful. Yeah, And I imagine that they are always
23:41
Speaker 1: working on this, Like I I assume the goal is
23:44
Speaker 1: to have the negative number there, don't you think from
23:46
Speaker 1: your lips to God's ear, chuck, Like, wouldn't that be great?
23:51
Speaker 1: If they're like it's going to go down by two
23:54
Speaker 1: or three percent per year? I mean that would that
23:57
Speaker 1: would be great? That's actually hopefully We're gonna talk a
23:59
Speaker 1: lot about how to fix the grid, and one of
24:01
Speaker 1: the suggestions is to create the smart grid, and one
24:04
Speaker 1: of the big components of it is to basically allow
24:07
Speaker 1: you and me, we or I and you to see
24:12
Speaker 1: how much electricity we use through interfaces that are similar
24:16
Speaker 1: to like online banking, like we would we would be
24:20
Speaker 1: and we would be aware in managing our electricity use
24:24
Speaker 1: with that level of like minute interface, right, and that
24:29
Speaker 1: by doing that we would start to consume less would
24:32
Speaker 1: be certainly less waste wasteful. So it's possible that we
24:35
Speaker 1: might go down compared to levels. Who knows would be great,
24:39
Speaker 1: It would be wonderful. Uh. One of the big changes
24:43
Speaker 1: about I think like basically all of the cold, nuclear
24:48
Speaker 1: and renewable resources we have in this country are consumed,
24:52
Speaker 1: most of it for creating energy, and I think about
24:55
Speaker 1: a third of natural gas. But natural gas is been
24:59
Speaker 1: a big boon. Um. We did an episode on fracking
25:02
Speaker 1: and say what you want about it, but there is
25:04
Speaker 1: a lot more natural gas now. Um, it has lowered
25:07
Speaker 1: the cost gas. Fire generators are cheaper to build, they
25:10
Speaker 1: burn cleaner than cold do by half, They're more nimble,
25:14
Speaker 1: they can respond quicker to big increases in demand. So
25:19
Speaker 1: it's gone up I think from nineteen from twelve percent
25:24
Speaker 1: of our energy mix to Yeah, and we should probably
25:27
Speaker 1: just safe a full disclosure. Um, we are deeply underwritten
25:31
Speaker 1: as a podcast by both Enron and x On, So
25:36
Speaker 1: just heads up on that one. Tops. Yes, um so uh,
25:42
Speaker 1: when you do generate electricity, you're not actually you don't
25:46
Speaker 1: create energy, where electricity is an energy carrier, right, which
25:50
Speaker 1: is why it's like it all turns into the same
25:52
Speaker 1: thing from all these different sources. Um. But the people
25:56
Speaker 1: who run the grid have figured out, like there's specific
26:00
Speaker 1: kinds of generation plants you want to run, and there's
26:02
Speaker 1: basically three of them. One is baseload, which is your average,
26:06
Speaker 1: say usually coal fire power plant that's running almost all
26:09
Speaker 1: the time, and that provides the vast majority of the
26:12
Speaker 1: electricity that's being consumed at any given point. Then there's
26:16
Speaker 1: load following plants, which a're um at this time natural
26:19
Speaker 1: gas power plants, but they may overtake gas or coal
26:23
Speaker 1: in the United States at some point. Those are a
26:25
Speaker 1: little more, um, a little less frequently run. If you're like,
26:30
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna need some more some more juice
26:32
Speaker 1: because it's Christmas time and everybody's got their lights up,
26:35
Speaker 1: you might spark up the old load load following plants.
26:38
Speaker 1: And then lastly there's one called peaker plants, like a
26:42
Speaker 1: peak like a peak capacity where when you start this up,
26:46
Speaker 1: you're basically like burning diamonds. It's so expensive to run
26:50
Speaker 1: these things, and that means that this the demand has
26:53
Speaker 1: gone crazy and the prices are going sky high. So
26:56
Speaker 1: turn up the peaker plant because we need that extra capacity. Yeah,
27:01
Speaker 1: and just quickly to tick through where we get the
27:03
Speaker 1: rest of these the rest of the fuel sources, I
27:06
Speaker 1: said natural gas ist coal is twenty three, nuclear is twenty,
27:10
Speaker 1: wind is seven, hydro electric is seven, biomass is two,
27:15
Speaker 1: pent solar one eight percent, which is still pretty low.
27:20
Speaker 1: Considering how many people have gotten on that train. I
27:22
Speaker 1: would say it's objectively shameful. Yeah, that would be nice
27:25
Speaker 1: to see that number go up. But um, there are
27:28
Speaker 1: a hundred and forty five million households and businesses connected
27:33
Speaker 1: to this grid in the US. And the reason it
27:36
Speaker 1: all works, and we talked about this, it's still just
27:39
Speaker 1: amazing to me how it all works. We talked about
27:41
Speaker 1: it in electricity, but the ability to send electricity over
27:46
Speaker 1: long distances and step it up and step it down
27:49
Speaker 1: to make it power your coffee machine is a modern miracle.
27:54
Speaker 1: It's amazing, right, And that's one of the big advantages
27:57
Speaker 1: of alternating current electricity is I guess you can do
28:00
Speaker 1: it with DC, but it's way more difficult and way
28:03
Speaker 1: more expensive. So for all intents and purposes, it's a
28:06
Speaker 1: c that you can step up and step down. And
28:09
Speaker 1: when when you do that, you do that because current,
28:12
Speaker 1: which is the flow of electrons like down the line
28:16
Speaker 1: UM is inversely proportionate to what's called voltage rights it is.
28:24
Speaker 1: Voltage is kind of like the pressure you put on
28:26
Speaker 1: a line, like the pressure of the flow where the
28:29
Speaker 1: where the current is the actual flow, right, And if
28:33
Speaker 1: you have a very high current of electricity, you unfortunately
28:38
Speaker 1: get a lot of resistance on the transmission lines. And
28:42
Speaker 1: when you have a lot of resistance, you lose a
28:44
Speaker 1: lot of electricity to heat. But fortunately for power generators, UM,
28:50
Speaker 1: if you up the voltage right up the pressure that
28:54
Speaker 1: you're putting on the line, it actually decreases the current.
28:58
Speaker 1: And if you decrease the current, then you d crease
29:00
Speaker 1: the energy loss. So they figured out that if they
29:03
Speaker 1: can take you know, when they generate the stuff at
29:05
Speaker 1: power plants, it's like two thousand volts, maybe up to
29:08
Speaker 1: twenty thousand volts, but then they step up the voltage
29:12
Speaker 1: to hundreds of thousands of volts. I think some transmission
29:15
Speaker 1: lines are able to take about seven hundred and fifty
29:19
Speaker 1: thousand volts, which is amazing. It is like if you
29:23
Speaker 1: get shocked by like an electrical socket in your house
29:27
Speaker 1: that's a hundred and twenty volts. This is seven hundred
29:30
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand volts um. The current goes down so
29:34
Speaker 1: dramatically that you lose almost none of the electricity over
29:37
Speaker 1: very very long distances of transmission. So that's really a
29:41
Speaker 1: huge benefit of alternating current that you can step them
29:44
Speaker 1: up and then when you get towards neighborhoods and stuff,
29:47
Speaker 1: step them back down. Yeah. I think they lose about
29:50
Speaker 1: six percent of electricity generated in the United States, which
29:56
Speaker 1: you know, that's a fairly low number, but I think
29:59
Speaker 1: they're all he's trying to make that better. Yeah, because
30:02
Speaker 1: I mean, let's see somewhere else whereas that number there's
30:05
Speaker 1: a um we we do something like thirty five, no,
30:10
Speaker 1: four and a half trillion kill a watt hours are
30:15
Speaker 1: generated in the United States. So six lost. That's an
30:19
Speaker 1: astounding amount of electricity that's lost. Any improvement on that
30:23
Speaker 1: would be huge. Yeah, that'd be great. Um So in
30:26
Speaker 1: your house, like you said, you have here in the States,
30:29
Speaker 1: we have a hundred and twenty volts, So you have
30:32
Speaker 1: these substations that step it down to about twelve thousand.
30:36
Speaker 1: Then it goes to your power lines, and then those
30:39
Speaker 1: you know, those gray um sort of cylindrical cans at
30:44
Speaker 1: the top of the things. Those are very important. They
30:47
Speaker 1: step it down even further to about two forty. Then
30:50
Speaker 1: by the time you get into your house is down
30:52
Speaker 1: to one and you're was about to say you're cooking
30:55
Speaker 1: with gas, but you're not. You're cooking with electricity. Yes,
31:00
Speaker 1: those gray can transformers are the same thing as that
31:02
Speaker 1: green death box that they wanted to put in your
31:06
Speaker 1: front yard, except the green death box it's called the
31:09
Speaker 1: pack frontyard mount transformer. That's for underground power lines. The
31:13
Speaker 1: gray cans are for overheadlines. But they do the same thing.
31:16
Speaker 1: They step it down to a much less deadly and
31:19
Speaker 1: much more usable um voltage of electricity. Yeah, we have
31:23
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, Atlanta just has a lot
31:26
Speaker 1: of outage this period because we have a it's a
31:29
Speaker 1: city in a forest, and we have a ton of trees,
31:32
Speaker 1: a ton of really old trees. Like most of the
31:35
Speaker 1: not most, but a lot of the old oak trees
31:38
Speaker 1: in Atlanta are coming down, or at the very least
31:41
Speaker 1: large limbs are coming down, and uh, it's it's a problem.
31:44
Speaker 1: So my neighborhood especially, we have a lot of blackouts.
31:47
Speaker 1: So hopefully this this burying the lines project will work
31:51
Speaker 1: out pretty well. Yeah. The tree thing, it's it's important.
31:53
Speaker 1: It's like kind of part of that whole reliability thing
31:56
Speaker 1: is we'll see is keeping trees trimmed away from power lines. Yeah,
32:00
Speaker 1: which is why a power company might knock on your
32:02
Speaker 1: door one day and say, Hi, we need to to
32:06
Speaker 1: cut a lot of your tree back, and you have
32:08
Speaker 1: to say yes. Well, yeah, they might not even say that.
32:11
Speaker 1: Then we might just show up and start cutting your
32:13
Speaker 1: tree and be like, what are you going to do
32:15
Speaker 1: about it? And I'm just like, that was uncalled for.
32:21
Speaker 1: Should we take another break before you get in another
32:25
Speaker 1: fight with a power person? Yeah, they started at chuck.
32:29
Speaker 1: All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back
32:30
Speaker 1: and talk about all this gobble you cook a little
32:33
Speaker 1: bit more, alrighty. So you mentioned earlier the monopoly situation
33:08
Speaker 1: that was broken up, um largely because of the energy
33:11
Speaker 1: crisis of the nineteen seventies, and we said, hey, let's
33:14
Speaker 1: open it up. Let's get the market going and get
33:18
Speaker 1: some competitive pricing happening, and everyone did that, not everyone
33:23
Speaker 1: in the Southeast. We still have a lot of the big,
33:25
Speaker 1: big utility companies, but um, they still needed some sort
33:30
Speaker 1: of oversight. And there are a lot of different ways
33:33
Speaker 1: that these things are regulated. If you look at a
33:36
Speaker 1: state level, you're going to be regulated by a public
33:39
Speaker 1: utility commission or a public service commission. And then when
33:43
Speaker 1: you start horse trading in Alabama says to Georgia, hey,
33:47
Speaker 1: we need some power, and you're like, wait, I'm getting
33:49
Speaker 1: some power from Tennessee right now. Hold on the other line,
33:53
Speaker 1: that's got to be regulated too. So the Federal Energy
33:55
Speaker 1: Regulatory Commission oversees those transactions. Yes, FVRC. So they're supposed
34:03
Speaker 1: to it. As we'll see, they they fall down on
34:05
Speaker 1: the job kind of frequently in huge catastrophic things happen
34:09
Speaker 1: when they do. Um. But yeah, So when they started
34:12
Speaker 1: to be regulated, especially in the set or deregulated in
34:15
Speaker 1: the seventies, strangely enough, it was Jimmy Carter's administration who
34:20
Speaker 1: opened up competition. You would think that would have been
34:22
Speaker 1: a squarely a Ronald Reagan kind of thing, but Carter
34:26
Speaker 1: did it to encourage conservation um of energy and to
34:31
Speaker 1: create that competition to see who could who could deliver
34:34
Speaker 1: this this stuff and kind of innovate more. Um, just
34:37
Speaker 1: basically shake up the stodgy old energy companies. But the
34:40
Speaker 1: problem is is, remember I said, like it was money
34:42
Speaker 1: in the bank, you could just kick back and expect
34:44
Speaker 1: eight percent growth year over year every single year, and
34:47
Speaker 1: people are just gonna keep using electricity. All of a sudden,
34:50
Speaker 1: there's a totally new mindset in America, which was whoa, whoa,
34:54
Speaker 1: we're using way too much electricity and energy we need
34:57
Speaker 1: to conserve. And now all the power companies started kind
35:01
Speaker 1: of losing money. And when they started to lose money,
35:03
Speaker 1: they stopped doing important things like cutting down trees um
35:08
Speaker 1: or cutting down off tree limbs, or servicing their lines
35:12
Speaker 1: as much like all the stuff that made them more reliable. UM,
35:17
Speaker 1: just stopped happening quite as frequently, and so you started
35:21
Speaker 1: to see things like enormous, massive blackouts that you know,
35:25
Speaker 1: affected millions of people for days, where you didn't really
35:29
Speaker 1: see that that often before. I think the first one
35:31
Speaker 1: ever was in nineteen five, but um, the really big
35:34
Speaker 1: ones started coming more frequently around about two thousand. I
35:39
Speaker 1: think that was kind of kicked off by the California
35:42
Speaker 1: energy crisis, and then you know we were talking about
35:44
Speaker 1: the regulatory bodies, UM those were just for the public
35:47
Speaker 1: utilities themselves. Then you have these transmission networks and they
35:51
Speaker 1: have to be managed as well, and UM, I think
35:55
Speaker 1: for stepped in and said, we need some sort of
35:57
Speaker 1: independent management and oversight here, uh, because basically we've got
36:01
Speaker 1: to make sure that everyone has equal access to this grid.
36:05
Speaker 1: And so these interconnections that we talked about, those three interconnections,
36:09
Speaker 1: they're divided about divided up into more than a dozen
36:13
Speaker 1: independent nonprofits UM that are called regional transmission organizations or
36:17
Speaker 1: independent system operators. And I think the idea there is
36:21
Speaker 1: they're just they're not in it for the money. They're
36:24
Speaker 1: there to kind of really just make sure everyone is
36:26
Speaker 1: being treated fairly and doing the right thing, right, that
36:28
Speaker 1: everybody has access to the grid that's supposed to get
36:31
Speaker 1: access to the grid. But also it's a they're also
36:34
Speaker 1: the modern incarnation of those power pools where like UM,
36:38
Speaker 1: like utilities would would buy and sell power to one
36:41
Speaker 1: another as needed. These are the groups that kind of
36:44
Speaker 1: oversee those transactions. Right. So you mentioned the grid failing
36:49
Speaker 1: in California. I was there at the time, and I
36:52
Speaker 1: remember in I remember these rolling blackouts California in the
36:56
Speaker 1: late nineties and early two thousands, early odts, UM had
37:01
Speaker 1: to institute these emergency rolling blackouts. Uh. And I remember
37:05
Speaker 1: when I was living there a couple of times it
37:07
Speaker 1: was all over the news. You know, it was a big,
37:09
Speaker 1: big news. And I remember a couple of times like
37:12
Speaker 1: you know, losing power because they just had to. Yeah,
37:15
Speaker 1: so there was UM. I guess California and and Ron
37:19
Speaker 1: actually makes an appearance every time there was a huge,
37:22
Speaker 1: colossal blackout. You could trace that its origins back a
37:26
Speaker 1: couple of years to Enron lobbying to get somebody d
37:29
Speaker 1: to get things deregulated, get a wholesale market built up,
37:33
Speaker 1: and they managed to do that in California. UM and
37:36
Speaker 1: California found itself in this weird position where the really
37:41
Speaker 1: big utility companies like PG and E UM or Southern
37:45
Speaker 1: California Edison UM were they they were capped at how
37:52
Speaker 1: much they could charge retail for energy for electricity. But
37:58
Speaker 1: at the same time, in this new wholesale market UM
38:03
Speaker 1: they had to buy electricity and it wasn't being regulated.
38:07
Speaker 1: Member I said that Birk sometimes falls down in the job. Well,
38:11
Speaker 1: they weren't regulating this wholesale market in California like they
38:13
Speaker 1: were supposed to, And so one day in the summer
38:16
Speaker 1: uh one month, I should say, starting in June of
38:19
Speaker 1: of two thousand, the wholesale prices went through the roof.
38:23
Speaker 1: It went from about thirty bucks the year before to
38:26
Speaker 1: three seventy five bucks a megawatt hour in two thousand
38:31
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, PG and is having to
38:33
Speaker 1: pay through the nose for this energy, but they can't
38:35
Speaker 1: pass the cost along to their customers, and yet they're
38:38
Speaker 1: also legally obligated to continue to to provide electricity to
38:44
Speaker 1: their customers. So they found themselves in this impossible situation.
38:47
Speaker 1: Some people still today say that they turned off the
38:50
Speaker 1: power because they didn't have the supply. Um, but they
38:55
Speaker 1: they swear that they did not do that and that
38:57
Speaker 1: they just ran out a supply because they can get
39:00
Speaker 1: it any longer. Well. Yeah, And as a result, p
39:03
Speaker 1: G and E in UH Southern Cali Edison, they were
39:07
Speaker 1: financially strapped. So they were in a situation where they
39:10
Speaker 1: had independent energy suppliers in surrounding states that were like,
39:15
Speaker 1: and I know you guys are in trouble, but I
39:17
Speaker 1: don't want to see my stuff because I don't know
39:19
Speaker 1: that I'm gonna get paid back now. So California was
39:22
Speaker 1: in a bind in the early ots and um, there
39:26
Speaker 1: were also technical problems and stuff. I think there was
39:29
Speaker 1: uh low water levels in the Pacific Northwest, which was
39:32
Speaker 1: huge because California at the time, I don't know if
39:34
Speaker 1: there is it's different now. They were not self sufficient
39:37
Speaker 1: energy wise. They depended on the surplus of other states. Yeah,
39:42
Speaker 1: so you know, if there was low water levels in
39:44
Speaker 1: the Pacific Northwest, that's less electricity being sent south. And
39:49
Speaker 1: they also basically had these high voltage power lines from
39:53
Speaker 1: southern California to northern California and they were crashing, they
39:57
Speaker 1: were failing because they were just over a burden base basically.
40:00
Speaker 1: So they said, we got to do these rolling blackouts,
40:03
Speaker 1: and I think the biggest one was March two thousand one,
40:06
Speaker 1: affected about one point five million customers. Yeah, and like
40:09
Speaker 1: you said that, they these independent energy producers wouldn't sell
40:14
Speaker 1: them electricity because they didn't think they were going to
40:16
Speaker 1: get paid back. The whole thing finally ended when the
40:19
Speaker 1: governor had the water Board, the State water Board, go
40:24
Speaker 1: buy energy or electricity on behalf of them because the
40:28
Speaker 1: state was you know, the state had a good enough
40:31
Speaker 1: credit to buy electricity, but their two biggest electricity utilities
40:35
Speaker 1: didn't have good enough credit. And that crazy. Yeah Great Davis,
40:41
Speaker 1: I was like, was that the Governator? No? I think
40:45
Speaker 1: he was just after Great Davis, wasn't he? And then
40:48
Speaker 1: I saw it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, actually the governor for
40:52
Speaker 1: California for years. It was, I mean that was after
40:56
Speaker 1: I left. Uh, just yeah, it was just after I left. Yeah,
41:02
Speaker 1: he was. He was Cheeze two thousand at the same
41:05
Speaker 1: time that Jesse the Body Venture was the governor of Minnesota.
41:10
Speaker 1: No way, man, all we needed was Carl Weathers is
41:14
Speaker 1: the governor of Georgia. And um, Piper, No, no, I'm
41:20
Speaker 1: doing Predator here. Okay, I missed that. I can't remember
41:24
Speaker 1: the guy who played Billy or maybe just the Predator.
41:28
Speaker 1: Sure the Predator was president, don't you know. Uh, I
41:36
Speaker 1: haven't seen that movie in so long. I bet your
41:37
Speaker 1: Predator holds up. Yeah, I saw in the last few
41:40
Speaker 1: years and it does. Yeah, don't check that out. Uh,
41:43
Speaker 1: there was a big blackout in the Northeast. I remember
41:45
Speaker 1: this one as well. In two thousand three, Uh, this
41:48
Speaker 1: was big time. This was fifty million people uh in
41:51
Speaker 1: the US and even parts of Canada lost power for
41:54
Speaker 1: a couple of days, in some case eleven deaths. And
41:57
Speaker 1: this one, like it was like a movie or something.
42:00
Speaker 1: How how this one started? Yeah, the there was Remember
42:04
Speaker 1: I said that tree cutting kind of fell to the
42:06
Speaker 1: wayside a little bit when they stopped making as much money.
42:08
Speaker 1: Well that's what happened here. It was really really hot
42:11
Speaker 1: and there was a lot of demand, and those lines
42:13
Speaker 1: were just blazing so much so that they actually started
42:17
Speaker 1: to sag, like the the atomic composition of the metal
42:22
Speaker 1: was put under that much stress, and they sagged into
42:24
Speaker 1: a tree brim, a tree branch and arct which is
42:28
Speaker 1: basically like lightning is produced. Right. There was a teenager
42:31
Speaker 1: in Ohio who noticed that, um, his outlets were smoking
42:36
Speaker 1: throughout his house, and it just so happened that there
42:40
Speaker 1: was a tree cutting crew outside of his house on
42:43
Speaker 1: the other side of the street, and he ran out
42:46
Speaker 1: to tell him and they basically told him to get lost.
42:48
Speaker 1: And hours and hours went by. Uh. And there was
42:52
Speaker 1: a bunch of cascading power feelers, which normally would have
42:55
Speaker 1: been caught, right, but there was some human error involved. Yeah,
42:58
Speaker 1: this was sort of the movie art. I mean, it
43:00
Speaker 1: might as well have been like a rat chewing on
43:02
Speaker 1: a wire or something that was. There's monitoring software that,
43:06
Speaker 1: like you said, it's usually like, hey, emergency, something's going on.
43:09
Speaker 1: But the software was being glitchy. And so a technician
43:12
Speaker 1: with I guess like mustard stains on his shirt, turns
43:16
Speaker 1: it off, tries to fix it, and forgets to turn
43:18
Speaker 1: it back on. That's crazy. And so because the power
43:23
Speaker 1: grid is especially interconnected up in the northeast, this power
43:26
Speaker 1: outage in Ohio meant that there was um power outages
43:31
Speaker 1: in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. And I think, did you say
43:34
Speaker 1: eleven people died? Eleven people died? Um? So you know
43:39
Speaker 1: the you the federal regulators stepped in and it was like,
43:41
Speaker 1: we need a catchy new slogan to improve this, and
43:46
Speaker 1: so how about the three T s trimming training and tools.
43:50
Speaker 1: And everyone rolled their eyes said, whatever, Boomer, We'll we'll
43:55
Speaker 1: get on those three T s. Sweet turn the volume
43:59
Speaker 1: up on which a Tall Lineman, which is the only
44:01
Speaker 1: song they ever listened to. The fourth tea was too sweet. Nice.
44:07
Speaker 1: Uh So, now Texas, we're in Texas, We're not literally
44:10
Speaker 1: in Texas. But uh, we're in Texas now in spirit
44:14
Speaker 1: because very recently a big freak winter stormhead as everyone knows,
44:19
Speaker 1: and everyone needed a lot more heat than they usually
44:21
Speaker 1: do at this time of year in Texas. I think
44:24
Speaker 1: they usually require about sixty seven thousand megawatts a day
44:26
Speaker 1: in the winter, yeah, compared to eighty six thousand megawatts
44:30
Speaker 1: in the summer. And all of this makes sense. We're
44:33
Speaker 1: not saying like you're wrong Texas for not, you know,
44:36
Speaker 1: being ready for this weird freak storm. I mean that
44:39
Speaker 1: was the cause of it. But you also have to
44:42
Speaker 1: take into consideration that, uh, like we said, some of
44:45
Speaker 1: those lines weren't insulated like they should have been because
44:47
Speaker 1: of money and wind and solar is not gonna work
44:51
Speaker 1: as well in the winter anyway, And I think those
44:53
Speaker 1: wind farms weren't winter rised as well, right, Yes, some
44:56
Speaker 1: of them did. Apparently a surprising number. UM kept spinning UM,
45:01
Speaker 1: but the big problem was the gas pipelines freezing over.
45:06
Speaker 1: So instead of the UM planned for sixty seven thousand
45:11
Speaker 1: megawatts of power, they ended up with UM thirty one
45:16
Speaker 1: thousand because of those failures in the actual system, So
45:21
Speaker 1: they had thirty thousand megawatts. They needed a lot more
45:23
Speaker 1: than that. Uh, they probably needed about fifty thousand more
45:26
Speaker 1: megawatts than they had. And so all of a sudden,
45:29
Speaker 1: power just started going out in Texas. Supposedly isn't connected anything.
45:34
Speaker 1: So Texas went dark and everybody started to get very
45:38
Speaker 1: cold and couldn't cook and couldn't um, couldn't boil water,
45:43
Speaker 1: couldn't take showers, to basically live in a very They
45:47
Speaker 1: lived in a very dangerous situation because this is sub
45:50
Speaker 1: freezing temperatures and these areas are not set up for
45:53
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Yeah, And if you want to
45:55
Speaker 1: get your feathers ruffled and get a little riled up,
45:59
Speaker 1: to read this New York Times article about the exorbitant
46:03
Speaker 1: UM power bills that some of these people got that
46:06
Speaker 1: we're able to stay online. There's a sixty three year
46:09
Speaker 1: old Army vet who had to pay sixteen thousand dollars
46:12
Speaker 1: for his monthly bill, which wiped out his entire savings UM.
46:17
Speaker 1: A lot of people were reportedly UM, including this guy.
46:21
Speaker 1: Customers of a company called Gritty g R I D
46:26
Speaker 1: T Y. I mean, you have to laugh at a
46:29
Speaker 1: name like that, but they provide electricity at wholesale prices,
46:34
Speaker 1: and the deal with Gritty is it really quickly changes
46:37
Speaker 1: based on supply and demand. So they sell it to
46:39
Speaker 1: the customers as, hey, we're gonna pass this wholesale price
46:42
Speaker 1: directly to you for a low monthly fee, and the
46:47
Speaker 1: rate's gonna fluctuate, but it's really no big deal because
46:51
Speaker 1: it fluctuates just sort of reasonably. Um. They saw this
46:56
Speaker 1: huge jump coming, apparently, and they encouraged their customer. There's
47:00
Speaker 1: twenty nine thousand people to switch to another provider when
47:03
Speaker 1: the storm came, which is just not that easy to do,
47:07
Speaker 1: and a lot of it is through an app A
47:09
Speaker 1: lot of people were like literally connected to their bank,
47:12
Speaker 1: so people would literally watch eight ten, twelve thou dollars
47:15
Speaker 1: drained out of their bank account before their very eyes
47:18
Speaker 1: and they can't do anything about it. And uh. The
47:21
Speaker 1: architect of the Texas energy grid, his name is where
47:26
Speaker 1: is it here? William Hogan? He said, you know what
47:29
Speaker 1: this thing is? Uh, it worked exactly like it was
47:32
Speaker 1: supposed to because high prices reflected the market performing as
47:36
Speaker 1: it was designed. And um, he said, as you get
47:39
Speaker 1: closer and closer to the bare minimum, these prices get
47:41
Speaker 1: higher and higher, which is what you want is that
47:44
Speaker 1: guys nicknamed Milton Friedman. I mean, how heartless. But yes,
47:48
Speaker 1: it's true in fact, but it's pretty heartless way to
47:52
Speaker 1: look at it, you know. Yeah, And I think Governor
47:54
Speaker 1: Abbott has stepped in and said, like, wait a minute,
47:57
Speaker 1: but we can't people can't be going broke paying for
48:00
Speaker 1: like three and four years worth of energy in a
48:02
Speaker 1: single month. Well, that's the opposite of what the the
48:06
Speaker 1: George W. Bush said when he was governor of Texas
48:10
Speaker 1: passed a bill that said you have to pay whatever
48:13
Speaker 1: the energy company charges you as a consumer. Yeah. So
48:18
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what they're gonna do if they can
48:19
Speaker 1: retroactively reimburse some of these people, but it's, um, I
48:24
Speaker 1: don't know, that's horrifying, man sixteen grand I know, especially
48:28
Speaker 1: when it's taken direct like this isn't even like a
48:31
Speaker 1: well hold on, hold on, I'm not gonna pay this yet.
48:33
Speaker 1: I want to talk to but it's like that's gone
48:35
Speaker 1: now I have to go try to get it back.
48:38
Speaker 1: Good luck. Yeah, that's terrible stuff. So sorry Texas that
48:41
Speaker 1: that happened. But the other thing about it, Chuck two,
48:44
Speaker 1: is like, you know, yeah, they weren't prepared for it.
48:47
Speaker 1: And it was a freak winter storm that just doesn't happen.
48:50
Speaker 1: But a lot of people are saying, hey, welcome to
48:53
Speaker 1: the age of climate change. This is not just a
48:55
Speaker 1: freak storm anymore. This stuff is actually going to keep happening.
48:59
Speaker 1: And Texas had virtually the same thing happened in two
49:03
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, and there was a there was a panel
49:07
Speaker 1: um that was created to figure out how to prevent
49:09
Speaker 1: that from happening again. They gave er out a whole
49:13
Speaker 1: list of things to do, including like winterization, like insulating
49:16
Speaker 1: their pipes Orcott didn't do it and it happened again.
49:20
Speaker 1: So I think Texas as patients with Urcott not listening
49:24
Speaker 1: to that kind of stuff has probably reached an end.
49:27
Speaker 1: So how do we fix this stuff? You mentioned, uh,
49:29
Speaker 1: the smart grid, I think about I mean, just our
49:33
Speaker 1: infrastructure in this country is in bad shape period. Seventy
49:36
Speaker 1: of large power transformers and transmission lines are at least
49:39
Speaker 1: twenty five years old, sixty percent of circuit breakers or
49:43
Speaker 1: thirty years old. And uh, you mentioned the smart grid,
49:47
Speaker 1: and I think that's they're starting to do some of it,
49:49
Speaker 1: but that's the solution going forward, right, Yeah, I mean,
49:52
Speaker 1: like it doesn't matter where you are UM on the
49:55
Speaker 1: on the left or the right or in the middle,
49:57
Speaker 1: everyone is like, yes, smart grid, smart grid. We the
50:00
Speaker 1: smart grid, and that's basically like the grid we have now,
50:03
Speaker 1: but just slowly, piecemeal, UM improved little by little to
50:07
Speaker 1: add way more UM back and forth communication between the generators,
50:13
Speaker 1: the transmitters, the distributors and the end user. UM that
50:17
Speaker 1: there's and there's a lot more automated sensing built into
50:21
Speaker 1: this system, which makes the whole thing a lot more clever,
50:25
Speaker 1: and UM makes like rerouting around problems a lot easier.
50:29
Speaker 1: But also one of the big things is making you
50:31
Speaker 1: and me and I and we UM a lot more
50:34
Speaker 1: savvy about the energy that we consume from moment to moment. Yeah,
50:41
Speaker 1: I mean there's that. And I also feel like the
50:43
Speaker 1: smart grid, most of it kind of falls under the
50:45
Speaker 1: banner of real time micro observance, whereas what we have
50:53
Speaker 1: now is very sluggish, very old fashioned. I mean it
50:57
Speaker 1: can be. It's like the difference between you know, digital
51:01
Speaker 1: smartphone technology and like the old like crank phones from
51:05
Speaker 1: the old days. Basically, Yeah, if there's a power outage,
51:08
Speaker 1: the way that the electrical generators find out about it
51:11
Speaker 1: is there's a series of towers where bonfires are lit
51:14
Speaker 1: from mountain to mountain and they finally see one that's
51:18
Speaker 1: close enough, lit close enough, and they start to like
51:20
Speaker 1: ramp up production. That's how it happens. Now it's amazing,
51:25
Speaker 1: But there's also so I mean, you've got things like
51:27
Speaker 1: UM feed er switches that basically go around a problem area.
51:31
Speaker 1: If you've got it down transmission line, it can just
51:33
Speaker 1: go around it and then you know it doesn't black
51:35
Speaker 1: everybody out. UM uh smart meters so you kind of
51:39
Speaker 1: see how much energy you're using and then also how
51:42
Speaker 1: much the price of energy is, so you can actually
51:44
Speaker 1: save money if you want to kind of get into
51:46
Speaker 1: it in that granular level. And then also um, just
51:50
Speaker 1: making sure that um that there's storage. That's the big challenge.
51:56
Speaker 1: We talked about that in our renewable energy episode Bill
51:59
Speaker 1: Gates Store. It don't have anywhere to put access, so
52:03
Speaker 1: we shuffle it around the grid. But if we have
52:05
Speaker 1: storage places strategically put around the United States, that would
52:09
Speaker 1: change absolutely everything. Yeah, as well as getting more direct use,
52:14
Speaker 1: which is solar UM. I actually have a little solar
52:17
Speaker 1: project going. I'm very excited about, uh not for my house,
52:21
Speaker 1: but I know you know this. We have some We
52:24
Speaker 1: have some acreage in North Georgia on a river that uh,
52:28
Speaker 1: no house or anything. It's just land, just a van.
52:34
Speaker 1: There may be a van one day, but it's just
52:37
Speaker 1: as I call it that. We call it the camp.
52:38
Speaker 1: It's friends and family camp. And I'm I'm trying to
52:40
Speaker 1: style it out like a legit like state park campground.
52:45
Speaker 1: And as of right now, as of like three days ago,
52:47
Speaker 1: I'm having a pavilion built. It's gonna have three solar
52:50
Speaker 1: panels on it and a little battery array, so I'm
52:53
Speaker 1: gonna be able to power like a big giant ceiling
52:57
Speaker 1: fan under the pavilion and like four odd outlets and
53:01
Speaker 1: like a coffee maker. Nothing huge, but he said, the
53:04
Speaker 1: guy said, will be enough for three or four days
53:06
Speaker 1: of full power and then like a day to juice
53:09
Speaker 1: it up. And we're never there for more than three
53:11
Speaker 1: days anyway, So I'm technically gonna have a little off
53:14
Speaker 1: grid campground. Soon you have me a coffee maker, and
53:19
Speaker 1: I should mention you've got me a very nice birthday
53:22
Speaker 1: gift that is going to live at that camp. I'm
53:25
Speaker 1: so glad you like it. Man. I saw and I
53:27
Speaker 1: was like, I know exactly where this will go, and
53:30
Speaker 1: it went exactly where I thought it would get. What
53:32
Speaker 1: is the exact name of it. I don't have the
53:33
Speaker 1: box in front of me. Oh man. It's a kindling
53:37
Speaker 1: splitter basically. Yeah, it's like a log splitter, but but
53:40
Speaker 1: it splits it into kindling. So the coolest thing about
53:43
Speaker 1: it all is the story behind it. Is this like
53:46
Speaker 1: twelve year old girl invented it in New Zealand and
53:50
Speaker 1: for the last like seven years. Now she's in her
53:52
Speaker 1: early twenties. I think she was like thirteen years old
53:54
Speaker 1: at the time. It's like a legit company and this
53:58
Speaker 1: thing you like screw it onto a log and then
54:00
Speaker 1: you put another log in it and hit it with
54:02
Speaker 1: a heavy hammer. You even got me the heavy hammer. Yeah. Yeah,
54:04
Speaker 1: you can't not get the hammer. It splits it into kindling.
54:07
Speaker 1: I'm just so excited. Yeah, rather than like bringing an
54:10
Speaker 1: axe down onto a log, the ax is coming up
54:12
Speaker 1: from the bottom. Yes, And it's very much safer. And
54:16
Speaker 1: I even looked at a YouTube video and a review
54:19
Speaker 1: and everyone was like, these things are great. So it's
54:21
Speaker 1: safer than an axe. I can't wait to I can't
54:25
Speaker 1: wait to use that very thoughtful gift. Well, happy birthday again, man,
54:28
Speaker 1: I'm glad. And six bottles of champagne. Yeah, did you
54:30
Speaker 1: drink it all in a weekend as suggested? Not yet,
54:33
Speaker 1: but spring break is next week and we're gonna we're
54:35
Speaker 1: gonna get into that champagne. We'll enjoy very sweet gifts.
54:40
Speaker 1: Is that is that it did? We stopped talking about electricity?
54:43
Speaker 1: I think, didn't we? I thought you meant like, are
54:45
Speaker 1: those all the gifts? I gave you? A right? You
54:48
Speaker 1: didn't get the other eight gifts, the half case of
54:50
Speaker 1: champagne and the log split it and the hammer, the
54:53
Speaker 1: three pound sledge. That's right. Well, if you want to
54:56
Speaker 1: know more about Chuck's three pound sledge, you can email him.
55:00
Speaker 1: But also, in the meantime, if you want to know
55:01
Speaker 1: more about the electrical grid, you can just start reading
55:04
Speaker 1: about it. It's an extraordinarily complicated, complex, modern marvel of engineering.
55:10
Speaker 1: That's pretty engrossing stuff. So go to town. And in
55:14
Speaker 1: the meantime, I said go to town, which means it's
55:15
Speaker 1: time for a listener made. I'm gonna call this titanic
55:21
Speaker 1: follow up from a friend in Ireland. This is this
55:23
Speaker 1: is a fun one. Hey, guys, been listening for a
55:25
Speaker 1: few years and now I currently work in Belfast port
55:29
Speaker 1: where RMS Titanic was built. The Titanic Museum was built
55:34
Speaker 1: in Belfast and the building is in the shape of
55:36
Speaker 1: a star representing white star lines. At each point of
55:39
Speaker 1: the star is the actual size of titanics hull at
55:43
Speaker 1: st high standing underneath. It really gives you a feel
55:46
Speaker 1: for its size and makes you feel very small in
55:49
Speaker 1: a good way. Also, slip ways for Titanic are filled
55:53
Speaker 1: in for you to walk over and etched with an
55:55
Speaker 1: outline of Titanic and its sister ship Olympic to scale. Yeah,
55:59
Speaker 1: it's very cool, including the actual locations of the lifeboats
56:02
Speaker 1: and funnels. Again, it's very cool to walk down. You
56:05
Speaker 1: can check out. You can check it out on Google
56:06
Speaker 1: Earth just search Titanic Belfast, check out the satellite view.
56:11
Speaker 1: Keep up the great work. And that is Kyle in Belfast,
56:15
Speaker 1: Northern Ireland, and he has a nice little ps joke.
56:18
Speaker 1: He says, there's a very overused joke here in Belfast
56:20
Speaker 1: when people ask us why we celebrate something that sank,
56:24
Speaker 1: which is this It was fine when it left here.
56:29
Speaker 1: That's great, that's that trademark Belfasts humor. I was gonna
56:33
Speaker 1: do it in Irish accent, but I got stage fright.
56:35
Speaker 1: Oh come on, let's hear it again. I don't know what.
56:37
Speaker 1: I don't even know what. It was fine, It was
56:39
Speaker 1: fine when it left here. Oh that was great? Man?
56:43
Speaker 1: Was that just transferred to me to my youth when
56:45
Speaker 1: I was eating a bowl of lucky charms? Or hey
56:48
Speaker 1: mane it was fine when it left here? Very nuts. Well,
56:53
Speaker 1: let's see Chuck is at it? That's gotta be it?
56:56
Speaker 1: Who it? Sammy Davis Jr. Thank you, Sammy Davis, to
57:00
Speaker 1: you for the letter. That was Kyle Kyle. That's right, Uh,
57:03
Speaker 1: Kyle from Belfast. We appreciate you. Uh. And if you
57:07
Speaker 1: want to be appreciated like Kyle, you can send us
57:10
Speaker 1: a good email like Kyle did. Wrap it up, spank
57:13
Speaker 1: it on the bottom, and ship it out to see
57:15
Speaker 1: to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
57:22
Speaker 1: Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
57:24
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57:28
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