Third world devolution update
Our infrastructure is crumbling in so many ways. This is just one example and it’s vital, particularly since the weather is now so volatile:
The patchwork of power grids that kept the country’s lights on for much of the last century is dangerously strained. Extreme weather and growing electricity use are demanding more of the grid at just the moment when the supply of 24/7 power is shrinking. With heat waves already roasting broad swaths of the nation, this summer’s brutal forecasts mean rolling blackouts are more likely than at any other point in living memory ― and the risk only gets worse by the year.
In Texas this month, where ideologically guided deregulation caused rolling blackouts last year that left hundreds dead, the grid operator urged customers to cut back on power use as demand surged. In New York City, where a nuclear plant that once provided the bulk of the five boroughs’ zero-carbon power shut down last year, the local power utility sent text messages last week urging ratepayers to cut back amid a heat wave. In California, rolling blackouts have become a feature of wildfire season as the utilities prefer shutting down power lines to the legal liability of potentially having some equipment spark a blaze.
Of the country’s nine grid regions, none is more vulnerable this year than the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). It covers Watkins and the 42 million other people living in 15 states along the Mississippi River, from Louisiana to Michigan and beyond, into the Canadian province of Manitoba.
“We’re the greatest country in the world,” said Tony Anderson, the general manager of the Cherryland Electric Cooperative in Grawn, Michigan. “And now we’re talking about shutting people off because we don’t have the generation to serve them.”
A New Era Of Power Generation
To understand why the MISO (pronounced MY-so) is in such peril, one could look to southwest Michigan, where the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station closed in May despite a last-ditch scramble by state and federal leaders to save the plant, which was deemed safe to produce enough zero-carbon power for 800,000 homes. The closure came just two days after the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the federally backed nonprofit responsible for developing standards for keeping the lights on across the continent, released its annual report listing the MISO as the system most at risk of blackouts this summer.
Across the Upper Midwest, coal and nuclear plants have come offline faster than new generators capable of matching demand are coming online, and routine infrastructure repairs have temporarily shrunk supply even more.
The seeds of chaos were sown in the 1990s, when states began “restructuring” electricity markets to force more competition among power plant operators. Undergirding this change was the belief that pitting plants against each other in hourly battles for market share would take profit away from the power plants and hand it back to the consumer in the form of lower prices on energy bills. As a result, electricity rates went from reflecting what monopoly utilities and the elected commissioners that regulated them said was needed to cover long-term costs to the lowest price in a daily bidding war. The market shift not only failed to deliver steadily cheap electricity, it allowed short-term thinking to dominate the system, a National Bureau of Economic Research study concluded in 2015.
That year marked something of a turning point for the grid. In 2015, as new federal regulations limiting toxic mercury emissions from coal stations were poised to come into effect, plant owners were forced to decide between investing in costly equipment upgrades or shut down. Many, already nearing the end of a coal plant’s ordinary lifespan, chose to close.
Construction of new coal plants is unlikely. Though coal has stubbornly defied forecasts of its demise, the extraordinary toll its pollution takes on the climate in the long term and on surrounding communities in the short term raises doubts over whether a new plant would last long enough to earn back the initial investment. Financial pressures mounted on coal plants over the past decade as the U.S. boom in hydraulic fracturing, the drilling technique known as fracking, made natural gas cheap. The plummeting price of wind turbines, photovoltaic panels and batteries squeezed coal even tighter.
Another wave of closures even bigger than 2015 is set to crash in 2028, when a record number of coal plants will cease operation.
Nuclear plants can most easily make use of the grid infrastructure built around coal stations. But nuclear power, which can deliver a bounty of coal-quality electricity without the climate-changing emissions, faces a similar problem. The nation’s aging fleet of roughly 90 reactors has struggled to compete against gas and renewables in markets that aren’t typically designed to factor in nuclear plants’ unique dependability or the subsidies and loans making renewables and gas cheap. As with coal plants, environmentalists have fiercely protested to close nuclear stations over concerns about Chernobyl-style accidents and the lack of permanent disposal for radioactive waste that remains dangerous for millenniums.
In many places, shutdowns of coal and nuclear plants have been lauded as steps toward cleaner futures. While that may be true of coal, new, cleaner forms of generation have not kept pace with closures, and the grid’s infrastructure has not undergone the costly overhauls needed to accommodate more renewables. If that mismatch of goals results in blackouts, environmentalists’ victories against coal plants could prove Pyrrhic.
Eliminating the 40% of U.S. climate-changing emissions that come from things like fueling automobiles and heating buildings will, in most cases, require swapping internal-combustion-engine cars for electric vehicles and gas furnaces for electric heat pumps. Even with more efficient appliances and conservation measures, that shift could drive up demand for electricity by 38% by 2050, according to a National Renewable Energy Laboratory study. And that estimate isn’t factoring in the myriad other potential new sources of intense energy demand in a hotter world, such as desalination plants to turn saltwater to freshwater or direct air capture machines to suck CO₂ from the atmosphere ― to say nothing of phenomena such as Bitcoin mining.
“Demand is going up and supply is going down. That’s the problem,” said Jim Matheson, chief executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, a trade group representing nonprofit co-ops in 47 states. “We can’t have some aspirational policy where if we remove these plants, somehow the market will take care of this in an orderly fashion. That’s not going to happen.”
Before the mercury regulations kicked in for coal plants, Eric Baker, chief executive of Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative, said he had never seen what is known as a “max gen” event ― a moment when demand is so close to eclipsing supply on the grid that operators halt all maintenance and planned outages to generate maximum volumes of power.
“Prior to 2016, there were none. Since 2016, we’ve had 40, and last year we had a record,” said Baker, whose co-op distributes power around rural Michigan. “That’s what I see as a canary in the coal mine that says the grid is being taxed.”
I’m sure you all remember the Enron debacle, just the most famous example of the 90s fetish for deregulation that was going to use “competition” to solve every problem. I remember my hairdresser telling me that she was getting into selling energy and thinking, “oh my god, it’s an Amway “get rich quick scheme.” We all know how that turned out.