How the Electrical Grid Works

The electrical grid that provides power to the US is one of those things you don’t give a second thought to until it stops working – then it’s tough to think about anything else. Learn why this engineering marvel is past its prime and how to update it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Spuzzing Clark, and there's Chuck Zippy Zap Bryant. Okay,
there's just the two of us. Don't have to come

(00:23):
up with any more stupid electricity based names. Jerry Jerry, Yeah,
she's we don't not here. She just zipped off into
the ether absent who knows. Yeah, we should call Roll Chuck. Okay, yeah,
Josh here, Chuck present, Jerry Jerry, She's not here, dude.

(00:51):
I just had a shower today for the first time
in a few days because we didn't have water in
our house. No, And I put this on the Movie
Crushers page just to get some feedback. I was like,
would you rather not have power or water? And that
kind of figures into today's episode, and you know, of
the people are very sensible and said would much rather
not have power than water, But there were a handful

(01:13):
of psychopaths that said they'd rather be I guess just
buying dozens of gallons of water to to flush toilets
and wash hands and not bathe. At what point? At
what point though of going without water and maybe you
reach this point and you can tell me. Do you

(01:33):
get to where you're like, well, we're just gonna save
water and dig a dig a pit and be in
the van a latrine. Well, I mean we were letting
the yellow mellow, you know what I'm saying. Unfortunately, uh,
you know the brown you gotta flush down. You should
trademark that. And it really hits home how much water

(01:55):
a toilet uses when you have to fill it up
with those huge, like arrowhead five gallon jugs. And it's
just shameful. But you know, I was happy to take
that shower, I gotta tell you. Yeah. But you go
through three of those five gallon jugs before you realize
that you're accidentally stepping on the handle and they're just
going right down the drain. You're like, man, this is

(02:16):
not my week. But this isn't about water. It's about power,
which you know, it's a it's a really good question,
and I'm not surprised that the um you've got the
response that you got from it, because like we we
tend to think of, like, you know, electricity is you know,
a really nice modern luxury, and that is basically not

(02:38):
the case anymore for most of the climates in the
United States, electricity is an absolute necessity. It's not a luxury,
like you need it to survive in the modern world.
You could try to do the take Kazinsky thing, go
off grid. People do it successfully, But even then, if
you look into what they're doing, I would guess something
in the neighborhood of of those people are still using

(03:02):
something like solar power or wind power. They just aren't
connected to this grid that we're going to talk about today. Yeah,
and I should caveat the question I posted the movie
Crushers was whether aside like obviously, in the hot, hot
summer people can and do die from outages, and in
the winter they do as well. But it was you
know that wasn't the case here in Atlanta. All that

(03:24):
is cold today. Yeah it is very cold, but I
mean not deadly cold, but it gets deadly cold once
in a while here. Um, but even beyond like heating
and cooling just to stay alive, Like, electricity is so
interwoven with our lives that you know, you you're like, okay,
I can wash dishes by hand. You know it's not
my preference, but whatever, or um, you know, I can,

(03:46):
I can use the old gas powered lawnmar and so
the electric lawnmar But there's also like can you keep
up in school or at work without you know, electricity?
That like it's it's really just a it's a fundamental
necessity in my modern industrial life. And um, we get
this based on this huge, sprawling, rickety old black and

(04:10):
white cartoon donkey of an engineering marvel that we call
the electrical grid. It's crazy how held together with like
duct tape and bubblegum this thing is. But it's still
literally delivers the juice for us. Yeah, and it is
funny how we it's so like power and water you
know here in the United States is so ingrained. Is

(04:33):
just something we kind of take for granted that when
you don't have it, this is the only time you notice.
And like, the only fun thing about the past few
days was hearing Emily scream from another room because you know,
your instinct is, oh, I have grease on my fingers,
let me go watch it off, and just hearing her
like flick uh, you know, some faucet or something somewhere

(04:55):
in the house over the past three days and nothing
comes out because you just forget, say, when the powers
if you're constantly flicking a switch and going I hate life.
It's not there. Yeah. Well, but that's why you'll see
in a lot of different like power companies, UM names
the word reliability because that is key, Like you can't have,
you know, an electric company that's just kind of like, oh,

(05:17):
you work a lot of the time, you know, don't
we get credit for that. It's like, no, people want
you to work basically a hundred percent of the time.
You don't want to sign up for a company, and
it's called partial credit exactly you want. You want the
full credit one the real ambitious types that like with
their hands shoot up into the air at every question.
That's the kind of energy company you want. So should

(05:39):
we talk about this big, antiquated system. Yeah, so, like
I said, it is considered a modern marvel. And part
of the reason why it's considered a modern marvel is
just from its sheer enormous size. Yeah, I mean big time.
We're talking uh nineteen thousand generators and in this case
it is literally generating the power or like a coal

(06:00):
plant or a National natural gas plant or a wind
farm that kind of thing. Uh fifty five thousand substations,
transmission substations, and we'll we've talked about this before and
we'll get to it later. But this is when you're
stepping up and stepping down power to get it in
and out of your house. I guess not out of
your house. It only comes in. It depends if you
have a good solar rain. Like a power wants your stuff.

(06:25):
It's uh six miles of um transmission lines. It's a
six point three million miles of distribution lines. And these
are like the power poles, unless you're lucky enough to
have buried power lines. I know, it looks so much better.
They're doing that actually in our neighborhood finally, and they
approached us with a dollar figure to say, can we

(06:47):
put this huge, big green thing in your front yard?
And we said thank you, No, Um, try someone else. Yeah,
you're you're like not these neighbors. We like them, but
three doors down they really sucks. So try that well,
I mean something. It doesn't have to go in our yards.
So I think they're just taking volunteers who want to
make a little scratch. But you can't, like plant bushes

(07:09):
in front of it or anything in our front yard
is very exposed. It would look really bad. Yeah, well
we'll talk about what those are, but they are seriously
dangerous too if you end up getting into one of those,
the one the things that kids play on all the time. Yeah,
it's crazy. Those are really really dangerous. Basically many power stations,
they're transformed. They just happen to be like on the

(07:30):
ground rather than up on a pole where everybody's used
to them. Yeah. I mean I felt kind of bad
at first because I thought, am I not doing my
part to make sure our neighborhood gets buried? But they
said that you know there, it doesn't have to go there,
and they can just that there are a lot of
people that are gonna want that, however much money it
was were. They like, okay, well, you know, we understand

(07:50):
your decision, but we noticed you have an empty lot
behind your and you keep walking. You know what's funny
we found out once we assume oimed that property that
we were squatting on, that two weeks later, Georgia Power
got in touch with them. So no, I know, that's
why I made that joke, but that was exactly what
was going to happen, right, Yeah, for that's not a joke,

(08:11):
I know, but I was joking about how close she came.
Oh goodness me. All right, so let's talk about the
nationwide network. Uh. And when we're talking about this, keep
in mind we're talking about the lower forty eight. Obviously,
Hawaii and Alaska have their own grids and systems. Yeah,
they were strangely left out of this, the poor poor DearS. Yeah,

(08:32):
but we're thinking about them. But on the lower forty eight,
we have basically three big separate grids that are called
inter connections, and really it should just be two. There
should be the Eastern interconnection, which is basically everything west
of the Rockies or east of the Rockies, a lot
of the um Great Plain states up to the northeast,

(08:54):
the southeast all that's the Eastern connection. Then you've got
the Western interconnection, which is west of the Rockies, and
then you've got Texas. Those are the three inter connections
of the United States electrical grid. Yeah, here's my question,
is it is Texas literally no longer connected at all? No,

(09:14):
that's the big about the whole thing. They're connected to
God and everybody. They're connected to Mexico. Mexico saved there,
took us in two thousand eleven. They're connected to everybody.
They just somehow are being left out of the law.
It's ridiculous. No, but they are connected, like okay, yes,
because I was gonna say, is it the lower forty seven?
But technically they are connected, but they're just Texas is

(09:35):
gonna do Texas now? And there's even that's exactly right.
And then there's even parts of Texas, including El Paso
and some parts of the Panhandle, that are connected to
either the Eastern or the Western inter connection. But most
of Texas by far is its own interconnection, its own
separate grid. Yeah. Even know even more than that, I
would say it's probably closer like percent, like almost all

(09:59):
of it. Okay, all right, Well this is good though,
that we're interconnected. Uh. And there are a lot of
big benefits to that, chief of which is probably reliability
because when you have such an interconnected grid, um, you
can work together and there's a lot of backups and
redundancy is built in, so if there's a big demand
in one place, or if power goes down in one place,

(10:20):
you can reroute and have get some help from your neighbors.
Basically right, exactly, um. And that actually came about, as
we'll see from a little bit of deregulation, but also
it kind of developed from from power producers realizing like, well,
we'll talk about that in a minute. There's also flexibility, right,

(10:40):
So if you have like a bunch of different sources.
So you've got a wind farm offshore in in Um, Florida,
and then you also have you're getting power from like
a damn in Georgia, and all of these are providing
power to the southeast, and you have all sorts of
coal fire power plates and nuclear power plates. You can
kind of put all these two gather into an energy portfolio,

(11:01):
and all of them are providing electricity to do the grid.
So the fact that it's like interconnected, it can accept
electrical um production from generators all over the place and
from different varieties and types. But as far as you're concerned,
it's all just it all just turns into electricity after
it's generated, right. Uh. And then the last advantage is affordability.

(11:24):
And this is kind of what you were hinting at.
You know, deregulations sort of has giveth in taken away
in some ways. Starting in the eighties, the grid was
open to wholesale competition and private power companies started investing
in certain efficiencies and that made that did really make
electricity affordable in the US. But it also when it

(11:46):
comes to like like insulating pipelines like Texas did not do. Um,
it makes companies more reticent to invest in money like
that because they're like, you know, why would we want
to unline our pockets? You know, envy. And so you
put all this stuff together. You put the power generation plants,
you put the transmission lines, you put the distribution networks

(12:09):
that all go into like people's homes and businesses and
end up as like an outlet or socket or something
like that, and that all together, all those components is
the electrical grid. And that's that's it. But uh so
let's take a break and um we'll come back and
talk a little bit about the history of the grid.
How about that. Let's do it, okay, Chuck. Also, before

(13:02):
we talk about the history, I want to direct everybody
to what I think is one of our better science
based episodes, How Electricity Works. Yeah, it's a good one.
We cover some of this stuff in there. But um,
like we really got into electricity. It was electrifying. Bo
you've laughed. I know, I'm just laughing because you're my friend.

(13:25):
I can't punch you right now because you're in a
different place, that joke in the same room, right, you
learned from the last one. Uh so, And then then
we talked, like you said about part of this in electricity.
But our earliest power grids were built in the eighteen eighties,
and they were all very local and specific, and this

(13:48):
was a time and place when Edison and Tesla were
duking it out in a very public, sometimes a grotesque
way to prove that they're uh. In Edison's case, DC
system or Tesla is a c Alternating current system was
better and gruesome, meaning electrifying large animals. That s ob

(14:08):
You always got to say that, right, Oh yeah, he
should go down in history. That Yeah, he's a terrible
guy in that respect for sure. But Tesla went out,
um in large part due to a lot of financial
backing from George Westinghouse. Right, Um, but not just that,
Like direct current has better in some ways, but it
also has some serious disadvantages to alternating current, which was

(14:32):
the Tesla Westinghouse version. And um, we'll talk about exactly why,
but just you know, remember that alternating current is way
better for long distance transmission. So the fact that we
went with alternating current meant that we could create this huge,
extensive grid with hundreds of thousands or millions of miles
of transmission and distribution line. That's all thanks to Nicola

(14:56):
Tesla's alternating current. That's right. So really part of the
twentieth century, there were about four thousand individual electric utilities
with all these tiny grids, and then World War Two
rolls around and there's a big spike in demand for
more power because it was just after World War Two.
There was a big boon, lots lots of new appliances

(15:17):
and fancy new things that needed power. And uh, the smaller,
little independent grids looked at each other and said, I
guess we gotta hold hands now and start working together
to to meet this demand. Yeah, there was this really
big push to electrify America that FDR took up pretty
early in his presidency, and he like took on these

(15:38):
really like powerful electric utilities and got a bunch of
black eyes as a result of it, but ended up
winning UM passing the Federal Power Act, of which basically
put a leash on the UM the holding companies that
there was like a handful of very large powerful holding
companies that basically ran and electricity in the United States UM,

(16:03):
and they weren't really innovating. They weren't doing much too
to electrify the US. So the federal government got involved
in UM basically took over and so we're gonna regulate
you guys from now on, and the United States became
UM very much electrified, like as a whole country. But
in return for this, it wasn't just the UM nanny
state taking away from the corporate state. They said, how

(16:26):
about this. We'll give you guys monopolies that we're gonna
keep a really close eye on, and we're gonna regulate strongly,
but you guys can make your costs back and a
reasonable profit. And so owning an electric company became UM.
It was like printing your own money, you know, like
you had so many customers that you were making gobs

(16:46):
of money. And every year your your growth, the growth
of the growth of the entire industry was about eight
percent each year. That's really good, and it was also
money in the bank. They knew that America was just
going to keep consuming and consuming and consuming, so they
would just build more and more power plants and they
were just going to sit back and collect eight percent
a year, and actually everybody was happy. There's a lot

(17:08):
of innovation and everything UM, but one of the things
that these different power monopolies learned early on is that
everyone expected power on demand twenty four hours a day.
If somebody wanted to plug their vacuum cleaner in at
three am, they better have power. There wasn't like downtime
that these guys could factor in. And as we'll see,

(17:31):
there was no storage capacity. That's something that we need
to get that we don't have, which means that power
has to be generated constantly and you also have to
have backup power. Was really really expensive to build a
backup power station, and so these early UM companies figured
out that they could buy power from other rival companies

(17:52):
that had some surplus right then, cheaper than it would
be for them to generate it or to build a
backup generating plant. And in this way, the early independent
grid started to connect to one another to kind of
buy and sell power as needed, and this kind of
wholesale power market developed, and that's where the grid started
to connect together, right And we should also point out

(18:14):
that in nineteen thirty five, with the passing of the
Federal Power Act. That's when Texas said, nah, ye said,
we're gonna do our own thing. We're gonna make our
own power, we're gonna keep our own power, and we're
gonna have our own our own body to oversee it.
Called the URCOTT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Millions

(18:35):
of listeners just WoT boo uh. They created that in
nineteen seventy and they manage about of the grid in Texas.
And um, we use a lot of power in this country. UM,
I think the US consumed there's a couple of years ago,
in twenty nineteen three point nine trillion kill a lot hours,
which is about thirteen thousand kill a lott hours per human.

(18:58):
And you'd think, like, that's got to be the most
in the world. There's about a dozen countries ahead of US,
but those are countries where it can get really really
cold or really really hot, not places like the United States,
where comparatively to other places like US, we use a
lot more per person. Yeah, so thirteen thousand kilowatt hours
per person, It sounds like a lot, and it is

(19:19):
a lot. But in Iceland they use fifty three thousand
kilowatt hours per person on average, they gotta heat those
soundests and that crazy. But for for in their defense,
they're making most of the electricity from geo thermal, so
who cares? Use as much electricity as you want. And
then we I know some of our other listeners don't

(19:40):
just live in the US, so Canada actually beats the
United States and per capita consumption, they use fifteen points
six thousand killed watt hours. Australia is um better at
it than we are. They use ten thousand. New Zealand's
nine thousand kill watt hours. And then for our three
German listeners seven thousand kilwatt hours. And then in the UK,

(20:01):
I think it's about five thousand kilwater yeah, exactly. Volcomb
the end, What was that Cabaret? I think, Okay, yeah
it is Cabaret. I think it's like the opening of it.
I just know Cabaret from Ship's Creek right same here.
I mean, I'm gonna watch it before but uh but yeah,

(20:24):
that's where I've seen most of Cabaret from that episode
of Ship's Creek. Yeah, Emily and I were both are like,
we need to see Cabaret though, Now dude, I started watching, Um,
what we do in the Shadows again from the TV Yes,
it's so. It's one of the best comedies ever put
on television. Yeah, and it's sort of a rare case

(20:44):
of taking a movie changing the cast up for television
and it's just as good. Yeah, the movie was great.
The TV show was great. I I have to I
haven't seen all of the movie, but from what I
saw the movie, I prefer the TV show. I love him.
I think for good six months after the TV show,
we would walk around the house saying these iffing gay

(21:08):
that like every dude, every single character. And that's just
so it's just great. Thank you people who made what
we do in the shows. Than uh, it is wonderful.
So as far as what we use that power for
here in the States, uh, and I guess this is
lower forty eight. Who knows what they're doing in Alaska, Hawaii,

(21:28):
but thirty eight percent of that power consumption is residential
people like you and I and or you and me.
And the bulk of that is that is is heating
and cooling our homes and making hot water or washing dishes,
and then the rest is you know, running appliances, charging

(21:50):
your laptop, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Um, The other
sixty one point five percent is non residential stuff commercial
things like office buildings, and then industrial, which is mostly
um used for running motors or because America loves its lathes.

(22:11):
I thought of that earlier, and I was like, oh, yeah,
I've I've seen pictures of lathe accidents before. So I
spent a good twenty minutes looking at lathe accident photos.
I do not recommend, but I didn't see that coming
up when I started researching this. I used a lathe
back in industrial arts in high school. Dude, once I
found out how dangerous those things were, I would never

(22:32):
go near near one. That's you have all your baseball
bats made by someone else. Now, yeah, I subout that
part of my life. So the good the good news
is with energy efficiencies, they've really come a long way
over the past couple of decades, the whole Energy Star
program and just appliances being made much more efficiently than

(22:54):
they used to be. Um, it's only going to increase
I think the demand by one percent a year from
now to which is good, but that's still thirty increase,
which is a lot. But it's astounding that as we
keep consuming more and more electricity and we do, um,
we we use a lot. They figured out, like these

(23:15):
Americans are nuts, They're just gonna keep consuming and consuming.
We better figure out how to make our stuff more
energy efficient. And that they've managed to offset all but
one percent of that growth per year, because I can
only imagine if we were still working with you know,
nineteen thirties style blenders and vacuum cleaners. Good lord, we'd
be suck in the cold directly out of the earth,
like straight into your vacuum cleaner. Would be so used,

(23:37):
so wasteful. Yeah, And I imagine that they are always
working on this, Like I I assume the goal is
to have the negative number there, don't you think from
your lips to God's ear, chuck, Like, wouldn't that be great?
If they're like it's going to go down by two
or three percent per year? I mean that would that
would be great? That's actually hopefully We're gonna talk a

(23:59):
lot about how to fix the grid, and one of
the suggestions is to create the smart grid, and one
of the big components of it is to basically allow
you and me, we or I and you to see
how much electricity we use through interfaces that are similar
to like online banking, like we would we would be

(24:20):
and we would be aware in managing our electricity use
with that level of like minute interface, right, and that
by doing that we would start to consume less would
be certainly less waste wasteful. So it's possible that we
might go down compared to levels. Who knows would be great,
It would be wonderful. Uh. One of the big changes

(24:43):
about I think like basically all of the cold, nuclear
and renewable resources we have in this country are consumed,
most of it for creating energy, and I think about
a third of natural gas. But natural gas is been
a big boon. Um. We did an episode on fracking
and say what you want about it, but there is

(25:04):
a lot more natural gas now. Um, it has lowered
the cost gas. Fire generators are cheaper to build, they
burn cleaner than cold do by half, They're more nimble,
they can respond quicker to big increases in demand. So
it's gone up I think from nineteen from twelve percent
of our energy mix to Yeah, and we should probably

(25:27):
just safe a full disclosure. Um, we are deeply underwritten
as a podcast by both Enron and x On, So
just heads up on that one. Tops. Yes, um so uh,
when you do generate electricity, you're not actually you don't
create energy, where electricity is an energy carrier, right, which

(25:50):
is why it's like it all turns into the same
thing from all these different sources. Um. But the people
who run the grid have figured out, like there's specific
kinds of generation plants you want to run, and there's
basically three of them. One is baseload, which is your average,
say usually coal fire power plant that's running almost all
the time, and that provides the vast majority of the

(26:12):
electricity that's being consumed at any given point. Then there's
load following plants, which a're um at this time natural
gas power plants, but they may overtake gas or coal
in the United States at some point. Those are a
little more, um, a little less frequently run. If you're like,
I think we're gonna need some more some more juice
because it's Christmas time and everybody's got their lights up,

(26:35):
you might spark up the old load load following plants.
And then lastly there's one called peaker plants, like a
peak like a peak capacity where when you start this up,
you're basically like burning diamonds. It's so expensive to run
these things, and that means that this the demand has
gone crazy and the prices are going sky high. So

(26:56):
turn up the peaker plant because we need that extra capacity. Yeah,
and just quickly to tick through where we get the
rest of these the rest of the fuel sources, I
said natural gas ist coal is twenty three, nuclear is twenty,
wind is seven, hydro electric is seven, biomass is two,
pent solar one eight percent, which is still pretty low.

(27:20):
Considering how many people have gotten on that train. I
would say it's objectively shameful. Yeah, that would be nice
to see that number go up. But um, there are
a hundred and forty five million households and businesses connected
to this grid in the US. And the reason it
all works, and we talked about this, it's still just
amazing to me how it all works. We talked about

(27:41):
it in electricity, but the ability to send electricity over
long distances and step it up and step it down
to make it power your coffee machine is a modern miracle.
It's amazing, right, And that's one of the big advantages
of alternating current electricity is I guess you can do
it with DC, but it's way more difficult and way

(28:03):
more expensive. So for all intents and purposes, it's a
c that you can step up and step down. And
when when you do that, you do that because current,
which is the flow of electrons like down the line
UM is inversely proportionate to what's called voltage rights it is.

(28:24):
Voltage is kind of like the pressure you put on
a line, like the pressure of the flow where the
where the current is the actual flow, right, And if
you have a very high current of electricity, you unfortunately
get a lot of resistance on the transmission lines. And
when you have a lot of resistance, you lose a

(28:44):
lot of electricity to heat. But fortunately for power generators, UM,
if you up the voltage right up the pressure that
you're putting on the line, it actually decreases the current.
And if you decrease the current, then you d crease
the energy loss. So they figured out that if they
can take you know, when they generate the stuff at

(29:05):
power plants, it's like two thousand volts, maybe up to
twenty thousand volts, but then they step up the voltage
to hundreds of thousands of volts. I think some transmission
lines are able to take about seven hundred and fifty
thousand volts, which is amazing. It is like if you
get shocked by like an electrical socket in your house

(29:27):
that's a hundred and twenty volts. This is seven hundred
and fifty thousand volts um. The current goes down so
dramatically that you lose almost none of the electricity over
very very long distances of transmission. So that's really a
huge benefit of alternating current that you can step them
up and then when you get towards neighborhoods and stuff,
step them back down. Yeah. I think they lose about

(29:50):
six percent of electricity generated in the United States, which
you know, that's a fairly low number, but I think
they're all he's trying to make that better. Yeah, because
I mean, let's see somewhere else whereas that number there's
a um we we do something like thirty five, no,

(30:10):
four and a half trillion kill a watt hours are
generated in the United States. So six lost. That's an
astounding amount of electricity that's lost. Any improvement on that
would be huge. Yeah, that'd be great. Um So in
your house, like you said, you have here in the States,
we have a hundred and twenty volts, So you have

(30:32):
these substations that step it down to about twelve thousand.
Then it goes to your power lines, and then those
you know, those gray um sort of cylindrical cans at
the top of the things. Those are very important. They
step it down even further to about two forty. Then
by the time you get into your house is down

(30:52):
to one and you're was about to say you're cooking
with gas, but you're not. You're cooking with electricity. Yes,
those gray can transformers are the same thing as that
green death box that they wanted to put in your
front yard, except the green death box it's called the
pack frontyard mount transformer. That's for underground power lines. The

(31:13):
gray cans are for overheadlines. But they do the same thing.
They step it down to a much less deadly and
much more usable um voltage of electricity. Yeah, we have
a lot of you know, Atlanta just has a lot
of outage this period because we have a it's a
city in a forest, and we have a ton of trees,
a ton of really old trees. Like most of the

(31:35):
not most, but a lot of the old oak trees
in Atlanta are coming down, or at the very least
large limbs are coming down, and uh, it's it's a problem.
So my neighborhood especially, we have a lot of blackouts.
So hopefully this this burying the lines project will work
out pretty well. Yeah. The tree thing, it's it's important.
It's like kind of part of that whole reliability thing

(31:56):
is we'll see is keeping trees trimmed away from power lines. Yeah,
which is why a power company might knock on your
door one day and say, Hi, we need to to
cut a lot of your tree back, and you have
to say yes. Well, yeah, they might not even say that.
Then we might just show up and start cutting your
tree and be like, what are you going to do
about it? And I'm just like, that was uncalled for.

(32:21):
Should we take another break before you get in another
fight with a power person? Yeah, they started at chuck.
All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back
and talk about all this gobble you cook a little
bit more, alrighty. So you mentioned earlier the monopoly situation

(33:08):
that was broken up, um largely because of the energy
crisis of the nineteen seventies, and we said, hey, let's
open it up. Let's get the market going and get
some competitive pricing happening, and everyone did that, not everyone
in the Southeast. We still have a lot of the big,
big utility companies, but um, they still needed some sort

(33:30):
of oversight. And there are a lot of different ways
that these things are regulated. If you look at a
state level, you're going to be regulated by a public
utility commission or a public service commission. And then when
you start horse trading in Alabama says to Georgia, hey,
we need some power, and you're like, wait, I'm getting
some power from Tennessee right now. Hold on the other line,

(33:53):
that's got to be regulated too. So the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission oversees those transactions. Yes, FVRC. So they're supposed
to it. As we'll see, they they fall down on
the job kind of frequently in huge catastrophic things happen
when they do. Um. But yeah, So when they started
to be regulated, especially in the set or deregulated in

(34:15):
the seventies, strangely enough, it was Jimmy Carter's administration who
opened up competition. You would think that would have been
a squarely a Ronald Reagan kind of thing, but Carter
did it to encourage conservation um of energy and to
create that competition to see who could who could deliver
this this stuff and kind of innovate more. Um, just

(34:37):
basically shake up the stodgy old energy companies. But the
problem is is, remember I said, like it was money
in the bank, you could just kick back and expect
eight percent growth year over year every single year, and
people are just gonna keep using electricity. All of a sudden,
there's a totally new mindset in America, which was whoa, whoa,
we're using way too much electricity and energy we need

(34:57):
to conserve. And now all the power companies started kind
of losing money. And when they started to lose money,
they stopped doing important things like cutting down trees um
or cutting down off tree limbs, or servicing their lines
as much like all the stuff that made them more reliable. UM,
just stopped happening quite as frequently, and so you started

(35:21):
to see things like enormous, massive blackouts that you know,
affected millions of people for days, where you didn't really
see that that often before. I think the first one
ever was in nineteen five, but um, the really big
ones started coming more frequently around about two thousand. I
think that was kind of kicked off by the California

(35:42):
energy crisis, and then you know we were talking about
the regulatory bodies, UM those were just for the public
utilities themselves. Then you have these transmission networks and they
have to be managed as well, and UM, I think
for stepped in and said, we need some sort of
independent management and oversight here, uh, because basically we've got
to make sure that everyone has equal access to this grid.

(36:05):
And so these interconnections that we talked about, those three interconnections,
they're divided about divided up into more than a dozen
independent nonprofits UM that are called regional transmission organizations or
independent system operators. And I think the idea there is
they're just they're not in it for the money. They're
there to kind of really just make sure everyone is

(36:26):
being treated fairly and doing the right thing, right, that
everybody has access to the grid that's supposed to get
access to the grid. But also it's a they're also
the modern incarnation of those power pools where like UM,
like utilities would would buy and sell power to one
another as needed. These are the groups that kind of
oversee those transactions. Right. So you mentioned the grid failing

(36:49):
in California. I was there at the time, and I
remember in I remember these rolling blackouts California in the
late nineties and early two thousands, early odts, UM had
to institute these emergency rolling blackouts. Uh. And I remember
when I was living there a couple of times it
was all over the news. You know, it was a big,
big news. And I remember a couple of times like

(37:12):
you know, losing power because they just had to. Yeah,
so there was UM. I guess California and and Ron
actually makes an appearance every time there was a huge,
colossal blackout. You could trace that its origins back a
couple of years to Enron lobbying to get somebody d
to get things deregulated, get a wholesale market built up,

(37:33):
and they managed to do that in California. UM and
California found itself in this weird position where the really
big utility companies like PG and E UM or Southern
California Edison UM were they they were capped at how
much they could charge retail for energy for electricity. But

(37:58):
at the same time, in this new wholesale market UM
they had to buy electricity and it wasn't being regulated.
Member I said that Birk sometimes falls down in the job. Well,
they weren't regulating this wholesale market in California like they
were supposed to, And so one day in the summer
uh one month, I should say, starting in June of

(38:19):
of two thousand, the wholesale prices went through the roof.
It went from about thirty bucks the year before to
three seventy five bucks a megawatt hour in two thousand
and all of a sudden, PG and is having to
pay through the nose for this energy, but they can't
pass the cost along to their customers, and yet they're
also legally obligated to continue to to provide electricity to

(38:44):
their customers. So they found themselves in this impossible situation.
Some people still today say that they turned off the
power because they didn't have the supply. Um, but they
they swear that they did not do that and that
they just ran out a supply because they can get
it any longer. Well. Yeah, And as a result, p
G and E in UH Southern Cali Edison, they were

(39:07):
financially strapped. So they were in a situation where they
had independent energy suppliers in surrounding states that were like,
and I know you guys are in trouble, but I
don't want to see my stuff because I don't know
that I'm gonna get paid back now. So California was
in a bind in the early ots and um, there
were also technical problems and stuff. I think there was

(39:29):
uh low water levels in the Pacific Northwest, which was
huge because California at the time, I don't know if
there is it's different now. They were not self sufficient
energy wise. They depended on the surplus of other states. Yeah,
so you know, if there was low water levels in
the Pacific Northwest, that's less electricity being sent south. And

(39:49):
they also basically had these high voltage power lines from
southern California to northern California and they were crashing, they
were failing because they were just over a burden base basically.
So they said, we got to do these rolling blackouts,
and I think the biggest one was March two thousand one,
affected about one point five million customers. Yeah, and like

(40:09):
you said that, they these independent energy producers wouldn't sell
them electricity because they didn't think they were going to
get paid back. The whole thing finally ended when the
governor had the water Board, the State water Board, go
buy energy or electricity on behalf of them because the
state was you know, the state had a good enough

(40:31):
credit to buy electricity, but their two biggest electricity utilities
didn't have good enough credit. And that crazy. Yeah Great Davis,
I was like, was that the Governator? No? I think
he was just after Great Davis, wasn't he? And then
I saw it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, actually the governor for

(40:52):
California for years. It was, I mean that was after
I left. Uh, just yeah, it was just after I left. Yeah,
he was. He was Cheeze two thousand at the same
time that Jesse the Body Venture was the governor of Minnesota.
No way, man, all we needed was Carl Weathers is

(41:14):
the governor of Georgia. And um, Piper, No, no, I'm
doing Predator here. Okay, I missed that. I can't remember
the guy who played Billy or maybe just the Predator.
Sure the Predator was president, don't you know. Uh, I

(41:36):
haven't seen that movie in so long. I bet your
Predator holds up. Yeah, I saw in the last few
years and it does. Yeah, don't check that out. Uh,
there was a big blackout in the Northeast. I remember
this one as well. In two thousand three, Uh, this
was big time. This was fifty million people uh in
the US and even parts of Canada lost power for
a couple of days, in some case eleven deaths. And

(41:57):
this one, like it was like a movie or something.
How how this one started? Yeah, the there was Remember
I said that tree cutting kind of fell to the
wayside a little bit when they stopped making as much money.
Well that's what happened here. It was really really hot
and there was a lot of demand, and those lines
were just blazing so much so that they actually started

(42:17):
to sag, like the the atomic composition of the metal
was put under that much stress, and they sagged into
a tree brim, a tree branch and arct which is
basically like lightning is produced. Right. There was a teenager
in Ohio who noticed that, um, his outlets were smoking
throughout his house, and it just so happened that there

(42:40):
was a tree cutting crew outside of his house on
the other side of the street, and he ran out
to tell him and they basically told him to get lost.
And hours and hours went by. Uh. And there was
a bunch of cascading power feelers, which normally would have
been caught, right, but there was some human error involved. Yeah,
this was sort of the movie art. I mean, it

(43:00):
might as well have been like a rat chewing on
a wire or something that was. There's monitoring software that,
like you said, it's usually like, hey, emergency, something's going on.
But the software was being glitchy. And so a technician
with I guess like mustard stains on his shirt, turns
it off, tries to fix it, and forgets to turn
it back on. That's crazy. And so because the power

(43:23):
grid is especially interconnected up in the northeast, this power
outage in Ohio meant that there was um power outages
in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. And I think, did you say
eleven people died? Eleven people died? Um? So you know
the you the federal regulators stepped in and it was like,
we need a catchy new slogan to improve this, and

(43:46):
so how about the three T s trimming training and tools.
And everyone rolled their eyes said, whatever, Boomer, We'll we'll
get on those three T s. Sweet turn the volume
up on which a Tall Lineman, which is the only
song they ever listened to. The fourth tea was too sweet. Nice.

(44:07):
Uh So, now Texas, we're in Texas, We're not literally
in Texas. But uh, we're in Texas now in spirit
because very recently a big freak winter stormhead as everyone knows,
and everyone needed a lot more heat than they usually
do at this time of year in Texas. I think
they usually require about sixty seven thousand megawatts a day
in the winter, yeah, compared to eighty six thousand megawatts

(44:30):
in the summer. And all of this makes sense. We're
not saying like you're wrong Texas for not, you know,
being ready for this weird freak storm. I mean that
was the cause of it. But you also have to
take into consideration that, uh, like we said, some of
those lines weren't insulated like they should have been because
of money and wind and solar is not gonna work

(44:51):
as well in the winter anyway, And I think those
wind farms weren't winter rised as well, right, Yes, some
of them did. Apparently a surprising number. UM kept spinning UM,
but the big problem was the gas pipelines freezing over.
So instead of the UM planned for sixty seven thousand
megawatts of power, they ended up with UM thirty one

(45:16):
thousand because of those failures in the actual system, So
they had thirty thousand megawatts. They needed a lot more
than that. Uh, they probably needed about fifty thousand more
megawatts than they had. And so all of a sudden,
power just started going out in Texas. Supposedly isn't connected anything.
So Texas went dark and everybody started to get very

(45:38):
cold and couldn't cook and couldn't um, couldn't boil water,
couldn't take showers, to basically live in a very They
lived in a very dangerous situation because this is sub
freezing temperatures and these areas are not set up for
that kind of thing. Yeah, And if you want to
get your feathers ruffled and get a little riled up,

(45:59):
to read this New York Times article about the exorbitant
UM power bills that some of these people got that
we're able to stay online. There's a sixty three year
old Army vet who had to pay sixteen thousand dollars
for his monthly bill, which wiped out his entire savings UM.
A lot of people were reportedly UM, including this guy.

(46:21):
Customers of a company called Gritty g R I D
T Y. I mean, you have to laugh at a
name like that, but they provide electricity at wholesale prices,
and the deal with Gritty is it really quickly changes
based on supply and demand. So they sell it to
the customers as, hey, we're gonna pass this wholesale price

(46:42):
directly to you for a low monthly fee, and the
rate's gonna fluctuate, but it's really no big deal because
it fluctuates just sort of reasonably. Um. They saw this
huge jump coming, apparently, and they encouraged their customer. There's
twenty nine thousand people to switch to another provider when

(47:03):
the storm came, which is just not that easy to do,
and a lot of it is through an app A
lot of people were like literally connected to their bank,
so people would literally watch eight ten, twelve thou dollars
drained out of their bank account before their very eyes
and they can't do anything about it. And uh. The
architect of the Texas energy grid, his name is where

(47:26):
is it here? William Hogan? He said, you know what
this thing is? Uh, it worked exactly like it was
supposed to because high prices reflected the market performing as
it was designed. And um, he said, as you get
closer and closer to the bare minimum, these prices get
higher and higher, which is what you want is that
guys nicknamed Milton Friedman. I mean, how heartless. But yes,

(47:48):
it's true in fact, but it's pretty heartless way to
look at it, you know. Yeah, And I think Governor
Abbott has stepped in and said, like, wait a minute,
but we can't people can't be going broke paying for
like three and four years worth of energy in a
single month. Well, that's the opposite of what the the
George W. Bush said when he was governor of Texas

(48:10):
passed a bill that said you have to pay whatever
the energy company charges you as a consumer. Yeah. So
I'm not sure what they're gonna do if they can
retroactively reimburse some of these people, but it's, um, I
don't know, that's horrifying, man sixteen grand I know, especially
when it's taken direct like this isn't even like a

(48:31):
well hold on, hold on, I'm not gonna pay this yet.
I want to talk to but it's like that's gone
now I have to go try to get it back.
Good luck. Yeah, that's terrible stuff. So sorry Texas that
that happened. But the other thing about it, Chuck two,
is like, you know, yeah, they weren't prepared for it.
And it was a freak winter storm that just doesn't happen.
But a lot of people are saying, hey, welcome to

(48:53):
the age of climate change. This is not just a
freak storm anymore. This stuff is actually going to keep happening.
And Texas had virtually the same thing happened in two
thousand eleven, and there was a there was a panel
um that was created to figure out how to prevent
that from happening again. They gave er out a whole
list of things to do, including like winterization, like insulating

(49:16):
their pipes Orcott didn't do it and it happened again.
So I think Texas as patients with Urcott not listening
to that kind of stuff has probably reached an end.
So how do we fix this stuff? You mentioned, uh,
the smart grid, I think about I mean, just our
infrastructure in this country is in bad shape period. Seventy
of large power transformers and transmission lines are at least

(49:39):
twenty five years old, sixty percent of circuit breakers or
thirty years old. And uh, you mentioned the smart grid,
and I think that's they're starting to do some of it,
but that's the solution going forward, right, Yeah, I mean,
like it doesn't matter where you are UM on the
on the left or the right or in the middle,
everyone is like, yes, smart grid, smart grid. We the

(50:00):
smart grid, and that's basically like the grid we have now,
but just slowly, piecemeal, UM improved little by little to
add way more UM back and forth communication between the generators,
the transmitters, the distributors and the end user. UM that
there's and there's a lot more automated sensing built into

(50:21):
this system, which makes the whole thing a lot more clever,
and UM makes like rerouting around problems a lot easier.
But also one of the big things is making you
and me and I and we UM a lot more
savvy about the energy that we consume from moment to moment. Yeah,
I mean there's that. And I also feel like the

(50:43):
smart grid, most of it kind of falls under the
banner of real time micro observance, whereas what we have
now is very sluggish, very old fashioned. I mean it
can be. It's like the difference between you know, digital
smartphone technology and like the old like crank phones from

(51:05):
the old days. Basically, Yeah, if there's a power outage,
the way that the electrical generators find out about it
is there's a series of towers where bonfires are lit
from mountain to mountain and they finally see one that's
close enough, lit close enough, and they start to like
ramp up production. That's how it happens. Now it's amazing,
But there's also so I mean, you've got things like

(51:27):
UM feed er switches that basically go around a problem area.
If you've got it down transmission line, it can just
go around it and then you know it doesn't black
everybody out. UM uh smart meters so you kind of
see how much energy you're using and then also how
much the price of energy is, so you can actually
save money if you want to kind of get into
it in that granular level. And then also um, just

(51:50):
making sure that um that there's storage. That's the big challenge.
We talked about that in our renewable energy episode Bill
Gates Store. It don't have anywhere to put access, so
we shuffle it around the grid. But if we have
storage places strategically put around the United States, that would
change absolutely everything. Yeah, as well as getting more direct use,

(52:14):
which is solar UM. I actually have a little solar
project going. I'm very excited about, uh not for my house,
but I know you know this. We have some We
have some acreage in North Georgia on a river that uh,
no house or anything. It's just land, just a van.
There may be a van one day, but it's just

(52:37):
as I call it that. We call it the camp.
It's friends and family camp. And I'm I'm trying to
style it out like a legit like state park campground.
And as of right now, as of like three days ago,
I'm having a pavilion built. It's gonna have three solar
panels on it and a little battery array, so I'm
gonna be able to power like a big giant ceiling

(52:57):
fan under the pavilion and like four odd outlets and
like a coffee maker. Nothing huge, but he said, the
guy said, will be enough for three or four days
of full power and then like a day to juice
it up. And we're never there for more than three
days anyway, So I'm technically gonna have a little off
grid campground. Soon you have me a coffee maker, and

(53:19):
I should mention you've got me a very nice birthday
gift that is going to live at that camp. I'm
so glad you like it. Man. I saw and I
was like, I know exactly where this will go, and
it went exactly where I thought it would get. What
is the exact name of it. I don't have the
box in front of me. Oh man. It's a kindling
splitter basically. Yeah, it's like a log splitter, but but

(53:40):
it splits it into kindling. So the coolest thing about
it all is the story behind it. Is this like
twelve year old girl invented it in New Zealand and
for the last like seven years. Now she's in her
early twenties. I think she was like thirteen years old
at the time. It's like a legit company and this
thing you like screw it onto a log and then

(54:00):
you put another log in it and hit it with
a heavy hammer. You even got me the heavy hammer. Yeah. Yeah,
you can't not get the hammer. It splits it into kindling.
I'm just so excited. Yeah, rather than like bringing an
axe down onto a log, the ax is coming up
from the bottom. Yes, And it's very much safer. And
I even looked at a YouTube video and a review
and everyone was like, these things are great. So it's

(54:21):
safer than an axe. I can't wait to I can't
wait to use that very thoughtful gift. Well, happy birthday again, man,
I'm glad. And six bottles of champagne. Yeah, did you
drink it all in a weekend as suggested? Not yet,
but spring break is next week and we're gonna we're
gonna get into that champagne. We'll enjoy very sweet gifts.
Is that is that it did? We stopped talking about electricity?

(54:43):
I think, didn't we? I thought you meant like, are
those all the gifts? I gave you? A right? You
didn't get the other eight gifts, the half case of
champagne and the log split it and the hammer, the
three pound sledge. That's right. Well, if you want to
know more about Chuck's three pound sledge, you can email him.
But also, in the meantime, if you want to know
more about the electrical grid, you can just start reading

(55:04):
about it. It's an extraordinarily complicated, complex, modern marvel of engineering.
That's pretty engrossing stuff. So go to town. And in
the meantime, I said go to town, which means it's
time for a listener made. I'm gonna call this titanic
follow up from a friend in Ireland. This is this
is a fun one. Hey, guys, been listening for a

(55:25):
few years and now I currently work in Belfast port
where RMS Titanic was built. The Titanic Museum was built
in Belfast and the building is in the shape of
a star representing white star lines. At each point of
the star is the actual size of titanics hull at
st high standing underneath. It really gives you a feel

(55:46):
for its size and makes you feel very small in
a good way. Also, slip ways for Titanic are filled
in for you to walk over and etched with an
outline of Titanic and its sister ship Olympic to scale. Yeah,
it's very cool, including the actual locations of the lifeboats
and funnels. Again, it's very cool to walk down. You
can check out. You can check it out on Google

(56:06):
Earth just search Titanic Belfast, check out the satellite view.
Keep up the great work. And that is Kyle in Belfast,
Northern Ireland, and he has a nice little ps joke.
He says, there's a very overused joke here in Belfast
when people ask us why we celebrate something that sank,
which is this It was fine when it left here.

(56:29):
That's great, that's that trademark Belfasts humor. I was gonna
do it in Irish accent, but I got stage fright.
Oh come on, let's hear it again. I don't know what.
I don't even know what. It was fine, It was
fine when it left here. Oh that was great? Man?
Was that just transferred to me to my youth when
I was eating a bowl of lucky charms? Or hey
mane it was fine when it left here? Very nuts. Well,

(56:53):
let's see Chuck is at it? That's gotta be it?
Who it? Sammy Davis Jr. Thank you, Sammy Davis, to
you for the letter. That was Kyle Kyle. That's right, Uh,
Kyle from Belfast. We appreciate you. Uh. And if you
want to be appreciated like Kyle, you can send us
a good email like Kyle did. Wrap it up, spank
it on the bottom, and ship it out to see

(57:15):
to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
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