“By the end of the book, I could no longer shake the feeling she just might be right on the big thing. RTOs may be producing an increasingly fragile grid.”
Meredith Angwin’s Shorting the Grid is a likeable, sometimes irritating book. Or maybe an irritating, sometimes likeable book. I cannot decide. Angwin’s book offers an introduction to and assessment of the Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that since the late 1990s have come to coordinate use of the transmission grid for about two-thirds of the electric power consumed in the United States.
Her view: RTOs are dominated by insiders who skew the system their direction at every chance, reaping profits while shirking responsibility for reliability. As a result we have an increasingly fragile, unreliable grid.
When Angwin’s book was published in 2020 it may have seemed alarmist.…
Continue Reading“Affordable and reliable energy is key to human development. It gives people mobility and comfort in their homes. It provides access to better food and clean water.”
“The reason we made money [during the February Texas freeze] is because we prepared with winterization. And, importantly, we manned our facilities. We had our people out there, some with families at home in the dark and cold. They were keeping our facilities up and running so we had the ability to deliver a lot of gas that otherwise wouldn’t have been available to customers.” (Steven Kean, Kinder-Morgan, August 9, 2021)
The mainstream media might not like it, but there is a tripartite fossil fuel boom underway globally that will outlast the Pandemic–and outlive the repetitive climate scares from the IPCC reports.
A glimpse into the industry’s thinking was provided by the president and CEO of Kinder-Morgan, Steven Kean.…
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