“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.…
Continue Reading“The climate of many countries seems to be one of the great reasons why idleness, dishonesty, immobility, stupidity, and weakness of will prevail. If we can conquer climate, the whole world will become stronger and nobler.”
– Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1915), p. 294.
Global government by an intellectual/political elite is the commanding height of commanding heights. Witness the (now) 33-year Great Alarm of anthropogenic global warming (aka climate change, global weirding).
UN 2021: 6th Climate Assessment
It’s all bad. it’s only going to get worse. It is civilization’s last chance. Red Alert for humankind….
But a massive energy transformation can avert the worst part. “The innovations in this report, and advances in climate science that it reflects,” said IPCC chair Hoesung Lee, “provide an invaluable input into climate negotiations and decision-making.”…
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