How the Electrical Grid Works

Published Apr 13, 2021, 9:00 AM

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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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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Should Know

If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD,  
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