 This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont and today we will be speaking with Meredith Anglin, who is the author of a wonderful book called Shorting the Grid, The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid. And she is a resident of Vermont and she's been very active in this field and she is produced, in my opinion, a very readable work and a very important work, but we'll let her explain that for us. So welcome, Meredith. Very happy to be here, Dennis. Thank you for inviting me. And could you tell us a little or a lot about yourself so our viewers can get to know you before we talk about the subject. Well, I always wanted to be a scientist and I came up with the idea that being a chemist would be the best kind because chemists can always make some progress. What I'm saying is I knew some physicists but they were always after the theory of everything, while chemists keep improving things. So I became a chemist. And after a while I became interested in power plants. This sort of partially happened, because I was working on pollution control from nitrogen oxides. I was also very interested in geothermal energy in the long run. I ended up at the Electric Power Research Institute in the renewables group. And then I switched to the nuclear group as I began to see the promise of nuclear. So I did this switch when nobody was doing the switch. I mean, back when people were like, you know, oh my gosh, you know, nuclear so bad. I have patents I worked as a chemist I worked as a project manager. I was one of the few women at that level back in the day luckily there's tons and tons of women now I'm so happy to see that. I was one of four girls in the physics class of 70 at one point. I mean, that isn't what it is today and I can only say how happy I am to see that because after all I have granddaughters as well as grandsons. So at any rate, moving, moving along with that I when I came here and I sort of semi retired I, I always I began writing more. I'd always enjoyed writing but you know at a full time job not so easy. At any rate, I also wanted to get involved in what's going on in the energy area around here because you know I always remember that I was one of the few women in the Electric Power Research Institute when I joined it. And so at any rate, I began writing a blog and the blog, somebody had read the blog and noticed that I was writing about the grid and he suggested that I joined the consumer liaison group of our grid operator. And I did and then I got elected to the steering committee of that group. And I began finding out a lot about the grid and I mean, it was like this whole new world I didn't understand any of that when I started and I'm going to say that in in in many ways. One of the reviews of my book on Amazon said the complexity is a feature, not a bug. It's a feature because it hides what's going on the people who are involved in this are delighted with it. I'm like, Oh, that might explain why I didn't get it until I had been in this consumer liaison group for a couple of years. So at any rate, so I began thinking that people that I didn't like the idea that the complexity was hiding things that people could make assertions that were not backed in fact because if you looked at it a certain way, you could say maybe it looked that way. So anyway I ended up writing this book because I wanted people to know what's going on with the grid, and maybe begin to take some action about it. So I guess that's the end of the story there. Great. I mean, live in Vermont and I understand your husband George credit to. Oh, he is. He is amazing. I mean we met in physics class, and he's the most amazing person he's he's a he his degree is in mathematics, minus in chemistry, and he is. He actually worked in software most of his life which is what most people who get to be some mathematics do, but he he is so organized and he was so helpful to me with this book I mean it couldn't have. I mean this book has 12 page glossary and three about 300 footnotes and notes. I mean, without his help. It wouldn't be the book. I mean, he is just the kind of person that I need in my life. Luckily I've been married to him for over 50 years so I have him in my life. That's wonderful. I want to tell you that it really grabbed me from page one. And I just want to, there's a lot of quotable quotes here. We're not going to have time to go through all the notes that I've named, but what really was shocking and of course I apologize for any of these funds that refer to electricity. And what was kind of shocking was on page one you compare this to the financial crisis of 2007. And the impact is that can you just give us a little teaser on that. Well, I did the financial crisis of 2007 one of the hallmarks of it was that everything was very built up and confusing. And so you really couldn't see what was going on I mean. And if you had simply said oh they're making a lot of loans to to people who really can't pay them back that's something you could say oh that's not good. But what they had was collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps and layers and layers and layers of acronyms so that a person walking around who was used to the idea that they, you know, you get you apply for a mortgage and you show your background and you get a mortgage and then you buy your house. They will not have any idea what was going on and I felt that in the book. The big short was really about a bunch of people who had figured out what was going on through the through studying what what all these different things were and who who was putting them out and what kind of backup they had. And I thought you know that the grid is like that to nobody nobody knows everybody just goes around you know oh yeah it's fine because they have built up many many layers of of confusion, in my opinion. Let's let's begin at the beginning what is the grid. The name of a science fiction movie but what is the grid, the grid that I'm talking about is the electric grid and it consists of generators of various kinds which could include photovoltaics or whatever that put electricity on the grid. Then it has substations, then it has, you know, it has a balancing authority you say well I never heard of that one. And of course it has wires connecting things you know transmission lines distribution lines in your own own area transformers to take the high voltage power and put it to a level of power that can be used at your home, all these things. What's the balancing authority I think this is where it starts that people don't know what's going on the grid is the your electricity has to be in balance when with the electricity produced at all times, instantaneously. Now, when you turn on a light. In general, some power plant picks up at speed a little bit takes a little more fuel to run it or whatever, in order to make up for the light you turned on. Now, and when you turn it off, this thing happens in reverse. So, there's a flow of electricity, a curve over the day at four in the morning, there's not much electricity being used compared to four in the afternoon. And, and the person there's a group, the grid operator is in charge of managing calling power plants online telling power plants to go offline in order to keep that balance going. And if I saw in New England is our grid operator, and it has many different roles, but one of the most important roles and a role that's on every grid is balancing authority running the control room that says power plant you go on power plant you. I'm sorry. The demand is dropping you go offline now power, you will look we actually need you but your your lines over there they're getting they're getting overloaded so you've got to go offline until one of the other power plants in your area also goes off on okay okay now you can come back on again. And that is this huge room and I so new England with four, I think six operators working all the time to sitting in in other positions for backup to them. Some of the things that are surprising about that room. They've got a big TV screen. He said what what's with the TV screen and are they bored. No, if something happens, sometimes that is reflected about five seconds later or 10 seconds later by a drop or in electricity man, you see. So, it's an amazing place. Oh, they have, I want to say that that's not the only one they have, they have a backup one in another state, and they switch back and forth between the main balancing and the backup, at least once a month so they know that it actually works. So what I'm saying is this is an amazing thing that balancing authority, and it's an important thing for every grid where things get dicey is what are the rules that the balancing authority uses to call this power plant instead of that power plant and that a lot of my book is about those rules. There's just the one word that we're going to be probably appears in this book many, many, many times is RTO tell us what an RTO is, and how Vermont is involved with that. Okay. Unfortunately, this has to go with some history. In the old days. And throughout most of the much of the country now utilities were vertically integrated that is, if I'm a utility I own a power plant, I own, I own, I own distribution, I have a group that stands by to deal with billing issues, and, and I have some share payment to transmission that goes between states. And what I do is control. I have to ask my local state public utilities commission or public service board for permission if I want to start a power plant. I mean, if I want to build a power plant retire power plant, build a transmission line by a part of a different transition line. Well, it turned out that during the time when everything was being deregulated. There was an idea that if we deregulated utilities that have been to have them go into the PUCs, but rather had regional organizations, everything would be cheaper. And those regional organizations are the regional transmission organizations. And they have a lot more power than the local PUCs had the local PUCs could say do this or do that. In some ways that regional transmission organizations don't have much power in the sense that they can't have a, they can't ask for a new power plant to be built or a new power plant to be delayed. They're supposed to do everything through a series of auctions people are supposed to different power plants are supposed to bid in and then they get chosen. And then, and then, and the thing is that it wasn't working. So what they do is they add another auction to make up for the problems of the first auction. Let me give you an example of that. And I feel like we're different. So they have an auction for kilowatt hours so that you know people bid in and and they say I can give you kilowatt hours at this price and then the least expensive ones are chosen by the balancing authority. So they bid in problem because there was no promise of payment of any particular amount it was whatever cleared at the auction. And so if you own a power plant that was only on part of the time like it from two to four in the afternoon most days or something. From four to six on winter evenings, you didn't know if you're going to get paid enough to keep that power plant in good shape. So they ended up with capacity auctions where you bid in and say, I'm going to keep this power plant in good shape and you have to pay me for the fact that I have capacity and reserve for you. Okay, so they begin paying capacity auctions and that got a little bad because you can have a gas fire plant and it bid into the capacity auction and it gets its payment. And then on a cold winter night where everybody's using gas for their homes. The balancing authority says you online and they say sorry about that we can't get any gas right now. So, then of course, they tried to sell this with yet another auction called the anyway. So you see, if I give you a fairly, I hope I've given a good overview of what the RTO does. Well, one thing I want to, there's a lot to this and again I want to stress that it is highly readable, highly exciting in many parts. And, you know, it's very revealing. And the other thing I want to say about your book is immensely fair. You know, you give both sides or all sides and certain issues about fuel preference and policy and things like that and also about fairness. I want to ask you about RTOs operating not like any government agency the relative secrecy that goes on when power decisions, whether they be split second or whether they be long term policies are made without the knowledge or a quote interference quote by the general public, the people who pay for this can tell us a little bit about the lack of transparency. There's two organizations in the RTO. The first one is the ISO New England that runs the balancing authority and ISO New England. What is ISO? Independent system operator New England. They're down in Holyoke, Massachusetts, as well as other locations, which I'm not sure they disclose before they're back up, a grid operator thing. And then there's a knee pool, a Northeast power pool, and knee pool was set up about the same time the ISOs, but it's very different. For me and me pool, you have to be pretty much a participant in the markets. Well, so they have, they have six sectors and sectors include transmission operators, traditional power plants, alternative power plants, public power, public utility such as municipal utilities, and one of the six sectors with 16% of the votes is end users. End users are totally outvoted. Plus, the end user sector is not like you would expect it to be AARP and stuff. It's also where the Sierra Club, the Massachusetts Attorney General, and so forth, they are in the end user sector. Now the thing about the knee pool meetings is you have to be invited. You can't say what happened at the knee pool meeting. They had a big flap when a reporter wanted to join. They said, okay, you can, they even repeal to FERC to keep the reporter out. I mean, the lack of transparency is almost overwhelming when you begin looking at the thing about knee pool, by the way, is their group decides who has to vet the board of directors for ISO New England. So you see that ISO New England is fairly independent, tries to do the right thing, tries to get balancing authority, working right, you know, all that stuff. But when you get right down to it, knee pool holds the big cards. That's my opinion. I mean, somebody else may say something different, but as far as I can tell, the knee pool holds the big cards. Let me also say, and I think this is very important, the people involved are very good people. They're very nice people. They're very kind people. If they can't tell me something, they're happy to say, I'm sorry, I can't say that as opposed to, you know, who the heck are you to ask. And I just want you to know that it's set up for the secrecy. It's set up so the different groups that I was naming, Life Transmission, can go in there and fight for rules that will help their companies. That's why they're sent there. They're paid by companies to go there and help make rules that will help their companies. The trouble is, it's all, it's not something you or I can find out much about. And one of the mentioned FERC, F-E-R-C, tell us what that is. Okay, FERC is going to be important nations. It is an important agency. It's the most important agency that nobody's heard about. The Federal Energy, oh my gosh, Regulatory Commission. And it's based in Washington and the way it's set up is that it has five commissioners, three are chosen by the president's party, and three are chosen by the opposition party. I'm sorry, two was chosen by the opposition party. It has to have a quorum of three commissioners before it can make a ruling. And it turns out that everything keeps going back to FERC. So for example, Neapol may say, I want to have these rules put into effect. And ISO may say, ISO New England say, I don't like those rules. We're putting in different ones. It'll be more fair to people. And then so what happens is that Neapol and ISO New England file their proposed rules to FERC at the same time. This is called a jump ball filing. And I've got several of them described in the book. I mean, in some ways it's an exciting book to read who's going to win the jump ball anyway. But the thing is FERC is the one that decides. And actually I think FERC is more open. It has more open meetings and stuff than Neapol does or ISO New England does. ISO New England, well, Neapol is the one that really was very upset about a reporter showing up at their meetings. Well, there's a great deal of material here. And again, I keep saying it's very readable. And also there are some portable quotes that you have here, which we're not going to be able to get into because of time. But I'm sure people are going to see when they get the book. But while we have some time, let's talk about renewables and the role that plays in some of your opinions on what's going on now with that in terms of your book and in terms of what you do. Well, let me start out by saying that when I started working in the utility industry, what I really wanted was to be in the renewables group. And I did get into the renewables group at EPRI and I felt really good about that. And then I realized that renewables were, I don't know, they can't make much power reliably. They're just not a very reliable source. It was very kind of upsetting to me. I was young. I mean, it was a long time ago. And I was very idealistic and I didn't. Anyway, so I began realizing that nuclear was also good in terms of things that were important to me, which is basically air pollution. I grew up in Chicago, very polluted city and air pollution, preventing air pollution has always been very, very important to me. So in terms of what you asked about renewables now, what happens now is that a state can decide on a renewables mandate and say, well, we're going to get 80% of our electricity from renewables in five years or in 10 years or whatever. And they can put that into place and they don't have to worry about the grid they feel because after all ISO is running the grid. There's auctions. Everything's going to be great. But as a matter of fact, renewables are very hard on the grid in a whole bunch of different ways. One of them, of course, is that they go on and off at their own schedule. And one of the few projects to look at this said that you have to have 1.1 megabytes of installed fast acting backup for every megawatt, I'm sorry, megawatt, 1.1 megawatts of fast backing backup for every one megawatt of renewables you put in. And why you need this fast backing backup? Well, the thing is renewables, when they go offline, they can go offline pretty quickly, you know, the sun sets, the clouds go over. So you need something that can come up very fast. And so that is why you hear a lot of people saying we need a flexible grid. No, you don't need a flexible grid if you don't have things that go on and off. I mean, you need some flexibility in a grid because as I say the demand goes up during the day and then it comes down. But traditional power plants have always been able to track that pretty well. You need fast acting power plants to back up the renewables. And I find that very, you know, it's not something I'm delighted about. But because what it means is every time you build a renewable, you empower a fast acting gas plant to back it up. Because there's only two kinds of plants that can back it up right now. And that is a gas plant and a gas fire plant, because they're internal combustion engines so they can start quickly. And they, and the other kind is hydro. But of course, we don't have, if we keep building more and more renewables we don't have enough hydro to back them all up. I mean, you know, and it's not easy to build hydro. As a matter of fact, more hydro is being taken out than being built nowadays, because people don't like it for a lot of good reasons. Well, we're talking wind and solar and, and seem to be attractive alternatives but I know your book really gets into this on a very fair basis. We talk about your background. There's a lot of portable quotes here and I just want to read one renewables and batteries are overhyped and are beginning to be overbuilt both can be helpful to the grid, even together, they cannot be the grid. So, yes, that's right. That's what it boils down to. They can be helpful, and they can be, you know, but they can't be the grid. I mean, it's, yeah, like I say, you know, I didn't, I, I like renewables in so many ways. I mean, for example, if you think about, if you think about coal trade, or you think about a gas pipeline, you've got to move all that fuel from point A to point B sometimes across the country. Do you know that the power plant, the Merrimack station coal plant, which is a very nice little coal plant, I mean, not a fan of coal plants but it's a very nice very well run one. It gets, it gets coal on barges from Venezuela, among other places. I mean, you're moving a lot of fuel for these fossil plants and that's one of the wonderful things about renewables. But unfortunately, renewables go on and off so quickly that they did bake in gas fire plants to back them up, they just make it in. You say, Oh, we're building so many renewables, aren't we proud of ourselves. So if you don't want blackouts, you're building gas plants too. And people just don't know that. And anyway, so, yeah. I'd like to say that all of these things like the popular value of renewables, the downside in public opinion about certain types of things and, and all of this stuff. Part of the entire picture and really explain it very simply. And you use some terminology that I'm sure that somehow somewhere it shows up in everybody's electric. You know, it's great how you put it together. I just want to talk about one little word. One of those exciting words, greenwash. Oh, greenwash. Well, okay. In my opinion, there's a lot of it going on. So greenwash means that you do something which helps your company, but somehow or other you describe it as being done for the good of the people and the good of the environment, and how could anyone object to you guys doing this. And let me give you an example of greenwashing. So you have some company, and it says, We're still proud of ourselves. We run on 100% renewable electricity at this company. So you imagine this company surrounded by wind turbines. No, no, no, no, no, no, they're getting their power from the grid just like anybody else. Their power is a mixture of gas and oil or gas and coal and gas and renewables or gas and nuclear. Anyway, why are they saying they have 100% renewable electricity. What it turns out is that when a renewable plant like a wind turbine makes a kilowatt hour of electricity, it makes an invisible object, which is a renewable energy certificate for one kilowatt hour of renewable electricity. It generally sells the electricity one direction and the certificate another direction. So that company which says, we're 100% renewable electricity you should love us. It's just bought a bunch of wrecks. It's still getting. And from the company's point of view, it's a perfect situation is it can it can cover itself with honor and greenwashing, we are so green. And at the same time it has very reliable electricity. It doesn't have to worry about what the wind dies down. So, anyhow, I just that is greenwashing, and it is, it is all over the place. I mean, I, you know, once you begin seeing how it works, you think, Oh, I can't believe it, they're doing it again. So, in any way, well, there's, there's a great deal of really practical advice in here and practical information that anyone who is a, what do they call it late payers or consumers or whatever, who pays electric bills uses electricity wants to for power or needs to for power for economic development is just a lot of good information in here. And I just want to before we conclude I want to ask, where can people get this book. And more importantly, how can people get help with you have a website or things of that nature. Okay, my, my website is Meredith angwin.com. And there are several places on the website it has several pages page about books a page for blocks and a page about my biography. There's several of the pages have a sign up sheet, so that you can get my newsletter. So you, if you go to Meredith angwin.com, you can sign up for my newsletter. And, and then the, the book is available through Amazon, shorting the grid, the hidden fragility of our electric grid. It's available in three forms to Amazon it's available as a softback which is when I said you, it's available as a hardback, because somebody told me that that no library or no school would buy the softback so it's available as a hardback I know I don't actually expect people to flock to buying it. And it's available as a Kindle, and as a Kindle it's very very affordable. I made that choice very deliberately so that people could get it as a Kindle. If you don't like Amazon and some people don't. You can, you can buy the ebook is a nook, and you can also buy it as a Kobo which is actually very popular outside of the United States you can get nook or Kobo. I also want to say that if you, it's not carried in the stores, but a book's a million Walmart and your local independent bookstore can all order the book from Ingram spark they all deal with Ingram spark, and the book is available from Ingram spark. So if you wanted to if you walk into your local independent bookstore assuming you could walk in which isn't true nowadays, but you could at least contact them and said hey can you get me a copy of this book, and they should be able to because all the bookstores deal with Ingram spark. That's great. And I see it was just published on November 6, 2020, we're recording this on December 7. And yes, positive even one deals with old stuff. This is, this is really good. I want to quote something that you say here near the end or actually right at the end, and if you can start important. Yeah, I'm calling you. If we are not concerned with the grid. We will not have a safe and happy country to leave our children. I can't say it any more starkly than that. We must take the grid away from the insiders, or our children may be outside of in some very unpleasant ways and that's the last hour of their people. And it is quite shocking again to pardon the electrical puns but why don't you expand on that as we conclude today. Well, I'm spending on that because I have, I have grandchildren, and I'm distressed at the grid, having these layers and layers of auctions of confusion and and close meetings and I remember one time I was in a meeting and and someone was presenting and say, Well, we went to our stakeholders and I kind of raised my hand said, I'm not a member of Neapol, but I'm one of your stakeholders because I buy I buy electricity from you. And so at any rate, from the grid rather so you see the thing is that there are places that are going to to rolling blackouts to to with a grid operator just shuts the power off for a while and turns it back on again. And so, and California has had them. We are in danger of having them. A projection of what will happen in 2025 a couple of scenarios were done by a grid operator 23 scenarios were done. 19 of the scenarios had rolling blackouts in the winter. So the grid operator will say we're not predicting these are just scenarios but I mean it's like the overwhelming percentage of scenarios had rolling blackouts in the winter. In my opinion that makes people outsiders in terms of their lives they can't predict things anymore. They can't, they can't plan for, you know, what they're doing when because they don't know if they'll have electricity then. And plus which it endangers people a lot for example, grid operator won't tell you when the rolling blackouts are going to happen because it would encourage the criminals to come into the area where the blackouts are having electricity is a safety issue. It's a safety issue about about people's lives about people's warmth about sick people and their ability to get care. And it's a safety issue about keeping, you know, keeping your house safe from from from people who might want to rob you. So I guess the thing is, I just feel that I don't want the kind of rolling blackouts that may happen in here and are already happening in California. And you know they say well it's hot well man it gets hot in California all the time. They're not having rolling blackouts because it's unprecedentedly hot. We didn't, we wouldn't have rolling blackouts per at a high percentage of the possibility five years from now, because people are expecting will have much colder winter five years you know it's about how the greatest manage we have to realize that I'm sorry I get very worked up about this. That's great because you know, it might not sound like an exciting topic but again your book really brings it into perspective and also brings a lot of the urgency to it. And so it's more than just a good reason. And I want to thank you. This is Dennis McMahon or positively Vermont. My guest today has been Meredith Angwin, the author of a recently very newly published book about your electrical system shorting the grid, the hidden majority of our electric grid, a very interesting work by this for a month or so I thank you very much for being a merit and thank you all for watching positively Vermont. This is Dennis McMahon.