 This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont. And today my guest is Meredith Angwin, who is a scientist and an expert in her field, an author of a book called Shorting the Grid, The Hidden Fogility of Our Electric Grid. And we just spoke with Meredith back, believe it or not, a year and a half ago about this very important and very readable book and some of the issues facing the state, the region and the country about our electric supply. But first of all, Meredith, would you just give our listeners and viewers a little bit about, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what you've been doing. Sure. Well, I have a chemistry degree, a master's in chemistry, and I work most of my life in the utility industry in research to help make power plants less polluting and more reliable. In other words, I did corrosion research and pollution control research. And I was one of the first women to be a project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, which is a consortium of utilities that does projects together so that, like, if you're a little utility out in, you know, a little rural cooperative and you're a member of EPRI, you can still get the benefit of expensive research projects because you don't have to fund it all yourself. And of course, a lot of the issues that face the utility are common to other utilities. So, you know, the same kind of equipment, the same kind of problems and so forth. So anyway, after I was at EPRI, I ran a consulting firm in corrosion control and stuff, and then after that, later on, I retired and our kids were living on the East Coast and EPRI was, EPRI is Electric Power Research Institute was in California. So we moved here to be closer to the kids and the grandkids. So we have two kids and four grandkids. So anyway, that's where I moved here. And then when I got here, you know, I've been in energy all my life. So I joined our town's energy committee for a couple of years and I was also, I'm also very much in favor of nuclear energy. So I started a blog in favor of Vermont Yankee because when I read the newspapers, they really, I felt that they were very slanted against Vermont Yankee and they didn't give it very as much space in the newspaper as they deserved. They gave a lot of space to people saying it should shut down, but they didn't give much space about the plant itself. So at any rate, I began a blog about it. Well, one of the things about this blog was that the plant had interactions with the grid operator. Now this was not my expertise at that point. This is, we're looking at 2010 here, but I said, well, I got to figure this out. So I would do research and I would write a blog post about the plant in the grid. And of course, when you write a blog, people are following you who you don't know who they are. And one of the people who was following me was the man who was very involved with the grid governance. And he said, Meredith, you're writing about the grid. Have you thought of joining the consumer liaison group of the grid operator? And I said, oh, who knew it had a consumer liaison group? So at any rate, I joined it and then I was on the coordinating committee for four years in that group. And that's where I really learned about the grid. You see, before that, I'm a journalist. I worked on materials problems, okay? And I really didn't work on governance problems and so forth. But when I joined that group, I began to see that there were no mechanisms in place in our grid for reliability. Oh, they will tell you their mechanisms. They will say, oh, we search for reliability, but you begin, we are responsible for reliability. So you look at the Northern National Energy Electricity Reliability Console, NERC. And you say, what do you do about reliability? And they say, oh, we do lots of things. We train people. We have rules for how you have to run a substation. We, I said, well, what if an area doesn't have enough power plants for reliability? Oh, that's not our issue. So then you go over to FERC, or I said to you in England, you say, what if an area doesn't have enough power plants for an area? That's not our issue. That's resource adequacy. We don't cover resource adequacy. The states cover resource adequacy. So you see, well, there's no place where you can say, you didn't have enough power plants online. And that's why you had to do black house. There's no place you can stay. And it's your fault because it's everybody's fault that everybody has some little pieces upon and a way to pass the buck. And I got very, very upset about this. I mean, you know, I said, look, and I began talking to my friends about it. Of course, that's what I do. And I found that I would have to give these long winter talks about the grid and how it was run, because it's a very complicated layer of band aid after band aid to keep it going. That's the only way to describe it. Nobody, nobody, the buck doesn't stop on anybody's desk, but people have been adding new rules and new rules and new rules in the hope that some of these rules will help. And of course, the new rules just mean that there's another set of new rules later to fix those rules. So I found that I couldn't even explain it to people. It was really, really annoying. And I realized that it's just not something you can explain into blog posts or a 10 minute talk. So I decided it really needed a book. And I went around looking for other books that covered this subject and they really didn't. I'm sorry to say they really didn't. There were excellent books on the history of the grid, starting with Thomas Edison and Tesla and, and rural electric cooperatives and all this, but when you got down to how a grid is governed right now, it was very, very empty space. And so I ended up writing this book and it was published in October of 2020. And it had to be, you know, people read it and they liked it. But what happened then, and, and I think this gets into more than the book, it gets into what happened since the book was, what happened then was that Texas had those huge blackouts in February, 2021. And I got emails from people saying, because I'd read your book, I could understand how, how it happened in Texas, what the sequence was in Texas. And I said, Oh, that's good. And all of a sudden, you know, there were people who wanted me to be on podcast people I hadn't heard of. I mean, you had asked me to be in a podcast earlier, but you're in Vermont. I'm in Vermont. I mean, it made sense. But all of a sudden it was like, you know, all kinds of people. And the reason is that as I said, there was a blank space where understanding how the grid was organized was, and this book filled a big part of it, not all of it. It can't fill all of it. You would need a thousand page book. This is 400 pages. And you would need a thousand page book. And anyway, I want to say one more thing before we go on with this. And that is, of course, I had readers who read it while I was in the process of writing it. And what they all said was, you need a glossary. And I did. I absolutely needed a glossary. And I think I'm as proud of the glossary in this book that explains all the infinite acronyms that are used on the grid, as much as anything else. Because if all you had of the book was the glossary, you would at least be able to get a clue about the headlines. So I have to tell you, this is like cramming for an exam. I read this book the night before our interview in December 2020. And not only did it go fast, and I had the time to make all kinds of initial variations, but I found it very readable. And for someone not in the field, it was very informative. And it's really a great job. And the rest is kind of history. And that's what I think we're going to do next time. There's a lot of neat in here about the problems, the issues, the solutions. Just give us a rendition of what has happened in your field. And maybe with the book since we first discussed it. Well, let's say that when the book first came out, some of the people who, some of the people in particular who worked in, in, in, in grid issues. Claimed I was being alarmist or, or whatever. And oddly enough, they retracted that somewhere after Texas. And, and, and so I would say that what has happened since then is that the issues on the grid that nobody having true responsibility for reliability. And I've really come home to roost. And one of the things in my book is I have a section based on a presentation that James Brian of energy tariff experts gave to the consumer liaison group when I was a member of it. And you can find that presentation on the web. So, you know, it's referenceable. But one of the things he noticed was that yes, the price of natural gas had gone down, but the price of electricity had not followed it down. And, and, and when he said is that we've gotten away. Well, he didn't put we've gotten away. We have added many things like paying for renewable energy credits and all kinds of things to a consumer's bill. But it hasn't come back to punch us. Well, he didn't put it that way. That's me. Anyway, this is my rephrasing. It hasn't come back to punch us because the natural gas prices are low, but we have used up all the leeway that those low natural gas prices have given us. And when natural gas prices go up, it's going to be the consumers are going to really be, you know, hit by it. And, and, and that's sort of what's happening now. Natural gas prices have gone up. There's a shortage of natural gas sort of worldwide. And electricity prices have, have, have followed them up because we have used up our, our leeway review. By investing in other things that don't add to the reliability of the grid. I'm going to say another thing about the grid. I, I, I, when I wrote the book, if you remember at the beginning of the book, or you're supposed to have memorized it, you understand, I described two grids. I say there's a physical grid, which consists of wires and substations and control room, which keeps the grid completely in balance. And then there's a policy grid. And the policy grid is about how power plants get paid. But it comes from big policy decisions, like for example, that renewable plants get, can get renewable energy credits, which pay them separately from whatever money they get on the grid. So you will have a bill and it may say there's only, this portion of the bill is the energy portion and this portion is distribution. But that isn't quite fair because what's going on is that the distribution part also includes what your distribution utility is paying for renewable energy credits. So to some extent your distribution charges include hidden costs for the renewables costs. And so that's what I mean by I ended up having to, to write a book about it because, you know, this is, this does not, you know, then somebody's going to say, well, why do they have these renewable energy? Well, there's a new renewable portfolio standard. Or anyway, it gets to be a fairly complex situation. And I also wanted to say that since I wrote the book, I realized that people don't know much about the power grid, the actual physical grid, but they know, they know even less about the policy grid, except for some vague ideas that we're encouraging renewables and exactly how that works in terms of their bills or in terms of percentage energy costs to other costs or whatever. And so forth. So there's a lot of, I wrote the book partially to help people understand these things and to be able to make their own conclusions based on the facts. But since then I've come up with an idea for, there's a third grid and you said, you understand there's only one grid out there with wires. I'm not imagining there are three grids out there with wires, but there's the grid out there with wires. So the grid of how power plants get paid and what policy decisions are made. And then there's the grid everybody knows about, which I call the could grid. And that's what you read about in the paper. We could have batteries. We don't have them yet, but we could. We could have transmission lines that run all the way across the country. We could have a unified grid all over the country. We could have a hundred percent renewables. We could, you know, there's a breakthrough in batteries. No, there isn't. If there is, you know, everybody is following the could grid. And the trouble is that some of those things can happen. Some of those things can happen in the future, but the future is based on the past. And you have to know what's happening now to have an idea of how, how, or whether it can transition to this could grid. So anyway, I've been really concerned about the fact that the could grid is the one everybody knows about. And the could grid is basically can include nuclear. If we had planned for it. I think that I follow what's going on in Britain right now that Britain has taken the initiative of having many nuclear power plants. And that's extremely serious, possibly with an older infrastructure than ours, but they're going at it. They're working. Absolutely. And a lot of places in Europe sort of, especially in Europe, sort of woke up because they said, wait a minute, we can't count on natural gas from Russia. And even if we can't count on it, we're paying Russia the money to invade Ukraine. We don't like this. So they really want energy independence, energy security in a way that two years ago, people were in this sort of happy world of, it's all globalized and everybody's agreeing and so forth and so on. And there was always a problem with that viewpoint, even before the Ukrainian invasion of Ukraine. And that is, okay, we're not at war with, with Canada, and we're unlikely to go to war with Canada. Nevertheless, Canada, like any sovereign country, takes care of its own people first, which means that when we have a very bad cold snap here, Canada lowers the amount of energy it exports to us. It took me a long time to try and figure this out. At first, I noticed it. And then I read a footnote on one of the winter reliability reports from our grid operator, which said that Canada only took on a supply obligation for about half the amount of electricity Quebec that is not all of Canada. Quebec only took on a supply obligation for about half the electricity that it usually supplies us, which means that if, if there's a cold snap, it could cut to half the amount it was exporting and it wasn't breaking any of the rules that it signed up for. And so when people begin saying, oh, well, you know, in a cold snap, we can count on Canada. I'm like, have you been looking at what goes on? I mean, no, Canada will, Quebec will take care of the people in Quebec first. And they should. They're not in the charity business to help out New England while people in Quebec can't get enough heat. Well, actually, this show is being reported on May 26. And what motivated me to do a follow up and not realizing it's been a year and a half was the power situation in Quebec over the past weekend and in Ontario. Because of storms and the weather conditions, power outages hundreds of thousands of people in that province alone. Yes. Yes. And could that happen here? I'm just curious. Well, the answer is that my book is mostly about resource, what you would call resource adequacy. Are there enough power lines? Are there enough transmission lines? What happened in Quebec and was huge storms? And yes, of course that could happen here. I mean, storms can happen in Quebec. They can happen in New England. They can happen in the Gulf states. Storms are a hazard. The question for me is how quickly can you get back up after a storm? That depends on having enough power to put on the lines. And that is the concern that I spent most of the book on. But another thing that's worth saying about this is that do you think Quebec was exporting to us when all those storms were hitting? No. So you can't really count on your neighbors to save you. They're going to solve their problems first. And they should. What do you see now are potential solutions? What can we in Vermont do? What could we do in the region? What can we do in other parts of the country to deal with this? The hidden fragility of the electric grid. What could we do to compensate in the near future? I think the first thing to do is to stop shutting down nuclear plants. I think that's the first thing to do. I think that's the first thing to do. Because nuclear plants are very, very steady. And they are kind of a backstop for the rest of the grid. And there's going to be somebody who's going to write you and say, no, no, nuclear plants are baseload. And we don't need baseload anymore. Well, actually. I've been just seeing some studies of New York state. And New York state includes New York city. All those areas, New York city and the rural areas, 60% of the electricity which is used is electricity that is used 24 hours a day, 60 to 70%. So if we had baseload of nuclear for 60 to 70%, we would have a far less dangerous situation with, with whether we could meet load. Okay. So the first thing is not to, to, to shut down nuclear plants. The second thing would be to understand that perfection is not possible. So let's say that you say, we want very clean electricity. So we're only going to allow nuclear natural gas. Well, natural gas is delivered just in time and things can disrupt it. Things from things such as a pipeline compressor having a problem. Another thing would be that it's a cold snap and houses are using a lot of natural gas to heat. Utilities that supply gas to houses make what's called firm contracts with natural gas because they don't want to leave their homes and the lurch. Utilities that burn natural gas to make electricity. That is electric utility electric power plants. They generally make interruptible contracts with natural gas, because first of all, it's cheaper. And secondly, they know that the utility will, will not. The power plant will, will can go offline if it wants to, unlike a house. Okay. A house doesn't want to just, okay, I'll go, I'll be going cold now, whatever, but a power plant could go offline because they're merchant plants and they make money when they sell power, but if they can't get the gas, they go offline. So that is a really important, important thing. So anyhow, I just thought I'd, I'd put that out there. About natural gas being kind of a dangerous thing to rely on. So what we need is allowing oil to be stored on site. Now our grid operator made a winter reliability program encouraging power plants to store oil on site by subsidizing the oil on site. But then, then, you know, the advocates of, of, of, of, of, you know, we're going to, we've got to do absolutely everything in our power to, to stop global warming. We're like, no, not oil, you're not allowed to burn oil. Well, you have to burn oil because otherwise you're going to have a real problem with, with power plants are not being able to make power. So I just feel like you can be against this or against that, but, but think about how, how it will affect people. When Texas had its blackout, people died. I mean, that's really important to remember, at least in my opinion. I'll tell you, we're actually have only a minute or so left. And this has really been, been fascinating. And what, what you suggested as a title today, which we're going to use is the fragile grid comes home. And if you could just tell us what you predict or what should be done in the, in the next time. And we're going to try to get you back as this picture develops over the course of time. What, what do you feel is, is the next step? Well, my next step is to be a. And I think it's really important to remember that. Honor our reliable power plants of both the nuclear plants and dual fired gas plants that can store oil on site and not just keep hammering them and hampering them and thinking it's all going to be okay, because it won't be okay. And what's happening right now is the NERC, the. Federal reliability, electric reliability console. And we're expecting that this summer, the chances of rolling blackouts in the Midwest are, are high. So you see, we had rolling black, we had rolling blackouts in, in Texas, which actually couldn't roll because they had so much trouble that they ended up with instead of a one hour blackout. And then it goes to a different area. They ended up blacking out people for 40 hours. And we came very close to rolling blackouts on our own grid, which I wrote about in my book. So NERC for the first time I've ever seen it is predicting a high probability of rolling blackouts in the upper Midwest. And so what I'm saying is we have become too dependent on just in time natural gas. We have been scornful of plants that like nuclear plants that keep fuel on site. A nuclear plant has 18 months of fuel on site. And we have got to get back to encouraging, keeping the nuclear plants that keep fuel on site, not being, keeping power plants that have fuels we don't like, like oil or coal available for the cold weather. And I mean, we really have to take the reliability of the grid seriously. That's what it has to be. Once we begin to realize the reliable grid is the basis of modern health and safety, then we will make some decisions that are reasonable. The decisions can be for low carbon grids, nuclear slow carbon and so forth. But they can't be like, we've got to be 100% low carbon, whatever happens to the people around here. So is that a help? Yeah, it sounds like a flexible approach, but people have to study this. I think this book is really a great primer on what needs to be done or what has gone wrong. But for the future, it's certainly a starting point. Thank you very much. I really felt obliged to write it because I felt that I was finding out things that affected everybody's life. And I couldn't explain it to people in a short manner. And I tried to write it so that it was at a really readable level. Well, it certainly is. What we're going to be doing is we'll be following this because it's in the news every day. There's news out of Canada this morning. There's all kinds of things going on. Of course we have the war and we have the whole issue of the supply and rushing all that. So we will be following this up and we will be in touch. And hopefully we might have a better power picture in the near future. Thanks to people like you who are keeping us aware. Thank you very much. And I just want to note that this is Dennis McMahon and this has been positively Vermont. My guest has been Meredith Anglin of Vermont, the author of shorting the grid, the hidden fragility of our electric grid. And our topic today has been the fragile grid comes home. Thank you for watching. Thank you.