Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Josh Spuzzing Clark, and there's Chuck Zippy Zap Bryant. Okay,
Speaker 1: there's just the two of us. Don't have to come
Speaker 1: up with any more stupid electricity based names. Jerry Jerry, Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's we don't not here. She just zipped off into
Speaker 1: the ether absent who knows. Yeah, we should call Roll Chuck. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: Josh here, Chuck present, Jerry Jerry, She's not here, dude.
Speaker 1: I just had a shower today for the first time
Speaker 1: in a few days because we didn't have water in
Speaker 1: our house. No, And I put this on the Movie
Speaker 1: Crushers page just to get some feedback. I was like,
Speaker 1: would you rather not have power or water? And that
Speaker 1: kind of figures into today's episode, and you know, of
Speaker 1: the people are very sensible and said would much rather
Speaker 1: not have power than water, But there were a handful
Speaker 1: of psychopaths that said they'd rather be I guess just
Speaker 1: buying dozens of gallons of water to to flush toilets
Speaker 1: and wash hands and not bathe. At what point? At
Speaker 1: what point though of going without water and maybe you
Speaker 1: reach this point and you can tell me. Do you
Speaker 1: get to where you're like, well, we're just gonna save
Speaker 1: water and dig a dig a pit and be in
Speaker 1: the van a latrine. Well, I mean we were letting
Speaker 1: the yellow mellow, you know what I'm saying. Unfortunately, uh,
Speaker 1: you know the brown you gotta flush down. You should
Speaker 1: trademark that. And it really hits home how much water
Speaker 1: a toilet uses when you have to fill it up
Speaker 1: with those huge, like arrowhead five gallon jugs. And it's
Speaker 1: just shameful. But you know, I was happy to take
Speaker 1: that shower, I gotta tell you. Yeah. But you go
Speaker 1: through three of those five gallon jugs before you realize
Speaker 1: that you're accidentally stepping on the handle and they're just
Speaker 1: going right down the drain. You're like, man, this is
Speaker 1: not my week. But this isn't about water. It's about power,
Speaker 1: which you know, it's a it's a really good question,
Speaker 1: and I'm not surprised that the um you've got the
Speaker 1: response that you got from it, because like we we
Speaker 1: tend to think of, like, you know, electricity is you know,
Speaker 1: a really nice modern luxury, and that is basically not
Speaker 1: the case anymore for most of the climates in the
Speaker 1: United States, electricity is an absolute necessity. It's not a luxury,
Speaker 1: like you need it to survive in the modern world.
Speaker 1: You could try to do the take Kazinsky thing, go
Speaker 1: off grid. People do it successfully, But even then, if
Speaker 1: you look into what they're doing, I would guess something
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood of of those people are still using
Speaker 1: something like solar power or wind power. They just aren't
Speaker 1: connected to this grid that we're going to talk about today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I should caveat the question I posted the movie
Speaker 1: Crushers was whether aside like obviously, in the hot, hot
Speaker 1: summer people can and do die from outages, and in
Speaker 1: the winter they do as well. But it was you
Speaker 1: know that wasn't the case here in Atlanta. All that
Speaker 1: is cold today. Yeah it is very cold, but I
Speaker 1: mean not deadly cold, but it gets deadly cold once
Speaker 1: in a while here. Um, but even beyond like heating
Speaker 1: and cooling just to stay alive, Like, electricity is so
Speaker 1: interwoven with our lives that you know, you you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: I can wash dishes by hand. You know it's not
Speaker 1: my preference, but whatever, or um, you know, I can,
Speaker 1: I can use the old gas powered lawnmar and so
Speaker 1: the electric lawnmar But there's also like can you keep
Speaker 1: up in school or at work without you know, electricity?
Speaker 1: That like it's it's really just a it's a fundamental
Speaker 1: necessity in my modern industrial life. And um, we get
Speaker 1: this based on this huge, sprawling, rickety old black and
Speaker 1: white cartoon donkey of an engineering marvel that we call
Speaker 1: the electrical grid. It's crazy how held together with like
Speaker 1: duct tape and bubblegum this thing is. But it's still
Speaker 1: literally delivers the juice for us. Yeah, and it is
Speaker 1: funny how we it's so like power and water you
Speaker 1: know here in the United States is so ingrained. Is
Speaker 1: just something we kind of take for granted that when
Speaker 1: you don't have it, this is the only time you notice.
Speaker 1: And like, the only fun thing about the past few
Speaker 1: days was hearing Emily scream from another room because you know,
Speaker 1: your instinct is, oh, I have grease on my fingers,
Speaker 1: let me go watch it off, and just hearing her
Speaker 1: like flick uh, you know, some faucet or something somewhere
Speaker 1: in the house over the past three days and nothing
Speaker 1: comes out because you just forget, say, when the powers
Speaker 1: if you're constantly flicking a switch and going I hate life.
Speaker 1: It's not there. Yeah. Well, but that's why you'll see
Speaker 1: in a lot of different like power companies, UM names
Speaker 1: the word reliability because that is key, Like you can't have,
Speaker 1: you know, an electric company that's just kind of like, oh,
Speaker 1: you work a lot of the time, you know, don't
Speaker 1: we get credit for that. It's like, no, people want
Speaker 1: you to work basically a hundred percent of the time.
Speaker 1: You don't want to sign up for a company, and
Speaker 1: it's called partial credit exactly you want. You want the
Speaker 1: full credit one the real ambitious types that like with
Speaker 1: their hands shoot up into the air at every question.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of energy company you want. So should
Speaker 1: we talk about this big, antiquated system. Yeah, so, like
Speaker 1: I said, it is considered a modern marvel. And part
Speaker 1: of the reason why it's considered a modern marvel is
Speaker 1: just from its sheer enormous size. Yeah, I mean big time.
Speaker 1: We're talking uh nineteen thousand generators and in this case
Speaker 1: it is literally generating the power or like a coal
Speaker 1: plant or a National natural gas plant or a wind
Speaker 1: farm that kind of thing. Uh fifty five thousand substations,
Speaker 1: transmission substations, and we'll we've talked about this before and
Speaker 1: we'll get to it later. But this is when you're
Speaker 1: stepping up and stepping down power to get it in
Speaker 1: and out of your house. I guess not out of
Speaker 1: your house. It only comes in. It depends if you
Speaker 1: have a good solar rain. Like a power wants your stuff.
Speaker 1: It's uh six miles of um transmission lines. It's a
Speaker 1: six point three million miles of distribution lines. And these
Speaker 1: are like the power poles, unless you're lucky enough to
Speaker 1: have buried power lines. I know, it looks so much better.
Speaker 1: They're doing that actually in our neighborhood finally, and they
Speaker 1: approached us with a dollar figure to say, can we
Speaker 1: put this huge, big green thing in your front yard?
Speaker 1: And we said thank you, No, Um, try someone else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're like not these neighbors. We like them, but
Speaker 1: three doors down they really sucks. So try that well,
Speaker 1: I mean something. It doesn't have to go in our yards.
Speaker 1: So I think they're just taking volunteers who want to
Speaker 1: make a little scratch. But you can't, like plant bushes
Speaker 1: in front of it or anything in our front yard
Speaker 1: is very exposed. It would look really bad. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: we'll talk about what those are, but they are seriously
Speaker 1: dangerous too if you end up getting into one of those,
Speaker 1: the one the things that kids play on all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's crazy. Those are really really dangerous. Basically many power stations,
Speaker 1: they're transformed. They just happen to be like on the
Speaker 1: ground rather than up on a pole where everybody's used
Speaker 1: to them. Yeah. I mean I felt kind of bad
Speaker 1: at first because I thought, am I not doing my
Speaker 1: part to make sure our neighborhood gets buried? But they
Speaker 1: said that you know there, it doesn't have to go there,
Speaker 1: and they can just that there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people that are gonna want that, however much money it
Speaker 1: was were. They like, okay, well, you know, we understand
Speaker 1: your decision, but we noticed you have an empty lot
Speaker 1: behind your and you keep walking. You know what's funny
Speaker 1: we found out once we assume oimed that property that
Speaker 1: we were squatting on, that two weeks later, Georgia Power
Speaker 1: got in touch with them. So no, I know, that's
Speaker 1: why I made that joke, but that was exactly what
Speaker 1: was going to happen, right, Yeah, for that's not a joke,
Speaker 1: I know, but I was joking about how close she came.
Speaker 1: Oh goodness me. All right, so let's talk about the
Speaker 1: nationwide network. Uh. And when we're talking about this, keep
Speaker 1: in mind we're talking about the lower forty eight. Obviously,
Speaker 1: Hawaii and Alaska have their own grids and systems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were strangely left out of this, the poor poor DearS. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we're thinking about them. But on the lower forty eight,
Speaker 1: we have basically three big separate grids that are called
Speaker 1: inter connections, and really it should just be two. There
Speaker 1: should be the Eastern interconnection, which is basically everything west
Speaker 1: of the Rockies or east of the Rockies, a lot
Speaker 1: of the um Great Plain states up to the northeast,
Speaker 1: the southeast all that's the Eastern connection. Then you've got
Speaker 1: the Western interconnection, which is west of the Rockies, and
Speaker 1: then you've got Texas. Those are the three inter connections
Speaker 1: of the United States electrical grid. Yeah, here's my question,
Speaker 1: is it is Texas literally no longer connected at all? No,
Speaker 1: that's the big about the whole thing. They're connected to
Speaker 1: God and everybody. They're connected to Mexico. Mexico saved there,
Speaker 1: took us in two thousand eleven. They're connected to everybody.
Speaker 1: They just somehow are being left out of the law.
Speaker 1: It's ridiculous. No, but they are connected, like okay, yes,
Speaker 1: because I was gonna say, is it the lower forty seven?
Speaker 1: But technically they are connected, but they're just Texas is
Speaker 1: gonna do Texas now? And there's even that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And then there's even parts of Texas, including El Paso
Speaker 1: and some parts of the Panhandle, that are connected to
Speaker 1: either the Eastern or the Western inter connection. But most
Speaker 1: of Texas by far is its own interconnection, its own
Speaker 1: separate grid. Yeah. Even know even more than that, I
Speaker 1: would say it's probably closer like percent, like almost all
Speaker 1: of it. Okay, all right, Well this is good though,
Speaker 1: that we're interconnected. Uh. And there are a lot of
Speaker 1: big benefits to that, chief of which is probably reliability
Speaker 1: because when you have such an interconnected grid, um, you
Speaker 1: can work together and there's a lot of backups and
Speaker 1: redundancy is built in, so if there's a big demand
Speaker 1: in one place, or if power goes down in one place,
Speaker 1: you can reroute and have get some help from your neighbors.
Speaker 1: Basically right, exactly, um. And that actually came about, as
Speaker 1: we'll see from a little bit of deregulation, but also
Speaker 1: it kind of developed from from power producers realizing like, well,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that in a minute. There's also flexibility, right,
Speaker 1: So if you have like a bunch of different sources.
Speaker 1: So you've got a wind farm offshore in in Um, Florida,
Speaker 1: and then you also have you're getting power from like
Speaker 1: a damn in Georgia, and all of these are providing
Speaker 1: power to the southeast, and you have all sorts of
Speaker 1: coal fire power plates and nuclear power plates. You can
Speaker 1: kind of put all these two gather into an energy portfolio,
Speaker 1: and all of them are providing electricity to do the grid.
Speaker 1: So the fact that it's like interconnected, it can accept
Speaker 1: electrical um production from generators all over the place and
Speaker 1: from different varieties and types. But as far as you're concerned,
Speaker 1: it's all just it all just turns into electricity after
Speaker 1: it's generated, right. Uh. And then the last advantage is affordability.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of what you were hinting at.
Speaker 1: You know, deregulations sort of has giveth in taken away
Speaker 1: in some ways. Starting in the eighties, the grid was
Speaker 1: open to wholesale competition and private power companies started investing
Speaker 1: in certain efficiencies and that made that did really make
Speaker 1: electricity affordable in the US. But it also when it
Speaker 1: comes to like like insulating pipelines like Texas did not do. Um,
Speaker 1: it makes companies more reticent to invest in money like
Speaker 1: that because they're like, you know, why would we want
Speaker 1: to unline our pockets? You know, envy. And so you
Speaker 1: put all this stuff together. You put the power generation plants,
Speaker 1: you put the transmission lines, you put the distribution networks
Speaker 1: that all go into like people's homes and businesses and
Speaker 1: end up as like an outlet or socket or something
Speaker 1: like that, and that all together, all those components is
Speaker 1: the electrical grid. And that's that's it. But uh so
Speaker 1: let's take a break and um we'll come back and
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about the history of the grid.
Speaker 1: How about that. Let's do it, okay, Chuck. Also, before
Speaker 1: we talk about the history, I want to direct everybody
Speaker 1: to what I think is one of our better science
Speaker 1: based episodes, How Electricity Works. Yeah, it's a good one.
Speaker 1: We cover some of this stuff in there. But um,
Speaker 1: like we really got into electricity. It was electrifying. Bo
Speaker 1: you've laughed. I know, I'm just laughing because you're my friend.
Speaker 1: I can't punch you right now because you're in a
Speaker 1: different place, that joke in the same room, right, you
Speaker 1: learned from the last one. Uh so, And then then
Speaker 1: we talked, like you said about part of this in electricity.
Speaker 1: But our earliest power grids were built in the eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: and they were all very local and specific, and this
Speaker 1: was a time and place when Edison and Tesla were
Speaker 1: duking it out in a very public, sometimes a grotesque
Speaker 1: way to prove that they're uh. In Edison's case, DC
Speaker 1: system or Tesla is a c Alternating current system was
Speaker 1: better and gruesome, meaning electrifying large animals. That s ob
Speaker 1: You always got to say that, right, Oh yeah, he
Speaker 1: should go down in history. That Yeah, he's a terrible
Speaker 1: guy in that respect for sure. But Tesla went out,
Speaker 1: um in large part due to a lot of financial
Speaker 1: backing from George Westinghouse. Right, Um, but not just that,
Speaker 1: Like direct current has better in some ways, but it
Speaker 1: also has some serious disadvantages to alternating current, which was
Speaker 1: the Tesla Westinghouse version. And um, we'll talk about exactly why,
Speaker 1: but just you know, remember that alternating current is way
Speaker 1: better for long distance transmission. So the fact that we
Speaker 1: went with alternating current meant that we could create this huge,
Speaker 1: extensive grid with hundreds of thousands or millions of miles
Speaker 1: of transmission and distribution line. That's all thanks to Nicola
Speaker 1: Tesla's alternating current. That's right. So really part of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, there were about four thousand individual electric utilities
Speaker 1: with all these tiny grids, and then World War Two
Speaker 1: rolls around and there's a big spike in demand for
Speaker 1: more power because it was just after World War Two.
Speaker 1: There was a big boon, lots lots of new appliances
Speaker 1: and fancy new things that needed power. And uh, the smaller,
Speaker 1: little independent grids looked at each other and said, I
Speaker 1: guess we gotta hold hands now and start working together
Speaker 1: to to meet this demand. Yeah, there was this really
Speaker 1: big push to electrify America that FDR took up pretty
Speaker 1: early in his presidency, and he like took on these
Speaker 1: really like powerful electric utilities and got a bunch of
Speaker 1: black eyes as a result of it, but ended up
Speaker 1: winning UM passing the Federal Power Act, of which basically
Speaker 1: put a leash on the UM the holding companies that
Speaker 1: there was like a handful of very large powerful holding
Speaker 1: companies that basically ran and electricity in the United States UM,
Speaker 1: and they weren't really innovating. They weren't doing much too
Speaker 1: to electrify the US. So the federal government got involved
Speaker 1: in UM basically took over and so we're gonna regulate
Speaker 1: you guys from now on, and the United States became
Speaker 1: UM very much electrified, like as a whole country. But
Speaker 1: in return for this, it wasn't just the UM nanny
Speaker 1: state taking away from the corporate state. They said, how
Speaker 1: about this. We'll give you guys monopolies that we're gonna
Speaker 1: keep a really close eye on, and we're gonna regulate strongly,
Speaker 1: but you guys can make your costs back and a
Speaker 1: reasonable profit. And so owning an electric company became UM.
Speaker 1: It was like printing your own money, you know, like
Speaker 1: you had so many customers that you were making gobs
Speaker 1: of money. And every year your your growth, the growth
Speaker 1: of the growth of the entire industry was about eight
Speaker 1: percent each year. That's really good, and it was also
Speaker 1: money in the bank. They knew that America was just
Speaker 1: going to keep consuming and consuming and consuming, so they
Speaker 1: would just build more and more power plants and they
Speaker 1: were just going to sit back and collect eight percent
Speaker 1: a year, and actually everybody was happy. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of innovation and everything UM, but one of the things
Speaker 1: that these different power monopolies learned early on is that
Speaker 1: everyone expected power on demand twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 1: If somebody wanted to plug their vacuum cleaner in at
Speaker 1: three am, they better have power. There wasn't like downtime
Speaker 1: that these guys could factor in. And as we'll see,
Speaker 1: there was no storage capacity. That's something that we need
Speaker 1: to get that we don't have, which means that power
Speaker 1: has to be generated constantly and you also have to
Speaker 1: have backup power. Was really really expensive to build a
Speaker 1: backup power station, and so these early UM companies figured
Speaker 1: out that they could buy power from other rival companies
Speaker 1: that had some surplus right then, cheaper than it would
Speaker 1: be for them to generate it or to build a
Speaker 1: backup generating plant. And in this way, the early independent
Speaker 1: grid started to connect to one another to kind of
Speaker 1: buy and sell power as needed, and this kind of
Speaker 1: wholesale power market developed, and that's where the grid started
Speaker 1: to connect together, right And we should also point out
Speaker 1: that in nineteen thirty five, with the passing of the
Speaker 1: Federal Power Act. That's when Texas said, nah, ye said,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do our own thing. We're gonna make our
Speaker 1: own power, we're gonna keep our own power, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna have our own our own body to oversee it.
Speaker 1: Called the URCOTT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Millions
Speaker 1: of listeners just WoT boo uh. They created that in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy and they manage about of the grid in Texas.
Speaker 1: And um, we use a lot of power in this country. UM,
Speaker 1: I think the US consumed there's a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen three point nine trillion kill a lot hours,
Speaker 1: which is about thirteen thousand kill a lott hours per human.
Speaker 1: And you'd think, like, that's got to be the most
Speaker 1: in the world. There's about a dozen countries ahead of US,
Speaker 1: but those are countries where it can get really really
Speaker 1: cold or really really hot, not places like the United States,
Speaker 1: where comparatively to other places like US, we use a
Speaker 1: lot more per person. Yeah, so thirteen thousand kilowatt hours
Speaker 1: per person, It sounds like a lot, and it is
Speaker 1: a lot. But in Iceland they use fifty three thousand
Speaker 1: kilowatt hours per person on average, they gotta heat those
Speaker 1: soundests and that crazy. But for for in their defense,
Speaker 1: they're making most of the electricity from geo thermal, so
Speaker 1: who cares? Use as much electricity as you want. And
Speaker 1: then we I know some of our other listeners don't
Speaker 1: just live in the US, so Canada actually beats the
Speaker 1: United States and per capita consumption, they use fifteen points
Speaker 1: six thousand killed watt hours. Australia is um better at
Speaker 1: it than we are. They use ten thousand. New Zealand's
Speaker 1: nine thousand kill watt hours. And then for our three
Speaker 1: German listeners seven thousand kilwatt hours. And then in the UK,
Speaker 1: I think it's about five thousand kilwater yeah, exactly. Volcomb
Speaker 1: the end, What was that Cabaret? I think, Okay, yeah
Speaker 1: it is Cabaret. I think it's like the opening of it.
Speaker 1: I just know Cabaret from Ship's Creek right same here.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm gonna watch it before but uh but yeah,
Speaker 1: that's where I've seen most of Cabaret from that episode
Speaker 1: of Ship's Creek. Yeah, Emily and I were both are like,
Speaker 1: we need to see Cabaret though, Now dude, I started watching, Um,
Speaker 1: what we do in the Shadows again from the TV Yes,
Speaker 1: it's so. It's one of the best comedies ever put
Speaker 1: on television. Yeah, and it's sort of a rare case
Speaker 1: of taking a movie changing the cast up for television
Speaker 1: and it's just as good. Yeah, the movie was great.
Speaker 1: The TV show was great. I I have to I
Speaker 1: haven't seen all of the movie, but from what I
Speaker 1: saw the movie, I prefer the TV show. I love him.
Speaker 1: I think for good six months after the TV show,
Speaker 1: we would walk around the house saying these iffing gay
Speaker 1: that like every dude, every single character. And that's just
Speaker 1: so it's just great. Thank you people who made what
Speaker 1: we do in the shows. Than uh, it is wonderful.
Speaker 1: So as far as what we use that power for
Speaker 1: here in the States, uh, and I guess this is
Speaker 1: lower forty eight. Who knows what they're doing in Alaska, Hawaii,
Speaker 1: but thirty eight percent of that power consumption is residential
Speaker 1: people like you and I and or you and me.
Speaker 1: And the bulk of that is that is is heating
Speaker 1: and cooling our homes and making hot water or washing dishes,
Speaker 1: and then the rest is you know, running appliances, charging
Speaker 1: your laptop, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Um, The other
Speaker 1: sixty one point five percent is non residential stuff commercial
Speaker 1: things like office buildings, and then industrial, which is mostly
Speaker 1: um used for running motors or because America loves its lathes.
Speaker 1: I thought of that earlier, and I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've I've seen pictures of lathe accidents before. So I
Speaker 1: spent a good twenty minutes looking at lathe accident photos.
Speaker 1: I do not recommend, but I didn't see that coming
Speaker 1: up when I started researching this. I used a lathe
Speaker 1: back in industrial arts in high school. Dude, once I
Speaker 1: found out how dangerous those things were, I would never
Speaker 1: go near near one. That's you have all your baseball
Speaker 1: bats made by someone else. Now, yeah, I subout that
Speaker 1: part of my life. So the good the good news
Speaker 1: is with energy efficiencies, they've really come a long way
Speaker 1: over the past couple of decades, the whole Energy Star
Speaker 1: program and just appliances being made much more efficiently than
Speaker 1: they used to be. Um, it's only going to increase
Speaker 1: I think the demand by one percent a year from
Speaker 1: now to which is good, but that's still thirty increase,
Speaker 1: which is a lot. But it's astounding that as we
Speaker 1: keep consuming more and more electricity and we do, um,
Speaker 1: we we use a lot. They figured out, like these
Speaker 1: Americans are nuts, They're just gonna keep consuming and consuming.
Speaker 1: We better figure out how to make our stuff more
Speaker 1: energy efficient. And that they've managed to offset all but
Speaker 1: one percent of that growth per year, because I can
Speaker 1: only imagine if we were still working with you know,
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties style blenders and vacuum cleaners. Good lord, we'd
Speaker 1: be suck in the cold directly out of the earth,
Speaker 1: like straight into your vacuum cleaner. Would be so used,
Speaker 1: so wasteful. Yeah, And I imagine that they are always
Speaker 1: working on this, Like I I assume the goal is
Speaker 1: to have the negative number there, don't you think from
Speaker 1: your lips to God's ear, chuck, Like, wouldn't that be great?
Speaker 1: If they're like it's going to go down by two
Speaker 1: or three percent per year? I mean that would that
Speaker 1: would be great? That's actually hopefully We're gonna talk a
Speaker 1: lot about how to fix the grid, and one of
Speaker 1: the suggestions is to create the smart grid, and one
Speaker 1: of the big components of it is to basically allow
Speaker 1: you and me, we or I and you to see
Speaker 1: how much electricity we use through interfaces that are similar
Speaker 1: to like online banking, like we would we would be
Speaker 1: and we would be aware in managing our electricity use
Speaker 1: with that level of like minute interface, right, and that
Speaker 1: by doing that we would start to consume less would
Speaker 1: be certainly less waste wasteful. So it's possible that we
Speaker 1: might go down compared to levels. Who knows would be great,
Speaker 1: It would be wonderful. Uh. One of the big changes
Speaker 1: about I think like basically all of the cold, nuclear
Speaker 1: and renewable resources we have in this country are consumed,
Speaker 1: most of it for creating energy, and I think about
Speaker 1: a third of natural gas. But natural gas is been
Speaker 1: a big boon. Um. We did an episode on fracking
Speaker 1: and say what you want about it, but there is
Speaker 1: a lot more natural gas now. Um, it has lowered
Speaker 1: the cost gas. Fire generators are cheaper to build, they
Speaker 1: burn cleaner than cold do by half, They're more nimble,
Speaker 1: they can respond quicker to big increases in demand. So
Speaker 1: it's gone up I think from nineteen from twelve percent
Speaker 1: of our energy mix to Yeah, and we should probably
Speaker 1: just safe a full disclosure. Um, we are deeply underwritten
Speaker 1: as a podcast by both Enron and x On, So
Speaker 1: just heads up on that one. Tops. Yes, um so uh,
Speaker 1: when you do generate electricity, you're not actually you don't
Speaker 1: create energy, where electricity is an energy carrier, right, which
Speaker 1: is why it's like it all turns into the same
Speaker 1: thing from all these different sources. Um. But the people
Speaker 1: who run the grid have figured out, like there's specific
Speaker 1: kinds of generation plants you want to run, and there's
Speaker 1: basically three of them. One is baseload, which is your average,
Speaker 1: say usually coal fire power plant that's running almost all
Speaker 1: the time, and that provides the vast majority of the
Speaker 1: electricity that's being consumed at any given point. Then there's
Speaker 1: load following plants, which a're um at this time natural
Speaker 1: gas power plants, but they may overtake gas or coal
Speaker 1: in the United States at some point. Those are a
Speaker 1: little more, um, a little less frequently run. If you're like,
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna need some more some more juice
Speaker 1: because it's Christmas time and everybody's got their lights up,
Speaker 1: you might spark up the old load load following plants.
Speaker 1: And then lastly there's one called peaker plants, like a
Speaker 1: peak like a peak capacity where when you start this up,
Speaker 1: you're basically like burning diamonds. It's so expensive to run
Speaker 1: these things, and that means that this the demand has
Speaker 1: gone crazy and the prices are going sky high. So
Speaker 1: turn up the peaker plant because we need that extra capacity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just quickly to tick through where we get the
Speaker 1: rest of these the rest of the fuel sources, I
Speaker 1: said natural gas ist coal is twenty three, nuclear is twenty,
Speaker 1: wind is seven, hydro electric is seven, biomass is two,
Speaker 1: pent solar one eight percent, which is still pretty low.
Speaker 1: Considering how many people have gotten on that train. I
Speaker 1: would say it's objectively shameful. Yeah, that would be nice
Speaker 1: to see that number go up. But um, there are
Speaker 1: a hundred and forty five million households and businesses connected
Speaker 1: to this grid in the US. And the reason it
Speaker 1: all works, and we talked about this, it's still just
Speaker 1: amazing to me how it all works. We talked about
Speaker 1: it in electricity, but the ability to send electricity over
Speaker 1: long distances and step it up and step it down
Speaker 1: to make it power your coffee machine is a modern miracle.
Speaker 1: It's amazing, right, And that's one of the big advantages
Speaker 1: of alternating current electricity is I guess you can do
Speaker 1: it with DC, but it's way more difficult and way
Speaker 1: more expensive. So for all intents and purposes, it's a
Speaker 1: c that you can step up and step down. And
Speaker 1: when when you do that, you do that because current,
Speaker 1: which is the flow of electrons like down the line
Speaker 1: UM is inversely proportionate to what's called voltage rights it is.
Speaker 1: Voltage is kind of like the pressure you put on
Speaker 1: a line, like the pressure of the flow where the
Speaker 1: where the current is the actual flow, right, And if
Speaker 1: you have a very high current of electricity, you unfortunately
Speaker 1: get a lot of resistance on the transmission lines. And
Speaker 1: when you have a lot of resistance, you lose a
Speaker 1: lot of electricity to heat. But fortunately for power generators, UM,
Speaker 1: if you up the voltage right up the pressure that
Speaker 1: you're putting on the line, it actually decreases the current.
Speaker 1: And if you decrease the current, then you d crease
Speaker 1: the energy loss. So they figured out that if they
Speaker 1: can take you know, when they generate the stuff at
Speaker 1: power plants, it's like two thousand volts, maybe up to
Speaker 1: twenty thousand volts, but then they step up the voltage
Speaker 1: to hundreds of thousands of volts. I think some transmission
Speaker 1: lines are able to take about seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand volts, which is amazing. It is like if you
Speaker 1: get shocked by like an electrical socket in your house
Speaker 1: that's a hundred and twenty volts. This is seven hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand volts um. The current goes down so
Speaker 1: dramatically that you lose almost none of the electricity over
Speaker 1: very very long distances of transmission. So that's really a
Speaker 1: huge benefit of alternating current that you can step them
Speaker 1: up and then when you get towards neighborhoods and stuff,
Speaker 1: step them back down. Yeah. I think they lose about
Speaker 1: six percent of electricity generated in the United States, which
Speaker 1: you know, that's a fairly low number, but I think
Speaker 1: they're all he's trying to make that better. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I mean, let's see somewhere else whereas that number there's
Speaker 1: a um we we do something like thirty five, no,
Speaker 1: four and a half trillion kill a watt hours are
Speaker 1: generated in the United States. So six lost. That's an
Speaker 1: astounding amount of electricity that's lost. Any improvement on that
Speaker 1: would be huge. Yeah, that'd be great. Um So in
Speaker 1: your house, like you said, you have here in the States,
Speaker 1: we have a hundred and twenty volts, So you have
Speaker 1: these substations that step it down to about twelve thousand.
Speaker 1: Then it goes to your power lines, and then those
Speaker 1: you know, those gray um sort of cylindrical cans at
Speaker 1: the top of the things. Those are very important. They
Speaker 1: step it down even further to about two forty. Then
Speaker 1: by the time you get into your house is down
Speaker 1: to one and you're was about to say you're cooking
Speaker 1: with gas, but you're not. You're cooking with electricity. Yes,
Speaker 1: those gray can transformers are the same thing as that
Speaker 1: green death box that they wanted to put in your
Speaker 1: front yard, except the green death box it's called the
Speaker 1: pack frontyard mount transformer. That's for underground power lines. The
Speaker 1: gray cans are for overheadlines. But they do the same thing.
Speaker 1: They step it down to a much less deadly and
Speaker 1: much more usable um voltage of electricity. Yeah, we have
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, Atlanta just has a lot
Speaker 1: of outage this period because we have a it's a
Speaker 1: city in a forest, and we have a ton of trees,
Speaker 1: a ton of really old trees. Like most of the
Speaker 1: not most, but a lot of the old oak trees
Speaker 1: in Atlanta are coming down, or at the very least
Speaker 1: large limbs are coming down, and uh, it's it's a problem.
Speaker 1: So my neighborhood especially, we have a lot of blackouts.
Speaker 1: So hopefully this this burying the lines project will work
Speaker 1: out pretty well. Yeah. The tree thing, it's it's important.
Speaker 1: It's like kind of part of that whole reliability thing
Speaker 1: is we'll see is keeping trees trimmed away from power lines. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is why a power company might knock on your
Speaker 1: door one day and say, Hi, we need to to
Speaker 1: cut a lot of your tree back, and you have
Speaker 1: to say yes. Well, yeah, they might not even say that.
Speaker 1: Then we might just show up and start cutting your
Speaker 1: tree and be like, what are you going to do
Speaker 1: about it? And I'm just like, that was uncalled for.
Speaker 1: Should we take another break before you get in another
Speaker 1: fight with a power person? Yeah, they started at chuck.
Speaker 1: All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back
Speaker 1: and talk about all this gobble you cook a little
Speaker 1: bit more, alrighty. So you mentioned earlier the monopoly situation
Speaker 1: that was broken up, um largely because of the energy
Speaker 1: crisis of the nineteen seventies, and we said, hey, let's
Speaker 1: open it up. Let's get the market going and get
Speaker 1: some competitive pricing happening, and everyone did that, not everyone
Speaker 1: in the Southeast. We still have a lot of the big,
Speaker 1: big utility companies, but um, they still needed some sort
Speaker 1: of oversight. And there are a lot of different ways
Speaker 1: that these things are regulated. If you look at a
Speaker 1: state level, you're going to be regulated by a public
Speaker 1: utility commission or a public service commission. And then when
Speaker 1: you start horse trading in Alabama says to Georgia, hey,
Speaker 1: we need some power, and you're like, wait, I'm getting
Speaker 1: some power from Tennessee right now. Hold on the other line,
Speaker 1: that's got to be regulated too. So the Federal Energy
Speaker 1: Regulatory Commission oversees those transactions. Yes, FVRC. So they're supposed
Speaker 1: to it. As we'll see, they they fall down on
Speaker 1: the job kind of frequently in huge catastrophic things happen
Speaker 1: when they do. Um. But yeah, So when they started
Speaker 1: to be regulated, especially in the set or deregulated in
Speaker 1: the seventies, strangely enough, it was Jimmy Carter's administration who
Speaker 1: opened up competition. You would think that would have been
Speaker 1: a squarely a Ronald Reagan kind of thing, but Carter
Speaker 1: did it to encourage conservation um of energy and to
Speaker 1: create that competition to see who could who could deliver
Speaker 1: this this stuff and kind of innovate more. Um, just
Speaker 1: basically shake up the stodgy old energy companies. But the
Speaker 1: problem is is, remember I said, like it was money
Speaker 1: in the bank, you could just kick back and expect
Speaker 1: eight percent growth year over year every single year, and
Speaker 1: people are just gonna keep using electricity. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: there's a totally new mindset in America, which was whoa, whoa,
Speaker 1: we're using way too much electricity and energy we need
Speaker 1: to conserve. And now all the power companies started kind
Speaker 1: of losing money. And when they started to lose money,
Speaker 1: they stopped doing important things like cutting down trees um
Speaker 1: or cutting down off tree limbs, or servicing their lines
Speaker 1: as much like all the stuff that made them more reliable. UM,
Speaker 1: just stopped happening quite as frequently, and so you started
Speaker 1: to see things like enormous, massive blackouts that you know,
Speaker 1: affected millions of people for days, where you didn't really
Speaker 1: see that that often before. I think the first one
Speaker 1: ever was in nineteen five, but um, the really big
Speaker 1: ones started coming more frequently around about two thousand. I
Speaker 1: think that was kind of kicked off by the California
Speaker 1: energy crisis, and then you know we were talking about
Speaker 1: the regulatory bodies, UM those were just for the public
Speaker 1: utilities themselves. Then you have these transmission networks and they
Speaker 1: have to be managed as well, and UM, I think
Speaker 1: for stepped in and said, we need some sort of
Speaker 1: independent management and oversight here, uh, because basically we've got
Speaker 1: to make sure that everyone has equal access to this grid.
Speaker 1: And so these interconnections that we talked about, those three interconnections,
Speaker 1: they're divided about divided up into more than a dozen
Speaker 1: independent nonprofits UM that are called regional transmission organizations or
Speaker 1: independent system operators. And I think the idea there is
Speaker 1: they're just they're not in it for the money. They're
Speaker 1: there to kind of really just make sure everyone is
Speaker 1: being treated fairly and doing the right thing, right, that
Speaker 1: everybody has access to the grid that's supposed to get
Speaker 1: access to the grid. But also it's a they're also
Speaker 1: the modern incarnation of those power pools where like UM,
Speaker 1: like utilities would would buy and sell power to one
Speaker 1: another as needed. These are the groups that kind of
Speaker 1: oversee those transactions. Right. So you mentioned the grid failing
Speaker 1: in California. I was there at the time, and I
Speaker 1: remember in I remember these rolling blackouts California in the
Speaker 1: late nineties and early two thousands, early odts, UM had
Speaker 1: to institute these emergency rolling blackouts. Uh. And I remember
Speaker 1: when I was living there a couple of times it
Speaker 1: was all over the news. You know, it was a big,
Speaker 1: big news. And I remember a couple of times like
Speaker 1: you know, losing power because they just had to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there was UM. I guess California and and Ron
Speaker 1: actually makes an appearance every time there was a huge,
Speaker 1: colossal blackout. You could trace that its origins back a
Speaker 1: couple of years to Enron lobbying to get somebody d
Speaker 1: to get things deregulated, get a wholesale market built up,
Speaker 1: and they managed to do that in California. UM and
Speaker 1: California found itself in this weird position where the really
Speaker 1: big utility companies like PG and E UM or Southern
Speaker 1: California Edison UM were they they were capped at how
Speaker 1: much they could charge retail for energy for electricity. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, in this new wholesale market UM
Speaker 1: they had to buy electricity and it wasn't being regulated.
Speaker 1: Member I said that Birk sometimes falls down in the job. Well,
Speaker 1: they weren't regulating this wholesale market in California like they
Speaker 1: were supposed to, And so one day in the summer
Speaker 1: uh one month, I should say, starting in June of
Speaker 1: of two thousand, the wholesale prices went through the roof.
Speaker 1: It went from about thirty bucks the year before to
Speaker 1: three seventy five bucks a megawatt hour in two thousand
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, PG and is having to
Speaker 1: pay through the nose for this energy, but they can't
Speaker 1: pass the cost along to their customers, and yet they're
Speaker 1: also legally obligated to continue to to provide electricity to
Speaker 1: their customers. So they found themselves in this impossible situation.
Speaker 1: Some people still today say that they turned off the
Speaker 1: power because they didn't have the supply. Um, but they
Speaker 1: they swear that they did not do that and that
Speaker 1: they just ran out a supply because they can get
Speaker 1: it any longer. Well. Yeah, And as a result, p
Speaker 1: G and E in UH Southern Cali Edison, they were
Speaker 1: financially strapped. So they were in a situation where they
Speaker 1: had independent energy suppliers in surrounding states that were like,
Speaker 1: and I know you guys are in trouble, but I
Speaker 1: don't want to see my stuff because I don't know
Speaker 1: that I'm gonna get paid back now. So California was
Speaker 1: in a bind in the early ots and um, there
Speaker 1: were also technical problems and stuff. I think there was
Speaker 1: uh low water levels in the Pacific Northwest, which was
Speaker 1: huge because California at the time, I don't know if
Speaker 1: there is it's different now. They were not self sufficient
Speaker 1: energy wise. They depended on the surplus of other states. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, if there was low water levels in
Speaker 1: the Pacific Northwest, that's less electricity being sent south. And
Speaker 1: they also basically had these high voltage power lines from
Speaker 1: southern California to northern California and they were crashing, they
Speaker 1: were failing because they were just over a burden base basically.
Speaker 1: So they said, we got to do these rolling blackouts,
Speaker 1: and I think the biggest one was March two thousand one,
Speaker 1: affected about one point five million customers. Yeah, and like
Speaker 1: you said that, they these independent energy producers wouldn't sell
Speaker 1: them electricity because they didn't think they were going to
Speaker 1: get paid back. The whole thing finally ended when the
Speaker 1: governor had the water Board, the State water Board, go
Speaker 1: buy energy or electricity on behalf of them because the
Speaker 1: state was you know, the state had a good enough
Speaker 1: credit to buy electricity, but their two biggest electricity utilities
Speaker 1: didn't have good enough credit. And that crazy. Yeah Great Davis,
Speaker 1: I was like, was that the Governator? No? I think
Speaker 1: he was just after Great Davis, wasn't he? And then
Speaker 1: I saw it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, actually the governor for
Speaker 1: California for years. It was, I mean that was after
Speaker 1: I left. Uh, just yeah, it was just after I left. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was. He was Cheeze two thousand at the same
Speaker 1: time that Jesse the Body Venture was the governor of Minnesota.
Speaker 1: No way, man, all we needed was Carl Weathers is
Speaker 1: the governor of Georgia. And um, Piper, No, no, I'm
Speaker 1: doing Predator here. Okay, I missed that. I can't remember
Speaker 1: the guy who played Billy or maybe just the Predator.
Speaker 1: Sure the Predator was president, don't you know. Uh, I
Speaker 1: haven't seen that movie in so long. I bet your
Speaker 1: Predator holds up. Yeah, I saw in the last few
Speaker 1: years and it does. Yeah, don't check that out. Uh,
Speaker 1: there was a big blackout in the Northeast. I remember
Speaker 1: this one as well. In two thousand three, Uh, this
Speaker 1: was big time. This was fifty million people uh in
Speaker 1: the US and even parts of Canada lost power for
Speaker 1: a couple of days, in some case eleven deaths. And
Speaker 1: this one, like it was like a movie or something.
Speaker 1: How how this one started? Yeah, the there was Remember
Speaker 1: I said that tree cutting kind of fell to the
Speaker 1: wayside a little bit when they stopped making as much money.
Speaker 1: Well that's what happened here. It was really really hot
Speaker 1: and there was a lot of demand, and those lines
Speaker 1: were just blazing so much so that they actually started
Speaker 1: to sag, like the the atomic composition of the metal
Speaker 1: was put under that much stress, and they sagged into
Speaker 1: a tree brim, a tree branch and arct which is
Speaker 1: basically like lightning is produced. Right. There was a teenager
Speaker 1: in Ohio who noticed that, um, his outlets were smoking
Speaker 1: throughout his house, and it just so happened that there
Speaker 1: was a tree cutting crew outside of his house on
Speaker 1: the other side of the street, and he ran out
Speaker 1: to tell him and they basically told him to get lost.
Speaker 1: And hours and hours went by. Uh. And there was
Speaker 1: a bunch of cascading power feelers, which normally would have
Speaker 1: been caught, right, but there was some human error involved. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was sort of the movie art. I mean, it
Speaker 1: might as well have been like a rat chewing on
Speaker 1: a wire or something that was. There's monitoring software that,
Speaker 1: like you said, it's usually like, hey, emergency, something's going on.
Speaker 1: But the software was being glitchy. And so a technician
Speaker 1: with I guess like mustard stains on his shirt, turns
Speaker 1: it off, tries to fix it, and forgets to turn
Speaker 1: it back on. That's crazy. And so because the power
Speaker 1: grid is especially interconnected up in the northeast, this power
Speaker 1: outage in Ohio meant that there was um power outages
Speaker 1: in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. And I think, did you say
Speaker 1: eleven people died? Eleven people died? Um? So you know
Speaker 1: the you the federal regulators stepped in and it was like,
Speaker 1: we need a catchy new slogan to improve this, and
Speaker 1: so how about the three T s trimming training and tools.
Speaker 1: And everyone rolled their eyes said, whatever, Boomer, We'll we'll
Speaker 1: get on those three T s. Sweet turn the volume
Speaker 1: up on which a Tall Lineman, which is the only
Speaker 1: song they ever listened to. The fourth tea was too sweet. Nice.
Speaker 1: Uh So, now Texas, we're in Texas, We're not literally
Speaker 1: in Texas. But uh, we're in Texas now in spirit
Speaker 1: because very recently a big freak winter stormhead as everyone knows,
Speaker 1: and everyone needed a lot more heat than they usually
Speaker 1: do at this time of year in Texas. I think
Speaker 1: they usually require about sixty seven thousand megawatts a day
Speaker 1: in the winter, yeah, compared to eighty six thousand megawatts
Speaker 1: in the summer. And all of this makes sense. We're
Speaker 1: not saying like you're wrong Texas for not, you know,
Speaker 1: being ready for this weird freak storm. I mean that
Speaker 1: was the cause of it. But you also have to
Speaker 1: take into consideration that, uh, like we said, some of
Speaker 1: those lines weren't insulated like they should have been because
Speaker 1: of money and wind and solar is not gonna work
Speaker 1: as well in the winter anyway, And I think those
Speaker 1: wind farms weren't winter rised as well, right, Yes, some
Speaker 1: of them did. Apparently a surprising number. UM kept spinning UM,
Speaker 1: but the big problem was the gas pipelines freezing over.
Speaker 1: So instead of the UM planned for sixty seven thousand
Speaker 1: megawatts of power, they ended up with UM thirty one
Speaker 1: thousand because of those failures in the actual system, So
Speaker 1: they had thirty thousand megawatts. They needed a lot more
Speaker 1: than that. Uh, they probably needed about fifty thousand more
Speaker 1: megawatts than they had. And so all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: power just started going out in Texas. Supposedly isn't connected anything.
Speaker 1: So Texas went dark and everybody started to get very
Speaker 1: cold and couldn't cook and couldn't um, couldn't boil water,
Speaker 1: couldn't take showers, to basically live in a very They
Speaker 1: lived in a very dangerous situation because this is sub
Speaker 1: freezing temperatures and these areas are not set up for
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Yeah, And if you want to
Speaker 1: get your feathers ruffled and get a little riled up,
Speaker 1: to read this New York Times article about the exorbitant
Speaker 1: UM power bills that some of these people got that
Speaker 1: we're able to stay online. There's a sixty three year
Speaker 1: old Army vet who had to pay sixteen thousand dollars
Speaker 1: for his monthly bill, which wiped out his entire savings UM.
Speaker 1: A lot of people were reportedly UM, including this guy.
Speaker 1: Customers of a company called Gritty g R I D
Speaker 1: T Y. I mean, you have to laugh at a
Speaker 1: name like that, but they provide electricity at wholesale prices,
Speaker 1: and the deal with Gritty is it really quickly changes
Speaker 1: based on supply and demand. So they sell it to
Speaker 1: the customers as, hey, we're gonna pass this wholesale price
Speaker 1: directly to you for a low monthly fee, and the
Speaker 1: rate's gonna fluctuate, but it's really no big deal because
Speaker 1: it fluctuates just sort of reasonably. Um. They saw this
Speaker 1: huge jump coming, apparently, and they encouraged their customer. There's
Speaker 1: twenty nine thousand people to switch to another provider when
Speaker 1: the storm came, which is just not that easy to do,
Speaker 1: and a lot of it is through an app A
Speaker 1: lot of people were like literally connected to their bank,
Speaker 1: so people would literally watch eight ten, twelve thou dollars
Speaker 1: drained out of their bank account before their very eyes
Speaker 1: and they can't do anything about it. And uh. The
Speaker 1: architect of the Texas energy grid, his name is where
Speaker 1: is it here? William Hogan? He said, you know what
Speaker 1: this thing is? Uh, it worked exactly like it was
Speaker 1: supposed to because high prices reflected the market performing as
Speaker 1: it was designed. And um, he said, as you get
Speaker 1: closer and closer to the bare minimum, these prices get
Speaker 1: higher and higher, which is what you want is that
Speaker 1: guys nicknamed Milton Friedman. I mean, how heartless. But yes,
Speaker 1: it's true in fact, but it's pretty heartless way to
Speaker 1: look at it, you know. Yeah, And I think Governor
Speaker 1: Abbott has stepped in and said, like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: but we can't people can't be going broke paying for
Speaker 1: like three and four years worth of energy in a
Speaker 1: single month. Well, that's the opposite of what the the
Speaker 1: George W. Bush said when he was governor of Texas
Speaker 1: passed a bill that said you have to pay whatever
Speaker 1: the energy company charges you as a consumer. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what they're gonna do if they can
Speaker 1: retroactively reimburse some of these people, but it's, um, I
Speaker 1: don't know, that's horrifying, man sixteen grand I know, especially
Speaker 1: when it's taken direct like this isn't even like a
Speaker 1: well hold on, hold on, I'm not gonna pay this yet.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to but it's like that's gone
Speaker 1: now I have to go try to get it back.
Speaker 1: Good luck. Yeah, that's terrible stuff. So sorry Texas that
Speaker 1: that happened. But the other thing about it, Chuck two,
Speaker 1: is like, you know, yeah, they weren't prepared for it.
Speaker 1: And it was a freak winter storm that just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people are saying, hey, welcome to
Speaker 1: the age of climate change. This is not just a
Speaker 1: freak storm anymore. This stuff is actually going to keep happening.
Speaker 1: And Texas had virtually the same thing happened in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, and there was a there was a panel
Speaker 1: um that was created to figure out how to prevent
Speaker 1: that from happening again. They gave er out a whole
Speaker 1: list of things to do, including like winterization, like insulating
Speaker 1: their pipes Orcott didn't do it and it happened again.
Speaker 1: So I think Texas as patients with Urcott not listening
Speaker 1: to that kind of stuff has probably reached an end.
Speaker 1: So how do we fix this stuff? You mentioned, uh,
Speaker 1: the smart grid, I think about I mean, just our
Speaker 1: infrastructure in this country is in bad shape period. Seventy
Speaker 1: of large power transformers and transmission lines are at least
Speaker 1: twenty five years old, sixty percent of circuit breakers or
Speaker 1: thirty years old. And uh, you mentioned the smart grid,
Speaker 1: and I think that's they're starting to do some of it,
Speaker 1: but that's the solution going forward, right, Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: like it doesn't matter where you are UM on the
Speaker 1: on the left or the right or in the middle,
Speaker 1: everyone is like, yes, smart grid, smart grid. We the
Speaker 1: smart grid, and that's basically like the grid we have now,
Speaker 1: but just slowly, piecemeal, UM improved little by little to
Speaker 1: add way more UM back and forth communication between the generators,
Speaker 1: the transmitters, the distributors and the end user. UM that
Speaker 1: there's and there's a lot more automated sensing built into
Speaker 1: this system, which makes the whole thing a lot more clever,
Speaker 1: and UM makes like rerouting around problems a lot easier.
Speaker 1: But also one of the big things is making you
Speaker 1: and me and I and we UM a lot more
Speaker 1: savvy about the energy that we consume from moment to moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's that. And I also feel like the
Speaker 1: smart grid, most of it kind of falls under the
Speaker 1: banner of real time micro observance, whereas what we have
Speaker 1: now is very sluggish, very old fashioned. I mean it
Speaker 1: can be. It's like the difference between you know, digital
Speaker 1: smartphone technology and like the old like crank phones from
Speaker 1: the old days. Basically, Yeah, if there's a power outage,
Speaker 1: the way that the electrical generators find out about it
Speaker 1: is there's a series of towers where bonfires are lit
Speaker 1: from mountain to mountain and they finally see one that's
Speaker 1: close enough, lit close enough, and they start to like
Speaker 1: ramp up production. That's how it happens. Now it's amazing,
Speaker 1: But there's also so I mean, you've got things like
Speaker 1: UM feed er switches that basically go around a problem area.
Speaker 1: If you've got it down transmission line, it can just
Speaker 1: go around it and then you know it doesn't black
Speaker 1: everybody out. UM uh smart meters so you kind of
Speaker 1: see how much energy you're using and then also how
Speaker 1: much the price of energy is, so you can actually
Speaker 1: save money if you want to kind of get into
Speaker 1: it in that granular level. And then also um, just
Speaker 1: making sure that um that there's storage. That's the big challenge.
Speaker 1: We talked about that in our renewable energy episode Bill
Speaker 1: Gates Store. It don't have anywhere to put access, so
Speaker 1: we shuffle it around the grid. But if we have
Speaker 1: storage places strategically put around the United States, that would
Speaker 1: change absolutely everything. Yeah, as well as getting more direct use,
Speaker 1: which is solar UM. I actually have a little solar
Speaker 1: project going. I'm very excited about, uh not for my house,
Speaker 1: but I know you know this. We have some We
Speaker 1: have some acreage in North Georgia on a river that uh,
Speaker 1: no house or anything. It's just land, just a van.
Speaker 1: There may be a van one day, but it's just
Speaker 1: as I call it that. We call it the camp.
Speaker 1: It's friends and family camp. And I'm I'm trying to
Speaker 1: style it out like a legit like state park campground.
Speaker 1: And as of right now, as of like three days ago,
Speaker 1: I'm having a pavilion built. It's gonna have three solar
Speaker 1: panels on it and a little battery array, so I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be able to power like a big giant ceiling
Speaker 1: fan under the pavilion and like four odd outlets and
Speaker 1: like a coffee maker. Nothing huge, but he said, the
Speaker 1: guy said, will be enough for three or four days
Speaker 1: of full power and then like a day to juice
Speaker 1: it up. And we're never there for more than three
Speaker 1: days anyway, So I'm technically gonna have a little off
Speaker 1: grid campground. Soon you have me a coffee maker, and
Speaker 1: I should mention you've got me a very nice birthday
Speaker 1: gift that is going to live at that camp. I'm
Speaker 1: so glad you like it. Man. I saw and I
Speaker 1: was like, I know exactly where this will go, and
Speaker 1: it went exactly where I thought it would get. What
Speaker 1: is the exact name of it. I don't have the
Speaker 1: box in front of me. Oh man. It's a kindling
Speaker 1: splitter basically. Yeah, it's like a log splitter, but but
Speaker 1: it splits it into kindling. So the coolest thing about
Speaker 1: it all is the story behind it. Is this like
Speaker 1: twelve year old girl invented it in New Zealand and
Speaker 1: for the last like seven years. Now she's in her
Speaker 1: early twenties. I think she was like thirteen years old
Speaker 1: at the time. It's like a legit company and this
Speaker 1: thing you like screw it onto a log and then
Speaker 1: you put another log in it and hit it with
Speaker 1: a heavy hammer. You even got me the heavy hammer. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't not get the hammer. It splits it into kindling.
Speaker 1: I'm just so excited. Yeah, rather than like bringing an
Speaker 1: axe down onto a log, the ax is coming up
Speaker 1: from the bottom. Yes, And it's very much safer. And
Speaker 1: I even looked at a YouTube video and a review
Speaker 1: and everyone was like, these things are great. So it's
Speaker 1: safer than an axe. I can't wait to I can't
Speaker 1: wait to use that very thoughtful gift. Well, happy birthday again, man,
Speaker 1: I'm glad. And six bottles of champagne. Yeah, did you
Speaker 1: drink it all in a weekend as suggested? Not yet,
Speaker 1: but spring break is next week and we're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna get into that champagne. We'll enjoy very sweet gifts.
Speaker 1: Is that is that it did? We stopped talking about electricity?
Speaker 1: I think, didn't we? I thought you meant like, are
Speaker 1: those all the gifts? I gave you? A right? You
Speaker 1: didn't get the other eight gifts, the half case of
Speaker 1: champagne and the log split it and the hammer, the
Speaker 1: three pound sledge. That's right. Well, if you want to
Speaker 1: know more about Chuck's three pound sledge, you can email him.
Speaker 1: But also, in the meantime, if you want to know
Speaker 1: more about the electrical grid, you can just start reading
Speaker 1: about it. It's an extraordinarily complicated, complex, modern marvel of engineering.
Speaker 1: That's pretty engrossing stuff. So go to town. And in
Speaker 1: the meantime, I said go to town, which means it's
Speaker 1: time for a listener made. I'm gonna call this titanic
Speaker 1: follow up from a friend in Ireland. This is this
Speaker 1: is a fun one. Hey, guys, been listening for a
Speaker 1: few years and now I currently work in Belfast port
Speaker 1: where RMS Titanic was built. The Titanic Museum was built
Speaker 1: in Belfast and the building is in the shape of
Speaker 1: a star representing white star lines. At each point of
Speaker 1: the star is the actual size of titanics hull at
Speaker 1: st high standing underneath. It really gives you a feel
Speaker 1: for its size and makes you feel very small in
Speaker 1: a good way. Also, slip ways for Titanic are filled
Speaker 1: in for you to walk over and etched with an
Speaker 1: outline of Titanic and its sister ship Olympic to scale. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very cool, including the actual locations of the lifeboats
Speaker 1: and funnels. Again, it's very cool to walk down. You
Speaker 1: can check out. You can check it out on Google
Speaker 1: Earth just search Titanic Belfast, check out the satellite view.
Speaker 1: Keep up the great work. And that is Kyle in Belfast,
Speaker 1: Northern Ireland, and he has a nice little ps joke.
Speaker 1: He says, there's a very overused joke here in Belfast
Speaker 1: when people ask us why we celebrate something that sank,
Speaker 1: which is this It was fine when it left here.
Speaker 1: That's great, that's that trademark Belfasts humor. I was gonna
Speaker 1: do it in Irish accent, but I got stage fright.
Speaker 1: Oh come on, let's hear it again. I don't know what.
Speaker 1: I don't even know what. It was fine, It was
Speaker 1: fine when it left here. Oh that was great? Man?
Speaker 1: Was that just transferred to me to my youth when
Speaker 1: I was eating a bowl of lucky charms? Or hey
Speaker 1: mane it was fine when it left here? Very nuts. Well,
Speaker 1: let's see Chuck is at it? That's gotta be it?
Speaker 1: Who it? Sammy Davis Jr. Thank you, Sammy Davis, to
Speaker 1: you for the letter. That was Kyle Kyle. That's right, Uh,
Speaker 1: Kyle from Belfast. We appreciate you. Uh. And if you
Speaker 1: want to be appreciated like Kyle, you can send us
Speaker 1: a good email like Kyle did. Wrap it up, spank
Speaker 1: it on the bottom, and ship it out to see
Speaker 1: to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
Speaker 1: Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
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Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.