CVL10: MEREDITH ANGWIN, Chemist and Electric Grid Expert - Your Future Access To Energy May Depend On Understanding The Grid
The Curated Viewing List stays with energy issues, importantly, as this past week the Public Service Commission admitted "blackouts are coming" and uttered the words "black start"
Our times will be noted for their irony. Any further “success” in the effort to “Electrify Everything” will bring not success but widespread system failures and potential collapse.
Our grid cannot support the “Electrification of Everything.” It’s already struggling mightily with the “Electrification of Many Things.” To aspire to electrify even more things will overwhelm the grid - more EVs, electric heating of homes and businesses, the elimination of gas stoves in your kitchen, the electrification of garbage trucks, the electrification of commercial airplanes, the electrification of the US military… the list goes on, added to all the things you routinely plug in right now: your Apple watch that monitors your heartbeat, your gaming devices, your ear buds, your cell phone, your wireless speakers, your tablet and laptop, your electric bicycle or skateboard… these in addition to the devices and appliances already powered by electricity: the refrigerator, lighting in your home, central air conditioning, the many televisions you have in your home, the microwave, the vacuum cleaner, the bread toaster, even the constantly-operating water pump in your turtle aquarium.
To add “Everything” to the list of existing “Many Things” will break the back of the camel that cannot handle one more bit of straw.
This week’s Public Service Commission meeting ought to be the week’s biggest statewide story, but somehow folks are missing the significance of it; we believe that we’ve all become a bit too comfortable; we’ve come to expect that the lights will always come on when we flip the switch. Anything else we think “won’t happen here.”
If only it won’t; if only it couldn’t. But it likely will and it can happen here.
We have been issued a stark warning about BLACKOUTS from the very people who produce and distribute electricity. The Public Service Commission seems to agree with the legitimacy of the warning, but is providing no remedies.
Energy is THE issue in Louisiana right now!
So the answer to us is clear: Educate people about the severity of this issue; our ability to power our lives is at stake! Our electrical grid cannot support the “Electrification of Everything!”
Your future access to energy may depend on how well you understand the grid.
Enter Meredith Angwin:
You’ll learn quite a lot about how the grid works and the vulnerabilities it suffers:
She’s WONDERFUL!
And here, Mrs. Angwin is having a conversation with Alex Epstein about the “hidden fragility of our grid”…
We hope you all benefit from understanding more about the basic foundation of our society: reliable power!
And allow us, if you will, to add this bit of laignaippe about solar energy:
Nineteen solar facilities in Louisiana provide 0.44% of the state's electricity, as reported by the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA). How many facilities consuming how much acreage would be needed to provide, say, only 20% of the state's electricity?
Solar panels are not the answer. Spinning razor blades hoisted into the sky are not the answer. Renewables are not base load power.
Louisiana: We need Small Modular Nuclear Reactors… let’s put in our order today!
“…if we don’t put steel in the ground… which means we’re going to have to start looking at, you know, nukes, whether they’re small modular nukes or whatever we’re going to have to do, but we have to keep a real solid open mind to this.
We can have renewables, but renewables are not base load electricity and will lead us closer to a trip to a black start provision which will be a bigger problem for the citizens of this state and the industry of this state and the economy of this state. We have to be very careful about what we commit to...”
PSC Commissioner Eric Skrmetta
