Shorting the Grid, by Meredith Angwin
Review by Dave Gamrath
One-liner: In Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, author Meredith Angwin does a deep-dive into the inefficiencies and complexities of America’s electrical grid.
Book Review:
“The American electrical grid has been called ‘the largest machine on earth,’” writes Meredith Angwin, author of Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid. After reading about grid failures in Texas, and rolling blackouts in other states, I picked up Angwin’s book, hoping to learn what has been causing all of these problems. Angwin is a chemist who spent her career working in the utility industry and teaches courses on America’s electrical grid, writes with a snarky tone that can be both endearing and aggravating. But she makes her point clear: “In my opinion, a grid meltdown is coming.”
Warning: for a grid novice like myself, Angwin’s book was a bit of a technical deep-dive, with lots of acronyms and technical terms. The book’s main point is that our grid contains insane complexities that make it woefully inefficient. Grid rules and regulations are so complex within our utility industry that “you could hide an elephant in these regulations.” Angwin defines our two different grids. “The power grid is about generators and voltage and wires. It is about delivering electricity to customers.” Our power grid works pretty well. In contrast, our “policy grid” of rules and regulations is where our grid fails.
Angwin writes that “to some extent, this entire book is about what went wrong with utility deregulation” that took place 25 years ago, and led to the removal of consumer choices, a lack of transparency, and removed accountability. Previously, our utility model was “vertically integrated,” where utilities own the power plants and distribution equipment. Deregulation moved much of the country to Regional Transmission Organizations, or RTOs. Angwin explains (in great detail) how RTOs are a bureaucratic nightmare. Within an RTO “no agency is charged with ensuring reliable power,” and the grid is becoming “more fragile and more expensive,” and risks frequent rolling blackouts. The deregulation that led to RTOs did not result in an energy market that saved any money. It just added complexity. “RTO markets punish reliable plants and support unreliable plants.” Angwin writes that “it’s Orwellian. RTOs are ‘deregulated’ only if ‘deregulated’ actually means ‘lots more regulation.’” She explains many details of the RTO system, but the net/net, per Angwin, is this: RTOs “gave us higher prices and the possibility of a new kind of reliability failure,” enabled market manipulation and failures, and resulted in mismanagement and inefficiencies. Angwin writes that “in an RTO area, the buck never stops anywhere.”
Angwin calls herself an environmentalist, and states that she believes that man-made carbon dioxide is a problem, but that her “book is about the grid, not about the climate debate.” Still, she dedicates multiple chapters in the book to the use of renewable energy. Going with the primary theme of the book, Angwin describes the insane complexities of how renewables are included within our grid. Angwin believes that much of the discussion on renewables is hype, and that there is much “green rhetoric.” She believes that renewables can work for meeting some “intermittent power” needs, but not for “baseload” power needs. She states that renewables make the grid less efficient: “the grid has to work around them.” A problem with integrating intermittent renewables on the grid is that they require a backup energy supply. Angwin writes extensively about ways in which renewables are inefficient, and attacks studies that claim that America can make the switch to renewables. In multiple chapters, Angwin attacks policies that pay homeowners for adding solar to their homes, and then sell this solar energy back into the grid at retail prices (I.E., the price that the homeowner pays for their electricity). She states that the homeowners should be paid at far lower wholesale rates, thus making it much less attractive to install solar panels on one’s home.
Angwin explains how Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) are gamed and misused, and lead to greenwashing. She questions whether or not RECs are really a “shell game” and states that “RECs are symptomatic of energy policies so complicated that few people understand them, including many of the politicians that voted for them.” Angwin writes that “renewable portfolio standards are a very expensive way to abate carbon,” since mandates increase the cost of power, and that cap-and-trade systems would be more efficient and much less expensive.
Angwin writes extensively about the storage requirement for green energy, because energy is needed even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Storing electricity in batteries is extremely difficult and comes with many barriers, including loss of energy during the round trip to/from storage. Battery production is resource-intensive. Today, grid-level storage is not available. The number of batteries needed for grid-level storage is staggering, and likely will never happen. Simply put, Angwin believes that batteries can help the grid, but cannot be the grid.
Angwin stresses that, at this point, personal responsibility towards lowering one’s own energy usage will have minimal (if any) impact on climate change. She writes that “little changes make a big difference is bunkum when applied to climate change and power.” Angwin declares that the low-carbon fuels she strongly prefers are nuclear and hydro, and writes about Sweden and Ontario low-carbon grids, both relying on nuclear and hydro. Nuclear power is Angwin’s clear energy favorite.
Angwin sums up her beliefs like this: consumers should have access to all the energy we want when we want it. The power grid should be “as clean as possible,” with the cost of electricity being “as low as reasonably possible.” Low-carbon fuel sources should “be encouraged, as much as reasonably possible.” Nuclear plants should serve as the grid’s energy baseload. Hydro is the best “load-following” energy, because it can be started quickly and is “non-polluting.” No hydro in the area? Then follow up nuclear with solar, wind and natural gas as backups. What can we, as consumers, do? Pay attention and get involved!
From an environmental perspective, Angwin’s book has some glaring omissions, and her opinions will likely piss off most environmentalists. First, her analysis fails any mention of the costs climate change will wreak on America, not to mention the planet. Second, she chooses not to address nuclear waste. Third, she ignores the environmental impact of hydro power. But her relentless harping on the very real inefficiencies within our grid make it blatantly clear that we are wasting scads of energy, and money, and that the risk of our grid “shorting” is way too high. Angwin sold me on the fact that we need a total grid revamp.
Reviewer Opinion: If you want to go deep into our electrical grid, read this book!
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