Brownouts, Blackouts and EVs

A half dozen years ago the power went out here in the Duluth region for several days. As soon as it happened I became concerned about the food in our two chest freezers and the fridge. I skipped my lunch hour to seek out some dry ice. I quickly learned of two sources, the first just a few blocks from where I worked.

When I got there I found that I was aready too late. They had been cleaned out by local restaurants and other quick responders. They instructed me to go to a place in West Duluth near Clyde Iron Works on Michigan Street. As it turns out, I was received the very last pieces of dry ice in the Twin Ports. Fifteen minutes later the dry ice was distributed in our freezers and fridge. 

Little did we know that the power would be out for four days. Fortunately, we have just enough dry ice to keep the frozen goods frozen that long. For others in our area the power was out for nearly a week. 

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This morning I was thinking about this incident and its implications as we're pushed toward an EV future. How would people with rural homes get to town if they couldn't charge their vehicles? What will office workers working from home do without power?

How will 50th floor employers reach their desks without elevators? Will the subways still operate when the power is down?

When I was living in Puerto Rico (1978-79) we have blackouts and brownouts every week. It could be half an hour, or it could be a full day. Do manufacturers keep their employees on stand-by? It seems like they. have to. Do employees get paid when no work is accomplished? Usually, though it's tough on the business owners.

Another thing that's tough on manufacturers is the manner in which businesses are being tied up with red tape due to government excess, absurd regulations and frivolous lawsuits. Check out Meredith Angwin's story "Stasi Come Home." 

I have much more to share, but and going to pull the trigger here and get on with my day. Stay informed and keep your eyes open. Till next.

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People I follow on Electric Grid and Energy related issues

Robert Bryce
https://robertbryce.com/ 

Meredith Angwin: The Electric Grandma
https://substack.com/@mjangwin

Doomberg
https://substack.com/@doomberg 

Tax Dollars Go to What Is Politically Popular, Not to What Makes Sense

An Old Curmudgeon

In 2020 I started a blog post with this sentence: "Money goes to what is popular, not to what makes sense." It was an introduction of sorts to an article by Robert Bryce titled,  Why Is Solar Energy Getting 250 Times More In Federal Tax Credits Than Nuclear?

It wasn't the first time I read something by Robert Bryce. In 2011 he published a book titled Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, which I read some time afterwards.

In case you miss the connection, Robert Bryce is a contrarian.

For some reason I am attracted to contrarian thinking. Perhaps that is why I invented the word Herdwinked. Perhaps that is why I purchased books by the Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman. 

When it comes to EVs, the power grid, crime, homelessness or world peace, I hope that I am wrong, but I'm quite pessimistic about how these things are going to play out. I'd rather be wrong, because there's peril in the future I see, a peril that is not being adequately talked about or addressed. 

I really liked the opening line of The Imitation Game, which was about the machine Alan Turing created to break Germany's Enigma encryption code. The film begins with the words, "Are you paying attention?"

None of us can be experts in everything. On the other hand, to keep from being herdwinked requires constant vigilance. Each of us must learn to discern, to separate wheat from chaff when it comes to ideas. 

Today's Substack eNewletter from Robert Bryce is titled Out Of Transmission Revisited. He begins by presenting the Green energy optimist's vision of the future. Unfortunately, there is a disconnect between their rhetoric and reality.

Bryce lays out the facts, with plenty of charts that demonstrate what we're up against. You can read the story here.

If you can't make the time, then here is a brief snippet to munch on. "The high-voltage grid is expanding very slowly, the costs associated with it are soaring, and the opposition to such a vast expansion is real and growing."

And here's one more.

Jenkins may be correct that [building out enough power transmission lines to meet future demand] “shouldn’t be viewed as impossible.” But the odds  of the U.S. building 75,000 miles of new high-voltage transmission over the next 10 years are, as my father used to say, “slim and none, and Slim left town.”

Open your eyes.

Will Electric Cars Rule? If So, When?

1899 -- "La Jamais Contente"

"Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday's vision of the future."
~ Richard Corliss 

About two decades ago I was looking through the 36-page car section of a Popular Mechanics when the following article by Roger Huntington caught my eye: “How Far Can We Go With The Piston Engine?”  The article begins like this. “An early death for the age-old internal combustion piston engine is the prediction of some people.  They say the exhaust can’t be cleaned up enough to meet future air-pollution and antismog laws and that we’ll be running around with batteries, steam, fuel cells and atomic engines in another ten years.”  

This was written in 1969. Seems to me these words could have been written in ‘79 or ’89 or ’99.  Or even yesterday. Is this picture of the near future more relevant today than it was then? For sure the EV has come a very long way. 

IT’S ELECTRIC 

1895 -- The Thomas Parker Electric Car

One way to get a perspective is to look back to the first days of automobile transportation.  Did you know that electric cars were the rage then as well?  

When first developed, the internal combustion engine did not take the motoring public by storm.  Though many inventors produced various designs for this novel approach to mobility, Gottlieb Daimler is often credited with developing the first prototype of the modern gas engine, including a vertical cylinder with gasoline injected through a carburetor. A year later, in 1886, Karl Benz obtained the first patent for a gas fueled car and the horseless carriage was soon on its way out.  

During this same time period carriages were also being powered by fuel cells. As early as 1842 an electric road vehicle was powered by a non-rechargeable battery.  Improvements in the battery made battery powered vehicles increasingly practical, and by 1899  there were more electric cars on the road in Britain and France than there were gas powered vehicles. In the late 1890’s there was even a New York City taxi fleet composed of electric cars.  

Electric cars were quieter, cleaner, and offered a much more pleasant motoring experience. And they could run at a pretty decent clip as well. In 1899 a Belgian built electric car called “La Jamais Contente” was clocked at 68 miles per hour, setting a world land speed record. The gas-powered counterpart was a hand-cranked contraption that smelled, vibrated a lot and made a lot of noise.  The hardest part of all was changing gears, which you didn’t have to do in an electric car. 

EdNote: There were even some deaths caused when a car in a garage lurched forward, causing the man turning the crank to be crushed against the back of the garage.

Electric vehicles did have their limitations. First, they were expensive. Second, they had a range of less than 20 miles, which became problematic in a wide open country like the United States.    

END OF THE ROAD

It was only a matter of time before the internal combustion engine would overpower the electric motor. Times were changing and America’s sprawling highway network was beginning to unfold. Motorists needed a car that could go the distance. Gas power was also helped by the discovery of Texas crude oil, making gasoline abundant and affordable. Gasoline filling stations sprang up not because of government subsidies, but because people wanted to take advantage of this new opportunity to make a profit. 

Charles Kettering’s invention of the electric starter in 1912 had a big impact on the desirability of gas powered cars, and Henry Ford’s mass production processes brought the price down to where almost anyone could afford these vehicles. A gas-powered Ford, at $650, became far more desirable than an electric roadster that cost over a thousand dollars more.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE

I cite the Pop Mechanics article because it has a direct bearing upon our expectations regarding the future of electric vehicles. This past week Robert Bryce made a presentation to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee regarding EV hype in the media in general and some of the impediments to rapid EV adoption. By rapid I mean ten years from now. 

Bryce began by reciting the numerous examples over the past 100 years in which the media has announced the imminent death of gasoline-powered vehicles because EVs were on the rise. The last of these was Tony Seba's prophesy that "by 2025 gasoline engines will be unable to compete with electric vehicles."

Naturally our government wants to run roughshod over what the public wants, creating mandates to force this shift. It ought to be obvious that we're not ready.

Tesla sales have been dramatic, but who is buying Teslas? Wealthy people who can afford a second car to take vacations in because EVs still don't have the range that gas-powered cars have.

What prompted Bryce to speak up at this Senate hearing was an EPE mandate being proposed "that would require two-thrds of new vehicles sold in the U.S. to be all-electric by 2032."

So, auto manufacturers will be forced, coerced, to fill their lots with EVs. But will Americans buy them? 

It's a solid, fact-filled read with lots of charts and data. I would encourge you to check it out. You can find it here: My U.S. Senate Testimony On EPA's EV Mandates: "Unrealistic And Unattainable"

Robert Bryce is author of Power Hungry: The Myths Of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels Of The Future,

Robert Bryce Discusses Current Events with Doomberg

Nope, we're not in Kansas anymore.

This weekend Meredith Angwin (Shorting the Grid) sent me a Robert Bryce podcast addressing many of the energy concerns that I worry about. Bryce is an American author and journalist who writes about energy, politics and other related topics. In this particular episode he interviewed a green chicken named Doomberg.

Doomberg is the nom de plume of one of the most successful new publications on Substack. In this episode, Doomberg’s famed green chicken icon explains the power of anonymity in a time of cancel culture, why politicians prefer platitudes over physics on energy, China, supply chains, the many problems with cryptocurrency, the “profound wave of onshoring” about to occur, and why “there’s going to be a lot of suffering” around the world in the coming months.

Doomberg self-identifies as a small team of consultants that come from industry. "We collectively have decades of experience in the heavy industry, commodity energy sectors. Doomberg is the anonymous publishing arm of that bespoke consulting firm."

The podcast was so insightful I wanted to share some excerpts in the hope that it might stimulate some thinking. Near the beginning Robert Bryce asks what it is about how being Anonymous that helps Doomberg get their message out.

Doomberg: When you write about provocative things, one of our objectives is to be provocative without being polarizing. That’s becoming harder and harder to do in our culture. It’s just a fact of life. And to the extent that being anonymous allows people to or forces people to attack your ideas, as opposed to attacking the person, right? That’s another huge benefit of being anonymous."

Bryce: Let me jump into this piece you wrote February 25. It’s time to get serious about energy. And this is the day after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, trying to get serious about U.S. energy policy and preserve our place in the geopolitical order or be forced to stop play acting as a superpower. 

The laws of physics make our cards transparent to our political enemies. And it’s all too easy for them to call our bluff when they know in advance what we’re holding. So my question here is, why is it so easy or so facile for Pelosi or Joe Biden or John Kerry, who just about two weeks ago said, "Oh, we’re going to decarbonize our entire electric grid, and we’re going to do it in 13 years." Why is it so easy for them to demagogue about energy? Or why do they have such a predilection about it?

Doomberg: Honestly, I chalk it up to shocking ignorance on the part of the people who end up in positions of power. And we have a phrase that we’ve coined, which has kind of gotten popular, which is in the battle between platitudes and physics, physics is undefeated. And this actually dovetails on something that you said about your career and that I think makes Doomberg unique. You have reporting background, we have decades of experience in heavy industry. But we are freed from heavy industry and freed from the confines of corporate public affairs teams that far too often shackle the the executives who who know enough and articulate enough to make the case for energy policy. 

So if you’re working at an Exxon Mobil or you’re working downstream in chemicals at a Dupont or pick your favorite major and you’re an executive, the last thing you’re going to do is go on social media and engage in the tug of war. They’re more interested in stock options, you know, RSU units, not getting cancelled, toeing the company line, letting the professional PR people within their company handle that aspect of the dirty part of the business. Because we’re freed of all of that, we occupy a pretty unique, you know, overlap in the Venn diagram between detailed industry experience, deep background and finance, and an ability to jump into the arena of content creation and effectively compete. And very few teams have all three of those. 

There’s a lot of content creators who come from academia or who come just from finance. We have all three, we have finance, we have industry expertise... I’m a PhD scientist, and I lead many hundreds of PhDs on research programs in renewable energy, on traditional energy, pick your favorite material science development. Very few people who are creating content today for the world of consumers have that kind of background and are willing to share it. And so our political class unfortunately lacks that background. 

What does John Kerry know about the physics of life? Nothing. John Kerry is the product of elite school systems, who, you know, I’m sure he’s a frequent attender of very well fed cocktail parties, and gets all kinds of applause for spouting platitudes. Why wouldn’t he keep spouting platitudes, it’s worked for him for the first, you know, six or seven decades of his life. Eventually, if you speed headlong into the wall of physics at 60 miles an hour, are you going to crash? And we’re going to do that. It’s unfortunate. We are optimistic about what happens after that. But the path function needn't be this terrible. It just seems like we are on an irreversible course to make all the wrong decisions and let physics teaches what’s what the true constraints are.

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:57 Food crisis

After explaining why the impact of food shortages in the U.S. will not be devastating here in the U.S., Doomberg expresses extreme concern about other parts of the world:

Doomberg: The farmers who are on the brink are the people in South America, and Sri Lanka. India is having crop failures... there’s going to be a lot of suffering in Africa. So the price spike in fertilizer for the subset of farmers who are sort of cash based accounting, and that’s, you know, the majority of them, they’re gonna use less fertilizer. They’re gonna use more manure, they’re gonna have lower yields. They’re gonna have more crop failures. There’s gonna be less food. We believe the behavior in the US that will avert a food crisis here will only make it worse over there.

...And here’s the scary part, Robert, We have outsourced a lot of the heavy industry, mining and things like that to countries that are going to be on the brink. And we’re seeing it already in the copper mines in Peru and Chile. They’re critical inputs into the electric revolution, that are dependent upon these societies being fed and we’re seeing food riots early on. What are we going to see in the fall?

...Their currencies are hyper inflating. Yeah, that’s what happens. Because they can’t afford to pay for the imports needed to run their societies. And it’s tragic. People are going to starve in vast numbers. And we wish this wasn’t true, as we as you quoted in that piece. Never have we been more convinced we're right and more disappointed that we’re right. It’s not a happy prediction. 

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From here Doomberg explains how much fertilizer we use to grow corn for ethanol or soybean oil for renewable diesel. But once again, there are limitations. The more fertilizer we use for running our cars, the less that is available for the rest of the world. Bottom line: "These are all just trade offs. We could pay a little bit more at the pump and feed the world. Or we could pay a little bit less at the pump and starve the world." 

THERE IS A LOT MORE. If you want to listen to the podcast or skim the transcript, Check it out HERE.