NEW: Won't Somebody Please Think of the Grid?
A new feature in Damage Magazine argues the tremendous achievement of the electrical grid and how the Left tends to undermine, not take on, responsibility for reliable electricity.
Last Monday the transmission system of the Iberian Peninsula experienced a catastrophic failure that caused blackouts across Spain and parts of Portugal. Spanish grid operators had to perform a black start operation, rare for a system of this scale, to restore electrical service. Almost 24 hours later, the grid was back to normal.
Also last Monday, Damage published mine and Matt Huber’s new feature article on the essential importance of a reliable electrical grid! We even mention black start in the opening paragraph. A wild coincidence.
Our article, “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Grid?”, serves as a follow-up to our article last year in Damage’s second issue, “The Utility of Utilities,” but now fits the new issue’s title of “Responsibility”:
Liberals and the Left tend to ignore the importance of a reliable electricity system, pushing visions of rooftop solar and 100% renewables out of line with the reality of our electrical grid. A responsible politics must aim to deliver what a reindustrializing society depends on: a stable grid.
A core idea we’re presenting is that the grid, composed of various territorial authorities with the monumental task of 24/7 balancing operations, represents a century-long socialization of the responsibility for reliable electricity service. Increasingly, though, progressives have criticized the necessary attention paid to electric reliability as conservative reaction, even outright climate change denial.
Against the socialization of electric reliability into utilities and grid operators, a growing interest in—and market for—“off-grid” home generators, rooftop solar panels, and battery storage represents a more recent privatization and individualization of that responsibility. The Right has always had its champions of rugged individualism, however divorced from reality that idea might be, but with rooftop solar the Left joins in the delusion. “From the beginning, I knew I wanted to cover my roof in solar panels,” we quote popular climate advocate Leah Stokes as saying. “That way, I could generate clean energy for my house and car.” Elsewhere, she puts a fine point on the importance of consumer choice in direct opposition to the institutions tasked with grid reliability: “if you decide to put solar on your roof, you begin to undermine [the electric utility’s] monopoly status.”
Like wind and solar power more generally, rooftop solar is a technology whose social benefits can be outweighed by the political-economic circumstances in which it is deployed. The dream of rooftop solar that is shared across the political spectrum rests on a particular form of compensation for its owners called net energy metering (NEM), the subject of intense political battles in California in recent years. We argue the case against NEM, a case that is rarely heard among progressives who ordinarily support public goods rather than private ones and who would ordinarily oppose subsidies for affluent homeowners at the expense of the working class.
In the article we also take aim at the absurdity of “100% renewables,” pinning the blame on prominent environmentalist and progressive advocate Bill McKibben, who argued that it should be a political demand on par with Medicare for All. McKibben has pollinated the pages of many liberal outlets over the past decade, in each one preaching the gospel of 100% renewables as envisioned by controversial, debunked Stanford scholar Mark Z. Jacobson. Though if you listen to McKibben and to Hollywood celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Don Cheadle, who sit on the board of Jacobson’s star-studded nonprofit, you’d never know how what a punchline, not prophet, he’s actually become.
What advocates of an ever-increasing “percent renewables” misunderstand is what their beloved metric even means: a financial accounting scheme predicated not on the physical reality of what makes the grid function but on the organized exchange of so-called renewable energy certificates, or RECs. Even many intellectuals chiming in about decarbonization are misled by this financialization of electricity.
In New York, landmark legislation pushed by an environmental Left coalition has rekindled public power at the New York Power Authority. But while the state’s grid operator actually tasked with ensuring reliable electricity service warns of the impending electricity shortfalls in New York City, the environmental Left—most prominently the Democratic Socialists of America—plug their ears and demand the closure of NYPA’s fleet of gas-powered peaker plants. They’re not just the only city peaker plants that are operated for public need and not for profit, but also the cleanest ones by a wide margin. But that doesn’t stop the public power advocates on the left from targeting them.
Finally, at the Tennessee Valley Authority, where public power also serves as an entire grid operator (i.e. a balancing authority), plans for new gas-burning power plants—and a new pipeline extension to fuel them—elicit nothing but outrage from liberals and the environmental Left. Whether this new infrastructure is needed for reliable electricity in the face of massive coal plant closures and rising residential and industrial demand doesn’t matter to them; the opposition sees only an intentional desire to harm the planet.
Read the full article here: WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE GRID?
I hope you read the article in full on the Damage website. It’s free to read with an email signup. If you subscribe to the Damage print edition, you can read it on the beautiful page, alongside other great contributions on the theme of responsibility. Readers of mine can click this link for 15% off a Damage digital or U.S. print subscription.