Stuff You Should Know - How the Electrical Grid Works

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

The electrical grid that provides power to the US is one of those things you don’t give a second thought to until it stops working – then it’s tough to think about anything else. Learn why this engineering marvel is past its prime and how to update it. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Spuzin-Clark and there's Chuck Zippy Zapp Bryant. Okay. There's just the two of us. I don't have to come up with any more stupid electricity based

names. Jerry, Jerry, the, uh, the, yeah, she's weird on here. She just zapped off into the ether. Absent. Who knows? Yeah. We should call roll, Chuck. Okay. Yeah. Josh here. Chuck. Prison. Jerry. Jerry. No, she's not here. Yeah. Dude, I just had a shower today for the first time in a few days because we didn't have water at our house. No. And I put this on the movie crushers page just to get some feedback. I was like, would you rather not have power or water and that kind of figures into today's episode and, you know, 98% of the people are very sensible and said, would much rather not have power than water. Yeah. But there were a handful of psychopaths that said they'd rather be, I guess, just buying dozens of gallons of water to, to flush toilets

and wash hands and not bathe. At what point, at what point though, of going without water, and maybe you reached this point and you can tell me, do you get to where you're like, well, we're just going to save water and dig a, dig a pit and be into that. A latrine. Well, I mean, we were letting the yellow mellow, you know what I'm saying? Unfortunately, yes. But you know, the brown, you got to flush down. You should trademark that. And it really hits home how much water a toilet uses when you have to fill it up with those huge like arrowhead five gallon jugs. Yeah. And it's just shameful, but you know, I was happy to take that shower. I gotta tell you. Yeah. But you go through three of those five gallon jugs before you realize that you're

accidentally stepping on the handle and they're just going right down the drain. And you're like, man, this is not my week. But this isn't about water. It's about power. Which, you know, it's a really good question. And I'm not surprised that you got the response that you got from it because we tend to think of electricity as a really nice modern luxury. And that is basically not the case anymore. For most of the climates in the United States, electricity is an absolute necessity. It's not a luxury. You need it to survive in the modern world. You could try to do the Ted Kizinski thing, go off grid, people do it successfully. But even then, if you look into what they're doing, I would guess something in the neighborhood

of 90% of those people are still using something like solar power or wind power. They just aren't connected to this grid that we're going to talk about today. Yeah. And I should caveat the question I posted the movie crushers was whether they're a side like obviously in the hot, hot summer, people can and do die from outages. And in the winter, they do as well. But it was, you know, that wasn't the case here in Atlanta. Although it is cold today. Yeah, it is very cold. But I mean, not deadly cold, but it gets deadly cold once in a while here. But even beyond like heating and cooling, just to stay alive, like electricity is so interwoven with our lives that, you know, you're like,

okay, I could wash dishes by hand, you know, it's not my preference, but whatever. Or, you know, I can use the old gas powered lawnmower instead of the electric lawnmower. But there's also like, can you keep up in school or at work without, you know, electricity? It's really just a fundamental necessity in modern industrial life. And we get this based on this huge, sprawling, rickety old black and white cartoon donkey of an engineering marvel that we call the electrical grid. It's crazy how held together with like duct tape and bubblegum, this thing is, but it still literally delivers the juice for us. Yeah. And it is funny how we, it's so like power and water, you know, here in the United States is so ingrained is just

something we kind of take for granted that when you don't have it is the only time you notice. And like the only fun thing about the past few days was hearing Emily scream from another room because, you know, your instinct is, oh, I have grease on my finger. Let me wash it off. And just hearing her like flick, you know, some faucet or something somewhere in the house over the past three days and nothing comes out. Because you just forget. Same when the power's off, you're constantly flicking a switch and going, ah, I hate life. It's not there. Yeah. Well, that's why you'll see in a lot of different like power company's names, the word reliability, because that is key. Like you can't have, you know, an electric company that's just kind of like,

oh, we work a lot of the time, you know, don't make it credit for that. It's like, no, people want you to work basically 100% of the time. You don't want to sign up for a company that's called partial credit. Right. Exactly. Exactly. You want, you want the full credit one, the real ambitious types that like with their hands, shoot up into the air at every question. That's the kind of energy company you want. So should we talk about this big antiquated system? Yeah. So like I said, it's considered a modern marvel. And part of the reason why it's considered a modern, modern marvel is just from its sheer enormous size. Yeah. I mean, big time. We're talking 19,000 generators. And in this case,

it is literally generating the power like a coal plant or a natural gas plant or a wind farm, that kind of thing. Sure. 55,000 substations, transmission substations. And we'll, we've talked about this before and we'll get to it later. But this is when you're stepping up and stepping down power to get it in and out of your house. Or I guess not out of your house. It only comes in. It depends. If you have a good solar array and like a power company that wants your stuff, you can sell the excess stuff. It's rare. 642,000 miles of transmission lines. It's a lot. 6.3 million miles of distribution lines. And these are like the power poles,

unless you're lucky enough to have buried power lines. I know it looks so much better. They're doing that actually in our neighborhood finally. And they approached us with a dollar figure to say, can we put this huge big green thing in your front yard? And we said, thank you, no. Try someone else. Yeah. You're like, not these neighbors. We like them, but three doors down. They really suck. So try them. Well, I mean, some, it doesn't have to go in our yard. So I think they're just taking volunteers who want to make a little scratch, but you can't like plant bushes in front of it or anything. And our front yard is very exposed. It would look really bad. Yeah. And we'll talk about what those are, but they are seriously dangerous too if you

end up getting into one of those. The things that kids play on all the time. Yeah. It's crazy. Those are really, really dangerous. Basically mini power stations, they're transformers. They just happen to be like on the ground rather than up on a pole where everybody's used to them. Yeah. I mean, I felt kind of bad at first because I thought, am I not doing my part to make sure our neighborhood gets buried? But they said that, you know, they're, it doesn't have to go there. And they can just, that there are a lot of people that are going to want that however much money it was. Were they like, okay, well, you know, we understand your decision, but we noticed you have an empty lot behind your house and you're

like, keep walking. Oh dude, you know what's funny? What? We found out once we assumed that property that we were squatting on that two weeks later, Georgia power got in touch with them. So... No, I know. That's why I made that joke. But that was exactly what was going to happen. Right. Yeah. For that. It's not a joke. I know, but I was joking about how close you came. Oh, goodness me. All right. So let's talk about the nationwide network. And when we're talking about this, keep in mind, we're talking about the lower 48. Obviously, Hawaii and Alaska have their own grids and systems. Yeah. They were strangely left out of this, the poor, poor deers. Yeah. But we're thinking about them. Yeah. But on the lower 48, we have basically three big,

separate grids that are called interconnections. And really, it should just be two. There should be the eastern interconnection, which is basically everything west of the Rockies, or east of the Rockies, a lot of the great plain states up to the northeast, the southeast, all that is the eastern connection. Then you've got the western interconnection, which is west of the Rockies, and then you got Texas. Those are the three interconnections of the United States electrical grid. Yeah. Here's my question. Is it, is Texas literally no longer connected at all? No. That's the big world about the whole thing. They're connected to God and everybody. They're connected to Mexico. Mexico saved, they took us in 2011. They're connected to everybody. They just,

somehow, are being left out of the law. It's ridiculous. No, but they are connected. Yes. Like, okay. Yes. Because I was going to say, is it the lower 47? But technically, they are connected, but they're just, Texas is going to do Texas. No, and there's even, that's exactly right. And then there's even parts of Texas, including El Paso and some parts of the Panhandle that are connected to either the eastern or the western interconnection. But most of Texas, by far, is its own interconnection, its own separate basic grid. Yeah. Yeah. No, even more than that, I would say it's probably closer to like 95 or 98%, like almost all of it. Okay. All right. Well, this is good, though, that we're interconnected. And there are a lot of

big benefits to that, chief of which is probably reliability, because when you have such an interconnected grid, you can work together. And there's a lot of backups and redundancies built in. So, if there's a big demand in one place or if power goes down in one place, you can reroute and have, get some help from your neighbors, basically. Right, exactly. And that actually came about as we'll see from a little bit of deregulation, but also it kind of developed from power producers realizing like, well, we'll talk about that in a minute. There's also flexibility, right? So, if you have like a bunch of different sources, say you've got a wind farm offshore in Florida, and then you also have, you're getting power from

like a dam in Georgia, and all of these are providing power to the southeast, and you have all sorts of coal fire power plants and nuclear power plants. You can kind of put all these together into an energy portfolio, and all of them are providing electricity to the grid. So, the fact that it's like interconnected, it can accept electrical production from generators all over the place, and from different varieties and types. But as far as you're concerned, it's all just, it all just turns into electricity after it's generated. Right. And then the last advantage is affordability. And this is kind of what you were hinting at, you know, deregulation sort of has giveth and taken away in some ways. Starting in the 80s, the grid was opened to

wholesale competition, and private power companies started investing in certain efficiencies. And that made, that did really make electricity affordable in the US. But it also, when it comes to like insulating pipelines, like Texas did not do, it makes companies more reticent to invest in money like that, because they're like, you know, why would we want to un-line our pockets? Right, exactly. You know what I'm saying? And so, you put all this stuff together. You put the power generation plants, you put the transmission lines, you put the distribution networks that all go into like people's homes and businesses and end up as like an outlet or socket or something like that. And that altogether, all those components is the electrical grid. And that's, that's it.

So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about the history of the grid. How about that? Let's do it. Okay. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot,

sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been

trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Chuck, also, before we talk about the history, I want to direct everybody to what I think is one of our better science-based episodes, how electricity works. Yeah, that was a good one. We cover some of this stuff in there, but like we really got into electricity. It was electrifying. Boo. You laughed. I know. I'm just laughing because you're my friend. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. I can't punch you right now because you're in a different place. Yeah, that's true. I probably wouldn't have tried that joke. Were we in the same room? Right. You learned from the last one.

And I know we talked, like you said, about part of this in electricity, but our earliest power grids were built in the 1880s, and they were all very local and specific. And this was a time and place when Edison and Tesla were duking it out in a very public, sometimes grotesque way to prove that there, in Edison's case, DC system or Tesla's AC DC, alternating current system was better and gruesome, meaning electrifying large animals. I know, man. That SOB. You always got to say that, right? Oh, yeah. He should go down in history. He's being reliable for that. Yeah, he's a terrible guy in that respect, for sure. But Tesla went out in large part due to a lot of

financial backing from George Westinghouse. Right. But not just that. Like, direct current has... It was better. In some ways, but it also has some serious disadvantages to alternating current, which was the Tesla Westinghouse version. And we'll talk about exactly why, but just remember that alternating current is way better for long distance transmission. So the fact that we went with alternating current meant that we could create this huge, extensive grid with hundreds of thousands or millions of miles of transmission and distribution line. That's all thanks to Nikola Tesla's alternating current. That's right. So early part of the 20th century, there were about 4,000 individual electric utilities with all these tiny

grids. And then World War II rolls around and there's a big spike in demand for more power because it was just after World War II, there was a big boom, lots of new appliances and fancy new things that needed power. And the smaller little independent grids looked at each other and said, I guess we got to hold hands now and start working together to meet this demand. Yeah. There was this really big push to electrify America. The FDR took up pretty early in his presidency and he took on these really powerful electric utilities and got a bunch of black eyes as a result of it, but ended up winning passing the Federal Power Act of 1935, which basically put a leash on the holding companies that there was like a handful of very large,

powerful holding companies that basically ran electricity in the United States. And they weren't really innovating. They weren't doing much to electrify the US. So the federal government got involved and basically took over. So we're going to regulate you guys from now on and the United States became very much electrified as a whole country. But in return for this, it wasn't just the nanny state taking away from the corporate state. They said, how about this? We'll give you guys monopolies and we're going to keep a really close eye on and we're going to regulate strongly, but you guys can make your costs back and a reasonable profit. And so owning an electric company became, it was like printing your own money. You had so many customers that

you were making gobs of money and every year, your growth, the growth of the entire industry was about 8% each year. That's really good. And it was also money in the bank. They knew that America was just going to keep consuming and consuming and consuming. So they would just build more and more power plants and they were just going to sit back and collect 8% a year. And actually everybody was happy. There's a lot of innovation and everything. But one of the things that these different power monopolies learned early on is that everyone expected power on demand 24 hours a day. If somebody wanted to plugs their vacuum cleaner in at 3am, they better have power. There wasn't like downtime that these guys could factor in. And as we'll see, there was no storage

capacity. That's something that we need to get that we don't have, which means that power has to be generated constantly. And you also have to have backup power. It was really, really expensive to build a backup power station. And so these early companies figured out that they could buy power from other rival companies that had some surplus right then, cheaper than it would be for them to generate it or to build a backup generating plant. And in this way, the early independent grid started to connect to one another to kind of buy and sell power as needed. And this kind of wholesale power market developed. And that's where the grid started to connect together. Right. And we should also point out that in 1935, with the passing of the Federal

Power Act, that's when Texas said, nah, we're going to do our own thing. We're going to make our own power. We're going to keep our own power. And we're going to have our own body to oversee it called the ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Millions of listeners just went boo, yes. They created that in 1970 and they manage about 90% of the grid in Texas. Right. And we use a lot of power in this country. I think the US consumed, this is a couple of years ago in 2019, 3.9 trillion kilowatt hours, which is about 13,000 kilowatt hours per human. And you'd think like, oh, that's got to be the most in the world. There's about a dozen countries ahead of us, but those are countries where it can get really, really cold or really, really hot,

not places like the United States where comparatively to other places like us, we use a lot more per person. Yeah. So 13,000 kilowatt hours per person. It sounds like a lot, and it is a lot, but in Iceland, they use 53,000 kilowatt hours per person on average. They got to heat those soundness. Isn't that crazy? But in their defense, they're making most of that electricity from geothermal. Right. So who cares? Use as much electricity as you want. And then I know some of our other listeners don't just live in the US. So Canada actually beats the United States in per capita consumption. They use 15.6 thousand kilowatt hours. Australia's better at it than we are. They use 10,000. New Zealand's

9,000 kilowatt hours. And then for our three German listeners, 7,000 kilowatt hours. And then in the UK, I think it's about 5,000 kilowatt hours per person. Yeah, exactly. Welcome. What was that? Cabaret, I think. Okay. Yeah, it is cabaret. I think it's like the opening of it. I just know cabaret from Schitt's Creek. Right. Same here. I mean, I've seen most of cabaret from that episode of Schitt's Creek. Yeah. Emily and I both are like, we need to see cabaret, though, now. Dude, I started watching what we do in the shadows again from the beginning. The TV show? Yes. It's one of the best comedies ever put on television. Yeah. And it's sort of a rare case of taking a movie, changing the cast up for television, and it's just as good. Yeah. The

movie was great. The TV show was great. I haven't seen all of the movie, but from what I saw of the movie, I prefer the TV show. I love them both. I think for a good six months after the TV show, we would walk around the house saying, this effing gay. Like every dude that we saw. Every single character in that's just so per... It's just great. Thank you, people who made what we do in the shadows. Thank you, Jermaine. It is wonderful. So as far as what we use that power for here in the States, and I guess this is lower 48, who knows what they're doing in Alaska, Hawaii, but 38% of that power consumption is residential. People like you and I. Sure. And or you and me. Or we. And the bulk of that is 44% of that is heating and cooling our homes and making hot water

for showers. Make sense, for sure. Or washing dishes. And then the rest is, you know, running appliances, charging your laptop, that kind of stuff. Yeah. The other 61.5% is non-residential stuff, commercial things like office buildings, and then industrial, which is mostly used for running motors because America loves its lathes. I thought of that earlier, and I was like, oh, yeah, I've seen pictures of lathes accidents before. So I spent a good 20 minutes looking at lathes accident photos. Oh, my Lord. Which I do not recommend, but I didn't see that coming up when I started researching this. I used to lathes back in industrial arts in high school. Dude, once I found out how dangerous those things were, I would never get near one.

That's you have all your baseball bats made by someone else now. Yeah, I sub out that part of my life. So the good news is with energy efficiencies, they've really come a long way. Over the past couple of decades, the whole Energy Star program and just appliances being made much more efficiently than they used to be. It's only going to increase, I think, the demand by 1% a year from now to 2050, which is good, but that's still 31% increase, which is a lot. But it's astounding that as we keep consuming more and more electricity, and we do. We use a lot. They figured out these Americans are nuts. They're just going to keep consuming and consuming. We

better figure out how to make our stuff more energy efficient and that they've managed to offset all but 1% of that growth per year. Because I can only imagine if we were still working with 1930s style blenders and vacuum cleaners, good Lord, we'd be sucking the cold directly out of the earth, like straight into your vacuum cleaner. It'd be so wasteful. Yeah, and I imagine that they are always working on this. I assume the goal is to have the negative number there, don't you think? From your lips to God's ear, Chuck. Like, wouldn't that be great if they're like, it's going to go down by 2% or 3% per year? I mean, that would be great. That's actually, hopefully, we're going to talk a lot about how

to fix the grid. And one of the suggestions is to create the smart grid. And one of the big components of it is to basically allow you and me, we or I and you, to see how much electricity we use through interfaces that are similar to like online banking. We would be aware and managing our electricity use with that level of like minute interface, right? And that by doing that, we would start to consume less, would be certainly less waste wasteful. So it's possible that we might go down compared to like 2020 levels. Who knows. That'd be great. It would be wonderful. One of the big changes about, I think like basically all of the coal, nuclear and renewable resources we have in this country are consumed, most of it for creating energy. And I think about

a third of natural gas. But natural gas has been a big boon. We did an episode on fracking and say what you want about it, but there is a lot more natural gas now. It has lowered the cost. Gas fire generators are cheaper to build. They burn cleaner than coal do. Yeah, by half. They're more nimble. They can respond quicker to big increases in demand. And so it's gone up, I think, from 1990 to 2019 from 12% of our energy mix to 38%. Yeah. And we should probably just say for full disclosure, we are deeply underwritten as a podcast by both Enron and Exxon. So just heads up on that one. Fracking tops. Yes. So when you do

generate electricity, you're not actually, you don't create energy. Electricity is an energy carrier, right? Which is why it's like it all turns into the same thing from all these different sources. But the people who run the grid have figured out like there's specific kinds of generation plants you want to run. There's basically three of them. One is baseload, which is your average say usually coal fire power plant that's running almost all the time. And that provides the vast majority of the electricity that's being consumed at any given point. Then there's load following plants, which are at this time natural gas power plants, but they may overtake gas or coal in the United States at some point. Those are a little more,

a little less frequently run. If you're like, I think we're going to need some more juice because it's Christmas time and everybody's got their lights up, you might spark up the old load following plants. And then lastly, there's one called peaker plants, like a peak capacity, where when you start this up, you're basically like burning diamonds. It's so expensive to run these things. And that means that the demand has gone crazy and the prices are going sky high. So turn up the peaker plant because we need that extra capacity. Yeah. And just quickly to tick through where we get the rest of these, the rest of the fuel sources, I said natural gas is 38%. Coal is 23%. Nuclear is 20%. Wind is 7%.

Hydroelectric is 7%. Biomass is 2%. Solar 1.8%, which is still pretty low considering how many people have gotten on that drain. I would say it's objectively shameful. Yeah, it'd be nice to see that number go up. Yeah. But there are 145 million households and businesses connected to this grid in the US. And the reason it all works, and we talked about this, it's still just amazing to me how it all works. We talked about it in electricity, but the ability to send electricity over long distances and step it up and step it down to make it power your coffee machine is a modern miracle. It's amazing. Right. And that's one of the big advantages of alternating current electricity. It's, I guess you can do it with DC, but it's way more difficult and way more expensive. So for

all intents and purposes, it's AC that you can step up and step down. And when you do that, you do that because current, which is the flow of electrons like down a line, is inversely proportionate to what's called voltage, right? Yeah, it's a little confusing. It is. Voltage is kind of like the pressure you put on a line, like the pressure of the flow where the current is the actual flow, right? And if you have a very high current of electricity, you unfortunately get a lot of resistance on the transmission lines. And when you have a lot of resistance, you lose a lot of electricity to heat. But fortunately for power generators, if you up the voltage, right, up the pressure that you're putting on the line,

it actually decreases the current. And if you decrease the current, then you decrease the energy loss. So they figured out that if they can take, you know, when they generate the stuff at power plants, it's like 2000 volts, maybe up to 20,000 volts, but then they step up the voltage to hundreds of thousands of volts. I think some transmission lines are able to take about 750,000 volts, which is... That's amazing. It is. Like if you get shocked by like an electrical socket in your house, that's 120 volts. This is 750,000 volts. The current goes down so dramatically that you lose almost none of the electricity over very, very long distances of transmission. So that's really a huge benefit of alternating current that you can step them up. And then when you get

toward neighborhoods and stuff, step them back down. Yeah. I think they lose about 6% of electricity generated in the United States, which, you know, that's a fairly low number. But I think they're always trying to make that better. Yeah. Because I mean, let's see, somewhere else, where is that number? There's a... We do something like 35, no, 4.5 trillion kilowatt hours are generated in the United States. So 6% of that is lost. That's an astounding amount of electricity that's lost. Any improvement on that would be huge. Yeah, that'd be great. So in your house, like you said, you have here in the States, we have 120 volts. So you have these substations that step it down to about 12,000. Then it goes to your power lines. And then those, you know, those gray,

sort of cylindrical cans at the top of the things, those are very important. They step it down even further to about 240. Then by the time you get into your house, it's down to 120. And you're, I was about to say, you're cooking with gas, but you're not. You're cooking with electricity. Nice. Yeah. So those gray can transformers are the same thing as that green death box that they wanted to put in your front yard, except the green death box, it's called a pad mount transformer. That's for underground power lines. The gray cans are for overhead lines, but they do the same thing. They step it down to a much less deadly and much more usable voltage of electricity. Yeah. We have a lot of, you know, Atlanta just has a lot of outages period because we have a,

it's a city in a forest and we have a ton of trees, a ton of really old trees, like most of the, not most, but a lot of the old oak trees in Atlanta are coming down or at the very least, large limbs are coming down. And it's a problem. So my neighborhood, especially, we have a lot of blackouts. So hopefully this, this bearing the lines project will work out pretty well. Yeah. The tree thing, it's, it's important. It's like kind of part of that whole reliability thing as we'll see is keeping trees trimmed away from power lines. Yeah. Which is why a power company might knock on your door one day and say, hi, we need to, to cut a lot of your tree back. Right. And you have to say yes.

Well, yeah, they, they, they might not even say that. They might just show up and start cutting your tree and be like, what are you going to do about it? And I'm just like, that was uncalled for. Should we take another break? Sure. Before you get in another fight with a power person? Yeah, they started it, Chuck. All right. Well, we'll take a break and we'll come back and talk about all this gobbledygook a little bit more. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to

father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All righty. So you mentioned earlier the monopoly situation that was broken up, largely because of the energy crisis of the 1970s. And we said, hey, let's open it up. Let's get the market going and get some competitive pricing happening. And everyone did that. Not everyone. In the Southeast, we still have a lot of the big, big utility companies, but they still needed some sort of oversight. And there are a lot of different ways that

these things are regulated. If you look at a state level, you're going to be regulated by a public utility commission or a public service commission. And then when you start horse trading in Alabama, says to Georgia, hey, we need some power. And you're like, wait, I'm getting some power from Tennessee right now. Hold on the other line. That's got to be regulated, too. So the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission oversees those transactions. The FERC. Yes, F-E-R-C. So they're supposed to, as we'll see, they fall down on the job kind of frequently and huge catastrophic things happen when they do. But yeah, so when they started to be regulated, especially in the, or deregulated in the 70s, strangely enough, it was Jimmy Carter's administration

who opened up competition. You would think that would have been a squarely, a Ronald Reagan kind of thing, but Carter did it to encourage conservation of energy and to create that competition to see who could deliver this stuff and kind of innovate more. Just basically shake up the stodgy old energy companies. But the problem is, is remember I said like it was money in the bank, you could just kick back and expect 8% growth year over year, every single year, and people are just going to keep using electricity. All of a sudden, there's a totally new mindset in America, which was, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're using way too much electricity and energy. We need to conserve. And now, all these power companies started kind of losing money. And when they started to lose money,

they stopped doing important things like cutting down trees, or cutting down off tree limbs, or servicing their lines as much. All the stuff that made them more reliable just stopped happening quite as frequently. And so you started to see things like enormous, massive blackouts that affected millions of people for days, where you didn't really see that that often before. I think the first one ever was in 1965, but the really big ones started coming more frequently, around about 2000, I think, that was kind of kicked off by the California energy crisis. And then, you know, we were talking about the regulatory bodies. Those were just for the public utilities themselves. Then you had these transmission

networks, and they have to be managed as well. And I think FERC stepped in and said, we need some sort of independent management and oversight here, because basically, we got to make sure that everyone has equal access to this grid. And so these interconnections that we talked about, those three interconnections, they're divided up into more than a dozen independent nonprofits that are called regional transmission organizations or independent system operators. And I think the idea there is they're not in it for the money. They're there to kind of really just make sure everyone is being treated fairly and doing the right thing. Right. That everybody has access to the grid that's supposed to get access to the grid.

But also, it's a, they're also the modern incarnation of those power pools where like, like utilities would buy and sell power to one another as needed. These are the groups that kind of oversee those transactions. Right. So you mentioned the grid failing in California. Yeah. I was there at the time. And I remember in, I remember these rolling blackouts, California in the late 90s and early 2000s, early aughts had to institute these emergency rolling blackouts. And I remember when I was living there a couple of times, it was all over the news, you know, it was a big, big news. And I remember a couple of times like, you know, losing power because they just had to. Yeah. So there was, I guess California and Ron actually

makes an appearance. Every time there was a huge colossal blackout, you could trace that, its origins back a couple of years to Enron lobbying to get somebody, to get things deregulated, get a wholesale market built up. And they managed to do that in California. And California found itself in this weird position where the really big utility companies like PG and E or Southern California Edison were, they were capped at how much they could charge retail for energy, for electricity. But at the same time in this new wholesale market, they had to buy electricity and it wasn't being regulated. Remember I said that FERC sometimes falls down on the job. Well, they weren't regulating this wholesale market in California,

like they were supposed to. And so one day in the summer, one month, I should say starting in June of 2000, the wholesale prices went through the roof. It went from about 30 bucks the year before to 375 bucks a megawatt hour in 2000. And all of a sudden PG and E is having to pay through the nose for this energy, but they can't pass the cost along to their customers. And yet they're also legally obligated to continue to provide electricity to their customers. So they found themselves in this impossible situation. Some people still today say that they turned off the power because they didn't have the supply. But they swear that they did not do that and that they just ran out of supply because they couldn't get it any longer. Well, yeah. And as a result,

PG and E and Southern Cal Edison, they were financially strapped. So they were in a situation where they had independent energy suppliers in surrounding states that were like, and I know you guys are in trouble, but I don't want to say my stuff because I don't know that I'm going to get paid back now. Right. So California was in a bind in the early odds. And there were also technical problems and stuff. I think there was low water levels in the Pacific Northwest, which was huge because California at the time, I don't know if it's different now, they were not self-sufficient energy wise. They depended on the surplus of other states. Yeah. So if there was low water levels in the Pacific Northwest, that's less electricity

being sent south. And they also basically had these high voltage power lines from Southern California to Northern California. And they were crashing. They were failing because they were just overburden basically. So they said, we got to do these rolling blackouts. And I think the biggest one was March, 2001, affected about 1.5 million customers. Yeah. And like you said, these independent energy producers wouldn't sell them electricity because they didn't think they were going to get paid back. The whole thing finally ended when the governor had the state water board go buy energy or electricity on behalf of them because the state had a good enough credit to buy electricity,

but their two biggest electricity utilities didn't have a good enough credit. Isn't that crazy? What was the governor back then trying to remember? Yeah, Gray Davis. I was like, was that the governor? No, I think he was just after Gray Davis, wasn't he? And then I saw it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, actually the governor of California. For years. I mean, that was after I left. Yeah, it was just after I left. Yeah, he was, jeez, 2003, 2011. At the same time that Jesse the Body Ventura was the governor of Minnesota.

No way, man. All we needed was Carl Weathers as the governor of Georgia and Bill... Roddy Roddy Piper. Yeah. No, no, I'm doing predator here. Oh, okay. I missed that. I can't remember the guy who played Billy. Or maybe just the predator. The predator was president in 2005.

Don't you know? I haven't seen that movie in so long. I bet your predator holds up. Yeah, I saw it in the last few years and it does. Yeah, yeah. Check that out. There was a big blackout in the Northeast. I remember this one as well in 2003. This was big time. This was 50 million people in the U.S. and even parts of Canada lost power for a couple of days in some case, 11 deaths.

And this one, it was like a movie or something, how this one started. Yeah. Remember I said that tree cutting kind of fell to the wayside a little bit when they stopped making as much money? Well, that's what happened here. It was really, really hot and there was a lot of demand and those lines were just blazing so much so that they actually started to sag. Like the atomic composition of the metal was put under that much stress and they sagged into a tree branch and arched, which is basically like lightning is produced, right?

There was this teenager in Ohio who noticed that his outlets were smoking throughout his house. And it just so happened that there was a tree cutting crew outside of his house on the other side of the street and he ran out to tell him and they basically told him to get lost and hours and hours went by. And there was a bunch of cascading power feelers, which normally would have been caught, right? But there was some human error involved. Yeah, this was the sort of the movie part. I mean, it might as well have been like a rat chewing on a wire or something.

There's monitoring software that, like you said, is usually like, hey, emergency, something's going on. But the software was being glitchy. And so a technician with, I guess, like mustard stains on his shirt turns it off, tries to fix it and forgets to turn it back on. Yeah. That's crazy. Yep.

And so because the power grid is especially interconnected up in the northeast, this power outage in Ohio meant that there was power outages in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. And I think, did you say 11 people died? 11 people died. So, you know, the federal regulator stepped in and was like, we need a catchy new slogan to improve this. And so how about the three T's, trimming, training and tools, and everyone rolled their eyes and said, whatever, boomer, we'll get on those three T's. They just turned the volume up on Wichita Lyman,

which is the only song they ever listened to over and over again. The fourth T was too sweet. Nice. So now Texas, we're in Texas, we're not literally in Texas, but we're in Texas now in spirit because very recently, a big freak winter storm hit, as everyone knows, and everyone needed a lot more heat than they usually do at this time of year in Texas. I think they usually require about 67,000 megawatts a day in the winter. That's what they plan for.

Yeah, compared to 86,000 megawatts in the summer. And all of this makes sense. We're not saying like, you're wrong, Texas, for not, you know, being ready for this weird freak storm. I mean, that was the cause of it. But you also have to take into consideration that, like we said, some of those lines weren't insulated like they should have been because of money. And wind and solar is not going to work as well in the winter anyway. And I think those wind farms weren't winterized as well, right?

Yeah, some of them did. Apparently a surprising number kept spinning. But the big problem was the gas pipelines freezing over. So instead of the planned for 67,000 megawatts of power, they ended up with 31,000 because of those failures in the actual system. So they had 30,000 megawatts. They needed a lot more than that. They probably needed about 50,000 more megawatts than they had. And so all of a sudden, power just started going out. And Texas supposedly isn't connected anything.

So Texas went dark and everybody started to get very cold and couldn't cook and couldn't boil water, couldn't take showers to basically live in a very, they lived in a very dangerous situation because this is sub freezing temperatures. And these areas are not set up for that kind of thing. Yeah. And if you want to get your feathers ruffled and get a little riled up, go read this New York Times article about the exorbitant power bills that some of these people got that were able to stay online. There's a 63-year-old army vet who had to pay $16,000 for his monthly bill, which wiped out his entire savings. A lot of people were reportedly,

including this guy, customers of a company called Griddy, G-R-I-D-T-Y. Okay. I mean, you have to laugh at a name like that. But they provide electricity at wholesale prices. And the deal with Griddy is it really quickly changes based on supply and demand. So they sell it to the customers as, hey, we're going to pass this wholesale price directly to you for a low $9.99 monthly fee. And the rate's going to fluctuate, but it's really no big deal because it fluctuates just sort of reasonably. They saw this huge jump coming apparently, and they encouraged their customers, 29,000 people, to switch to another provider when

the storm came, which is just not that easy to do. And a lot of it is through an app. A lot of people were literally connected to their bank, so people would literally watch $8,000, $10,000, $12,000 drain out of their bank account before their very eyes, and they can't do anything about it. And the architect of the Texas Energy Grid, his name is, where is it here? William Hogan. He said, you know what? This thing is, it worked exactly like it was supposed to because high prices reflected the market performing as it was designed. And he said, as you get closer and closer to the bare minimum, these prices get higher and higher, which is what you want.

Well, is that guy's nickname Milton Friedman? I mean, how heartless, but yes, it's true, in fact, but it's a pretty heartless way to look at it, you know? Yeah. And I think Governor Abbott has stepped in and said, wait a minute, people can't be going broke like paying for like three and four years worth of energy in a single month. Well, that's the opposite of what the George W. Bush said when he was governor of Texas in 1998. He passed a bill that said, you have to pay whatever the energy company charges you as a consumer. Yeah. So I'm not sure what they're going to do if they can retroactively reimburse some of these people, but it's, I don't know, that's horrifying, man, $16,000?

I know, especially when it's taken directly. Like, this isn't even like a, well, hold on, hold on. Well, I'm not going to pay this yet. I want to talk this over. It's like, that's gone. Now I have to go try to get it back. Yeah, good luck. Yeah. That's terrible stuff. So sorry, Texas, that that happened. But the other thing about it, Chuck, too, is like, you know, yeah, they weren't prepared for it. And it was a freak winter storm that just doesn't happen. But a lot of people are saying, hey, welcome to the age of climate change. This is not just a freak storm anymore. This stuff is actually going to keep happening. And Texas had virtually the same thing happen in 2011.

And there was a panel that was created to figure out how to prevent that from happening again. They gave ERCOT a whole list of things to do, including like winterization, like insulating their pipes. ERCOT didn't do it. And it happened again. So I think Texas's patience with ERCOT not listening to that kind of stuff has probably reached an end. So how do we fix this stuff? You mentioned the smart grid. I think about, I mean, just our infrastructure in this country is in bad shape period. 70% of large power transformers and transmission lines are at least 25 years old. 60% of circuit breakers are 30 years old. And you mentioned the smart grid. And I think that's, they're starting to do some of it,

but that's the solution going forward, right? Yeah. I mean, like it doesn't matter where you are on the left or the right or in the middle, everyone is like, yes, smart grid, smart grid, we need a smart grid. And that's basically like the grid we have now, but just slowly piecemeal improved little by little to add way more back and forth communication between the generators, the transmitters, the distributors, and the end user. And there's a lot more automated sensing built into this system, which makes the whole thing a lot more clever and makes like rerouting around problems a lot easier. But also one of the big things is making you and me and I and we a lot more savvy about the energy that we consume from moment to moment.

Yeah. I mean, there's that. And I also feel like the smart grid, most of it kind of falls under the banner of real time micro observance. Whereas what we have now is very sluggish, very old fashioned. I mean, it can be, it's like the difference between, you know, digital smartphone technology and like the old like crank phones from the old days. Basically, yeah, if there's a power outage, the way that the electrical generators find out about it is there's a series of towers where bonfires are lit from mountain to mountain. And they finally see one that's close enough, lit close enough, and they start to like ramp up production. That's how it happens now. It's amazing. But there's also, so I mean, you've got things like feeder

switches that basically go around a problem area. If you got a down transmission line, it can just go around it and then, you know, it doesn't black everybody out. Smart meters. So you kind of see how much energy you're using, and then also how much the price of energy is. So you can actually save money if you want to kind of get into it in that granular level. And then also just making sure that there's storage. That's the big challenge. We talked about that in our renewable energy episode, Bill Gates' storage. We don't have anywhere to put excess. So we shuffle it around the grid. But if we have storage places strategically put around the United States, that would change absolutely everything. Yeah, as well as getting

more direct use, which is solar. I actually have a little solar project going. I'm very excited about it. Very nice. Not for my house, but I know you know this. We have some, we have some acreage in North Georgia on a river that, no house or anything, it's just land. There's just a van down by the river. There may be a van one day. But it's just a, I call it, we call it the camp. It's friends and family camp. And I'm trying to style it out like a legit, like state park camp ground. And as of right now, as of like three days ago, I'm having a pavilion built. It's going to have three solar panels on it and a little battery array. So I'm going to be able to power like a big giant ceiling fan under the pavilion and like four quad outlets and

like a coffee maker, nothing huge. But he said the guy said it'll be enough for three or four days of full power and then like a day to juice it up. And we're never there for more than three days anyway. So I'm technically going to have a little off grid campground soon. You have me a coffee maker. And I should mention, you got me a very nice birthday gift that is going to live at that camp. I'm so glad you like it. I saw it and I was like, I know exactly where this will go and it went exactly where I thought it would go. What is the exact name of it? I don't have the box in front of me. Oh man. It's a kindling splitter basically. Yeah, it's like a log splitter. But it splits it into kindling. So the coolest

thing about it all is the story behind it. Is this like a 12 year old girl invented it in New Zealand. And for the last like seven years, now she's in her early twenties, I think she was like 13 years old at the time. It's like a legit company. And this thing, you like screw it onto a log and then you put another log in it and hit it with a heavy hammer. You even got me the heavy hammer. Yeah, yeah, you can't not get the hammer. It splits it into kindling. I'm just so excited. Yeah, rather than like bringing an axe down onto a log, the axe is coming up from the bottom. Yes. And it's very much safer. And I even looked at a YouTube video and review and everyone was like, these things are great. So it's safer than an axe. I can't wait to. Can't wait to use that.

Very thoughtful gift. Well, happy birthday again, man. I'm glad you like it. And six bottles of champagne. Yeah. Did you drink it all in a weekend as suggested? Not yet, but spring break is next week and we're gonna get into that champagne. Awesome, man. Enjoy. Very sweet gifts. Is that is that it? Did we stop talking about electricity, I think, didn't we? I thought you meant like, are those all the gifts I gave you? You didn't get the other eight gifts? The half case of champagne and the log splitter and the hammer, the three pound sledge. That's right. Well, if you want to know more about Chuck's three pound sledge, you can email them. But also, in the meantime, if you want to know more about the electrical grid, you can just start reading

about it. It's an extraordinarily complicated, complex, modern marvel of engineering that's pretty engrossing stuff. So go to town. And in the meantime, I said go to town, which means it's time for Listener Man. I'm going to call this Titanic follow up from a friend in Ireland. This is this was a fun one. Hey, guys, been listening for a few years and now I currently work in Belfast port where RMS Titanic was built in 2012. The Titanic Museum was built in Belfast and the building is in the shape of a star representing white star lines. And each point of the star is the actual size of Titanic's hull at 126 feet high. Standing underneath it really gives you a feel for its size and makes you feel very small in a good way. Also, slipways for

Titanic are filled in for you to walk over and etched with an outline of Titanic and its sister ship Olympic to scale. Yeah, it's very cool, including the actual locations of the lifeboats and funnels. Again, it's very cool to walk down. You can check it out. You can check it out on Google Earth, just search Titanic Belfast, check out the satellite view, keep up the great work. And that is Kyle in Belfast, Northern Ireland. And he has a nice little PS joke. He says there's a very overused joke here in Belfast when people ask us why we celebrate something that sank, which is this. It was fine when it left here. That's great. That's that trademark Belfast's humor. I was going to do it in Irish accent, but I got stage fright. Oh, come on. Let's hear it again.

I don't know. I don't even know it was fine. It was fine when it left here. Oh, that was great, man. That just transported me to my youth when I was eating a bowl of Lucky Charms. Or, hey, babe, it was fine when it left here. Very nice. Well, let's see. Chuck, is that it? That's got to be it. Who was it? Sammy Davis Jr. Thank you, Sammy Davis Jr. for the letter. That was Kyle. Kyle, that's right. Kyle from Belfast. We appreciate you. And if you want to be appreciated like Kyle, you can send us a good email like Kyle did. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and ship it out to sea to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on myHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.