TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #248: Fragile electrical grids, unreliable energy lobby, nuclear FUD, and common sense with Meredith Angwin

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Meredith Angwin, author of Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, to discuss: - The fragility of grids - Misconceptions around electric grids - Energy mix - What's happening in Texas and California? - Why nuclear is important - How data is manipulated to push special interests - How we can fix our grids Follow Meredith on Twitter Pick up Shorting the Grid

what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here to introduce this episode of tales from the crypt it is yet another crossover episode with the great american mining podcast i sat down with meredith angwin author of shorting the grid a book about the fragility of our grid systems throughout the country people's misunderstandings around how grids work how electricity is delivered the sources of that electricity the mix that we should be using the mix we are using just bad policy around this i think this episode is very very important to cross-pollinate with tftc because just adds to another data point and proves that there's a lot of misconceptions in the world a bunch of people taking things at face value taking what the media tells them

and running with it considering what happened in new york state last week late last week with the decommissioning of their nuclear power plant on the hudson due to some very very uh just completely misguided reasons just call them what they are misguided reasons being pushed by a bunch of anti-human individuals who just want to make your electricity prices more expensive and make your electricity delivery less reliable the world is going mad project veritas they said cnn they caught cnn and a little catch-22 you know what the next big big scare is after covid climate climate crisis climate change new york state today they're shooting themselves in the foot they decommissioned this power plant last week and then

today there's it became apparent that there's a now a bill on the floor in new york state to to put a three-year moratorium on on bitcoin mining within the state because it is uh it's bad for the environment too much electricity these people don't know how the environment works they don't know how electricity delivery works they don't understand anything and meredith who's an incredible woman up in vermont she's a strong nuclear energy advocate as everybody should be um she she highlights in her book shorting the grid and just common misconceptions around energy delivery specifically and the forces behind it the lobbying forces behind it a bunch of idiots who have the ears of politicians

who are doing things that are going to make, again, energy less reliable, energy delivery less reliable and more expensive. It hurts poor people the most. It's a racist and classist movement here to move us to unreliable energy sources.

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so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be welcome back to gamcast smarty been here on a beautiful what's today wednesday wednesday afternoon where i am and where you are too correct marriage yes yeah i'm in uh i'm in vermont So sitting down with Meredith Angwin, author of Shorting the Grid, The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, to talk about electric grids. Maybe we'll get into Bitcoin at some point, but I think this topic of electric grids, particularly most people's misunderstanding of how important they are, how they work, and how energy actually gets delivered, and the fragility of some of our grids across the United States particularly, that's sort of what I want to talk about today.

and jump into that, particularly in the midst of what happened in Austin, Texas, and the rolling blackouts and brownouts that we see in California as they've decommissioned some of their power plants, particularly nuclear and nat gas. So I guess just to jump into it, let's talk a little bit about the book, why you wrote it, and the topics that it covers and the things it's trying highlight? Well, I wrote it because I began writing in defense of keeping a Vermont Yankee nuclear plant going here in Vermont. And I began to blog about it because the positive side didn't seem to be covered in the regular press. So anyway, I'm blogging about it. And then these things would come up like Vermont Yankee not allowed to delist from Ford capacity auction.

Now, I've been in the electric industry most of my life, and I'm like, I'm not sure exactly what this means. So I began investigating and began learning about the grid, how the grid is managed, and got asked to be on a committee at ISO New England about consumer liaison group. Anyway, long and short of it, I realized that most people didn't have a clue about it. I had a beginning of a clue because I knew I'd been working with utilities for a long time, but as a chemist, not as somebody who worked about the grid. I'm a chemist. And I thought, you know, this is too important for people not to know about it. And it's also very fragile. The decisions that are made have nothing to do with reliability.

The way they set it up, it doesn't have anything to do with reliability. And people don't want to talk about that. The buck doesn't stop on any desk at any agency for keeping the grid going. So, for example, at one point, someone said, well, there's a NERC, National Electricity Reliability Council, that has rules about the grid. And I said, really, it doesn't seem to keep the grid going. And they said, well, the rules aren't about resource adequacy. Resource adequacy is do you actually have enough electricity to keep the grid growing? That's not something they make rules about. I mean, so the whole thing is such a mishmash of interested parties moving the grid toward what they want, lack of oversight, lack of transparency. you can't even get into the meetings and and it's all sort of under under the radar I mean

I have a friend in Chicago very educated woman and I said I called her at one point I said you know I'm writing a book about the grid I was wondering how do you like being in that little bit of PJM that's stuck in the middle of my soul and she was like the middle of my soul what what are you talking about? Because nobody knows the name of their grid operator. Now we know ERCOT. Everybody knows the name of ERCOT. But lots of other places, people simply have never heard of this. None. So let's hone in on the special interest pushing certain forms of energy generation over others and pushing grids in certain directions. Where have you found that interests lying and what are their motives, particularly from your perspective?

There's two groups. Everybody, of course, wants to push their own interests. And the way it's set up with comparatively little oversight for reliability, people are able to push their own interests a lot. But the two groups that I consider to be most successful in pushing their own interests are the renewable groups and the uh the natural gas industry and and the ones that are least successful would be the um nuclear groups the coal groups and um basically that's kind of all there is on the grid when you get right down to it's natural gas nuclear uh renewables, coal. I mean, you know, there aren't, people say, oh, there's all kinds of stuff on the grid, but really it comes down to, oh, and there's hydro, of course there's hydro, but there's only

hydro some places. So I tend to, I don't tend to, hydro, there's only hydro some places and hydro isn't expanding. So I don't tend to think much about how the hydro is going. I have to admit that. Yeah, I mean, that's very specific to locality, correct? You need to have water flowing near a populous area for that to make any sense at all. Well, actually, water flowing not very near a populous area. You know, over here in Vermont, we get a lot of electricity down on big high-voltage DC lines from Hydro-Quebec. And Hydro-Quebec has flooded a lot of Native American lands up there to make very big reservoirs. So, you know, they've improved their relationship with the Indigenous people. They have improved it. But when they started out, the Indigenous people said, we didn't know a jam was going in until we saw the bulldozers. It's very funny. The Bitcoin mining community has a very interesting history with Hydro-Quebec specifically. Hydro-Quebec was overproducing power, I think gigawatts worth of power at their power station.

and they invited bitcoin miners in to come use that excess capacity to to mine bitcoin at very cheap rates and a bunch of miners came on that hydrogen quebec grid or the grid that they were selling to and plop their miners down and were using the electricity very cheaply build up very sizable mining operations and then one day quebec for some reason or another wanted to pick on bitcoin miners specifically and raise the rates for those miners so you had people invest a bunch of capital and infrastructure and buildings and capacity to take on that excess energy that Hydro-Quebec was producing. They built these sizable mining operations that were very profitable because the excess

energy was cheap. And then once they were locked in, Quebec and Hydro-Quebec raised their prices to the point of unprofitability. And they had to quickly shut down all those mining operations there. There was a lot of politics and favor, basically, the Quebec, the province, and Hydro-Quebec picking favorites of who was using their electricity and basically pinpointing Bitcoin miners saying, hey, we're going to make it more expensive for you. Well, you know, I'm not, I mean, I don't want to just point fingers at one company or another, but I'm not particularly surprised at Hydro-Quebec being, you know, unpredictable or maybe predictable. Uh, when I started, remember, I started blogging about Vermont Yankee and, and, and, and the local grid. And, uh, one, uh, we had a, in 2013, 2014, approximately, we had a polar vortex. It was very,

very cold. And, uh, the grid was stressed and also for, and I was watching this. And the first thing I noticed was that Hydro-Quebec was sending us about half the amount of power that it did in other times. I mean, things were desperate around here. There were places that were turning on diesel generators with like jet fuel. I mean, there were frozen coal piles. There was all kinds of stuff going on. And all of a sudden, they're sending us less. And I thought, whoa, that's interesting. And it turns out later, as I got to learn more about the grid, and especially in 2018, when there was another polar thing, and once again, Hydro-Quebec was sending us less power, I discovered that Hydro-Quebec had actually not promised to send us all the power that it sends

usually. It had only promised, that is, it had taken on a capacity supply obligation for about half the power that it usually sends. So anytime it needed the rest, no foul on them. They just say, okay, we're living up to our capacity obligation. You want more? You're used to getting more? Well, that's unfortunate. And it's because they needed the power at home. And this was my first real understanding. I talked about different ways grids fail in the book. And one of the ways is over-dependence on the neighbors. Like everybody just slammed Texas. Texas didn't want to be connected to its neighbors.

If Texas had been connected to its neighbors, everything would have been great. No, the neighbors were having the same trouble. They weren't going to be exporting a lot of things. They didn't have as dramatic a trouble as Texas did because Texas actually had four days of blackouts Well, the neighbors only had 20 minute usual. The ones I know about were 20 minute rolling blackouts every two or three hours. So the neighbors weren't having the kind of problems Texas was having, but they were having problems enough that they weren't going to ship a lot of power to Texas. and and similarly when hydro when a lot of people in in quebec heat with with electricity because

it's very cheap up there and when they needed the heat and hydro quebec didn't have enough electricity to send to new england new england didn't get it we if it's lousy weather and the p you can't just count on your neighboring grid to take care of you before they take care of their own uh uh customers and that's one of the ways the grid is fragile yeah that should be common sense right like you need to take care of your own before you you branch out especially in emergency times if you will right you work from inside out but a lot of people would have have said that one of texas's problems wasn't connected to the neighboring grids if it had only been connected no it was cold all over the place the neighboring grids were having their own

problems. What I'm saying is, remember at the beginning, I began talking about this resource adequacy, which is kind of a buzzwordy thing. But when you get right down to it, resource adequacy mean, do you have enough electricity to meet peak demand? Do you have it? And basically, you got to have it on your own grid. You can't count on the neighbors. Now, you understand that doesn't mean i feel that every person ought to have a little you know generator and then they're their own grid and whatever what i mean is if you've got a region of the country you shouldn't count on neighboring regions that have their own grids and their own rules and their own constraints to make it up to you when things are tough yeah i mean you're you're highlighting

fragility like one thing we talk about in the bitcoin world particularly about making sure the network is robust and resilient enough against state attacks is having enough full nodes full bitcoin nodes passing the rules and the transactions along to each other geographically dispersed around the world if you don't have enough nodes it's a lot easier to shut down the more nodes you have the more anti-fragile the system is the more modularized it is the more anti-fragile it is and it seems like with grids we need to apply a very similar logic to how we're delivering electricity to people in localities. We need to build up the capacity and not be reliant on neighbors, as you've been describing. And I think this may be a good time to jump into

Texas specifically and what led to their unreliable grid during this polar vortex. Why didn't they have resource adequacy? Did they think they may have because of wind and solar, the amount of electricity that was being produced by those sources. But once you have a black swan event like this 100-year storm that freezes up turbines and makes cloud cover so that you're not able to actually produce the solar electricity you may have wanted during peak demand, were these factors? Was it a push towards an over-reliance on these unreliable sources of energy

and wind and solar and a second tiering of natural gas, nuclear, other sources? Well, the way I look at it is that there are three things that work together to make a grid unreliable. And the first thing is you have over-reliance on renewables that go on and off at their own schedule, not connected with demand. So, for example, the wind in Texas had been like, I don't know, 30%, 40% of the grid energy before this event happened. And then when the event happened and it got cold, the wind died down. And then it was like 8% of the grid energy. So 25% disappeared very quickly. Now, somebody, a lot of people will say, well, yeah, go ahead and blame renewables.

Go ahead. But you know that the Texas operators didn't really expect the renewables to be that great in the winter anyway. Well, I'm sorry. If you go from 30-something to 8-something, you just drop so much ability to supply energy because the wind blows when it wants to blow. Nobody can order up, hey, get another couple of turbines spinning, huh? I mean, you can't do that. Just get a bunch of people out there to blow. You can't do that.

So anyway, so the wind wasn't available, and no matter how much demand there was on the grid, no matter how bad things were in Texas, you couldn't order it to blow. So that's over-reliance on the wind. Then I have to say that Texas as a whole has always had what you might call low margins. I don't know why people say that it's because they don't have a capacity market, but I don't think that's the whole story. But the thing is that an average grid tries to keep about, what, 15% more installed generating capacity than their peak demand. So the idea is that if there's peak demand, then you will still meet it even if 10% of your plants are down for the count for some reason. You see, that's the reserve margin. Texas has always run with the skinniest reserve margins in the whole of the United States.

It's been like, if you follow these things, if you read Utility Dive or the trade magazines, you know, at the beginning of every summer, they say, despite reserve margins that are less than 8% or less than 6% in Texas for this season, the grid operator is confident of their ability to meet demand. You know, everybody else is running like, despite, with our reserve margins of 15%, we're confident, and then there's Texas, despite reserve margins of less than 10%, we're, you know, so they never have really had the margins they should have had. And then the other thing is that they're very, very dependent on natural gas. Now, I think natural gas is a lovely fuel. I think nuclear is better. But what I want to say is that one thing about nuclear is that when you do a fuel load in a nuclear reactor, you've got enough fuel for 18 months. Whatever else is going to happen, for example, the grid goes down so the nuclear reactor has nowhere to send its power, so it has to go down. Things can happen that mean the nuclear reactor isn't operating, but it won't stop operating because it's out of fuel, because it's got the fuel.

It's got 18 months of fuel. That is what the great insight that Hyman Rickover had was these submarines could stand for a long time. I mean, you know, we would never have eliminated the German wolf packs, except that they had to come up and run their diesels in order to go down again. So there's the German subs. So at any rate, I guess what I'm saying is that natural gas is not stored at the power plant. It is shipped to the power plant by pipeline, and it will get to the power plant by pipeline if a whole bunch of conditions are met. First of all, there's enough natural gas to put in the pipeline. That's usually the case, but sometimes wells freeze in these beds. I mean,

they don't work well okay another thing is that the pipeline can deliver natural gas to the power plants you say well i don't know what's that what's the difference about that natural gas deliveries are prioritized for homes so if you're having a cold snap and all of a sudden everybody that used to run their heater for about an hour in the morning is running it 24 7 and running it at high heat you know because it they need the heat because they're not used to this kind of cold snap then that natural gas that's being burned in that home isn't making it to a power plant so the power plant may not be able to get natural gas and uh so those are the two just in time oh and of course i i have to say there can be compressor failures there can be all kinds of

other failures. There can be all sorts of other things that prevents the natural gas from getting to the power plant. And unlike a nuclear plant or even a coal plant, there's no natural gas sitting around there at the power plant to be burned. So if you're dependent first on renewables that go on and off when they want to, and second on natural gas, which is delivered just in time, of assuming it's available and it hasn't been diverted to homes and none of the valves are frozen and so forth. And third, oh, well, if we're in trouble, the neighbors will help. This is not going to be a happy story. And it seems like common sense what you're describing here. It should be common sense,

and particularly around the conversation with nuclear. So that's one thing that hopped onto my radar a couple of months ago. Again, so Bitcoin mining, we don't have to jump into like to particulars but i think it helps add some context to this conversation bitcoin mining is seen as an evil in the world because it uses a lot of electricity to produce the hashes allow people to add blocks of transactions to the bitcoin ledger for this digital ledger that we're creating this distributed digital ledger the the energy density of the the machines the asics that uh produce the hashes that allow miners to add blocks to the blockchain take a lot of energy but what you'll find is bitcoin miners uh they they find stranded energy sources typically

hydroelectric wind or solar that has overcapacity in our case the great american mining we go into oil fields and we find producers that are flaring gas and we say hey don't flare that gas let's run it through generators produce electricity and actually get some value out of this gas a couple months ago a woman in california took and i think this highlights perfectly how most individuals just number one don't understand how grids work or how energy is delivered she took a bunch of pictures of bitcoin mining warehouses from around the world one in kazakhstan one in upstate new york both using hydroelectric one in china i believe maybe that was coal powered and another one that was somewhere else in in eastern europe she was

a california and she posted those four pictures on on her twitter with a tweet that said we're having rolling blackouts here in california and all these bitcoin miners are are using so much energy oh my god they stole your energy from yeah well this is legitimately what this woman thought and it was like oh my gosh you don't understand and what's ironic about it is the the impetus for the rolling blackouts in california is the fact that they decommission natural gas power plants and nuclear power plants they didn't replenish that power generation and and people were quote tweeting retweeting what she tweeted and saying we need to bomb all the bitcoin mining facilities in the world because it's using too much energy like all these people in california having

blackouts and bitcoin miners using it using this energy and it just highlights how disconnected a lot of the people talking about this and screaming about it are are from reality of how this stuff actually works yes and like the great fragility in california was because they decommissioned power plants and replenish the power generation and yet people don't understand this what should be very fundamental and rudimentary uh concept of how energy is produced and delivered to localities you know they they really they don't understand it i remember when um when uh people were going to uh there were a bunch of people marching around with signs saying shut down vermont yankee nuclear plant and so forth and so on. And then someone would say, well, how are you going to

replace the power? And they'd say, oh, there's plenty of power on the grid. What does that mean? What kind of power? Are you planning to run the natural gas plants more, which is actually what happened? I mean, what, you know, they just say on the grid, it's on the grid. It's like floating around on the grid and it's one of these things where people have somehow uh disconnected themselves from what reality i i mean i'm sorry the power plant power isn't on the grid there's something making the power if you shut down one thing that makes the power hopefully you have something else that'll fill in if you shut down too many things that are making the power they may not be able to fill in what's left may not be able to fill in that's what happened in

california yeah and so why why do people demonize so there's a couple things i want to go why are people demonizing nuclear when we should like so that's the other thing what are the intentions of these people pushing us towards these unreliable renewables and wind and solar particularly so in texas you had rick perry george bush which had a bunch of special interests behind them pushing their grid and subsidizing wind and solar generation in favor of natural gas and other sources uh in california i'm sure it was political why they decommissioned the nat gas and the nuclear power plants similarly in vermont uh i believe i believe there's also another nuclear power plant that's being decommissioned in the new york area as well new york area not in vermont

in new york uh on the hudson river near new york city and not everywhere but closer than from to So that's the thing that perplexes me about nuclear specifically. So if you're going to appease the idea that we need to move to renewable energy sources solely to save the planet from a climate emergency, why does everybody not push toward nuclear? Why only wind and solar? It seems like nuclear is demonized despite the fact that it's the most energy dense resource that we have on the planet and most reliable that we have on the planet and would be the cleanest in terms of not actually producing CO2 from the construction of the power plants to the delivery of the energy. when you compare that to how you basically dig for cobalt, coal, and other precious and rare earth metals and have to get them to very high degrees Fahrenheit via fossil fuels to build wind and solar power generation sources? Well, that's a really big, important question.

And I would say that there's two factors. There's first the sort of virtue factor. The idea is that if you're against nuclear, then you're against nuclear everything. You're against nuclear war. You're against nuclear submarines. You're against nuclear, you know. In other words, you're just a person who really wants the world to be a beautiful place with none of this war-y stuff going on in it. Unfortunately, wanting that doesn't make it happen, but I think that's one of the, it's like credentials for being in favor of peace and love and greenfields that don't use fertilizers.

And it's an idealistic view of the world. On the other hand, there's also money behind it, to be blunt about it. I mean, if you look at, there are very few studies I was able to find. I finally found a couple that look at what happens when you add renewable energies to grids. And it said that basically if you add one megawatt of renewable energy of the kind that comes and goes when it wants to, okay, that is wind and solar, then you have to add a little more than one megawatt of fast-acting response. And what is the only fast-acting response you can add? It's a gas turbine.

That's it. Every time you add a renewable, you're adding a gas turbine of the same size. So that's a big market for natural gas. So you see, if you can convince people that nuclear is bad and you're going to do renewables, then you know that they're going to have to add the gas turbines or they're going to have to have major blackouts going on when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. So they're going to have to add the gas turbines and they're going to be able to sell a lot of natural gas. So despite New York State's great plans, for example, for a renewable future and we're shutting down Indian Point, a big nuclear station, and we're going to have a celebration when it closes and all that kind of stuff. what you actually have is three new natural gas plants have been built within about 100 miles of Indian Point.

Why are they celebrating this, though? What is their... Well, they've been fighting to close it for a long time, some of the people. I mean, and they get these wild names. I mean, you know, sometimes I think that they want to live in a world written by Tolkien. And what I mean by that is if there's this group that's been fighting Indian Point forever and they're called River Keeper.

You know, they are the keepers of the river and they have like names of their officers that sort of like River Keeper too. It's very, very, I haven't looked up the name. Pete Seeger was very active in that group. But do they have data about pollution emanating from the site? Is it the potential for pollution? They don't have data about pollution from the site. I don't think they could actually find such data. But they do have other data that they can use. For example, they say, you realize that there's no leakage of radioactivity in this matter, but we have cooling water that comes from the Hudson River. And in order to use the cooling water, it has to go through a screen so that little animals and stuff don't go into any of the cooling circuits and so forth. and those screens kill uh maybe fish or fish eggs or whatever and they kill billions of them don't you realize they kill billions of them and the answer is of course they kill billions of them

every fish lays thousands of eggs i mean anything and and i actually did a little research study on this you know the most dangerous thing for fish eggs is other fish other fish like to eat fish eggs it's a great source of protein you gotta ban all fish so you know they can go around saying we'll have our hudson back there won't be all these fish dying on that not real living fish but little tiny baby fish and fish fry and uh you know but well so i had alex epstein on the the podcast uh about a month ago he's very pro fossil fuels wrote the book the moral case for fossil fuels and i've been on his podcast i know him yeah he's incredible i think what you what you guys are doing is incredible because it like really highlights the fact that these hysterics

these alarmists are anti-human or like yes like maybe it is killing some fish eggs that could potentially have hatched and become fish but that stuff works itself out there's not zero fish in hudson like it hasn't destroyed all the fish and you should be more worried about what's going into the hudson around new york city and manhattan uh compared to what's going up upstate new york but it's really anti-human because they're going to decommission this power plant to raise electricity prices which is going to hurt the poor the most and there could be externalities negative externalities of potentially poor people dying because they they get priced out of electricity well yes and and i i'm afraid that there's a tendency among the

um people who are most concerned with the outside environment to not even see poor people oh they say things about oh the most vulnerable we've got to protect the most vulnerable whatever but when you get right down to it i mean i had this conversation with this woman one time and um And I said, and she has a reasonably high position. And I said, you know, raising electricity prices, it really, it really hurts people. It can hurt people. And she said, oh, electricity is a very small portion of the average household's costs. I mean, I don't think raising prices of electricity by 20% or something is really going to make that much difference.

And I thought, the average household cost in your household and in my household, because I'm a retired chemist, and I worked for years and years in high tech, and my husband did, and we're not rich, don't get me wrong. but yes we have a paid off house and we have you know social security and he has a small pension and so yeah for us people like us anyway yeah 20 increase in a one part of your your your monthly expenses is material for a lot of people i think if you want to It's very material. It's terribly material for a lot of people. People do all kinds of things to avoid a high cost electricity. And some of these things are not good. I mean, especially for older people. I'm an old person. And I know... that I used to be able to read if there was a little bead of light in the room somewhere. Nowadays, man, I want one of those, you know, I mean, it's an LED bulb and stuff. It's got to be bright. Or I'm just going to be like, what is this? And that is something that happens to older

people. I mean, even if you don't have, you know, some eye problem, some diagnosable eye problem, older people need more light to read for example and and and the there's an assumption people like us people like us it doesn't the cost of this doesn't matter people like but but not everybody is people like us i mean i i i mean i was you know talking to this woman and and and she does and and she talked about how her boss was late eight days in paying her and it was just this big crisis because a lot of people who are working very hard eight days is a big crisis yeah i mean there's the stats that's been throwing out a lot recently uh recent years something like 40 of americans couldn't afford a 400 emergency expense without

extending a line of credit or using a credit card if they needed to people are living hand to mouth paycheck to paycheck on the hamster wheel yes i i know and you what you really don't want to do is make it worse by raising the cost of energy for for people first of all you raise the cost for them and secondly you raise you raise the cost for all sorts of things and and then it gets reflected back to them i mean energy goes into so many things that if you raise the cost of energy you're raising the cost of everything else all of a sudden oh the electricity bill electricity is more expensive okay how does that affect your supermarket that has a freezer is it is it going to have to raise some prices at the supermarket because

is it only going to raise prices at the at the freezer stuff i don't think so the supermarket's going to figure out where to raise prices to make its overhead And it's not going to be like, oh, we're really going to be doing this in a manner of equity. The poor people don't buy frozen food, so we'll raise only frozen food prices. That's not it. They're going to look at what their expenses are, and they're going to raise their prices to meet the expenses. Why can't people? So that, like, me personally, I get my head spinning.

Like, what is the agenda behind this? Do these people really care about helping the environment or do they just want to control other humans, particularly what energy sources they use? Is it a bunch of people who just don't like that they don't have control of how the world works and this is their vector through which they can force control? Well, you know, I don't tend to think badly of people's motivations, because if I begin doing that, then life gets to be very, very unpleasant. For me, I mean, I feel that people are actually frightened of how out of control they see the world. And they, in other words, say, you know, how many people really want to know that there was a piece of space junk that killed all the dinosaurs and there's no reason a piece of space junk couldn't do the same to us? You don't want to know that. A lot of the world is not in our control.

I mean, and then, you know, it's a very frightening thought. When you get right down, it's a very frightening thought. And so there's a feeling that if we're good enough, if we're virtuous enough, then maybe these bad things won't happen to us. I mean, in a way, the Greeks, for example, there are a lot of things I really don't like about the culture of ancient Athens. But one thing is that they would say things like, the good die young. In other words, they didn't think that, you know, you could protect yourself from the bad things in the world simply by virtue. Virtue was to be done for its own reasons. Virtue was to be done because you were a philosopher, a Stoic, a good husband, a good daughter, whatever. It wasn't about now things will be good for me. And unfortunately, I think we have gotten to the point that people protect themselves mentally from the uncertainties of the world by saying,

well i'm going to be really really good and nothing bad will happen to me yeah i mean there's so many ways i could take this particularly this is a conversation on my other podcast tales from the crypt which is specifically about bitcoin that we touch on this a lot the idea of elite overproduction and so something that's sort of tangential to the line of thinking that that you just expounded upon is this idea of elite overproduction where last generation last 30 50 years of people of my generation specifically i'm 29 told since we were in middle school you got to go to college this is the path that you have to take on life you have to get a degree that's how you get a good job that's how you separate yourself from

the lazy of the world and you you build yourself up and get enough financial backing that you can you can separate yourself from the working class not not implicitly said but that was uh excuse me not explicitly said but that's what it's implied with the the notion that if you go to school get a degree you get a good job you can make a better life for yourself well we flooded the university system which was enabled by the access to cheap loans and everybody my generation got a degree and so they're expecting uh to be able to separate themselves particularly from the working class financially they're expecting to get a degree that gets them a job that gets them a salary that gets them to the next rung of the economic ladder just due to the flooding of people

into the university system and the overproduction of degrees you have this concept of elite overproduction where the people my generation mainly who are fed this idea throughout our whole lives have gotten their degree they're in the job market and they're looking around they're like wait a second i'm not making any more money than uh the working class that i was told i would be above in this economic status game that we play in the world and so since they can't separate themselves uh with economic with economics with financially they have to separate themselves morally and virtuously and so that's why you see this onslaught of virtue signaling of oh i i'm better than the working class the the rust belt trump trump voter because i have these

virtues and they don't that's how we separate ourselves now is with these virtues that aren't back in reality which is scary at the end of the day yeah that's another thing you know that's one of the things that alex actually talks a lot about it like well i don't know that he talks about this specifically but a virtue is only a virtue and value system okay i mean there's a value system and then you behave according to that value system and then you are virtuous the thing is the virtue the value system isn't about uh uh people thriving anymore it's about as as alex epson says it's about not affecting nature but when you get right down to it what affects nature the least is nuclear i mean it takes the lowest amount of land it takes the lowest amount of

mining it i mean you know it it makes the least amount of pollution and uh and yet it um see that's what leads me to believe that these people don't actually care about renewable energy they care about control because if they did care they'd be championing nuclear as loud and as voice-a-fair-ously as they could. Well, you know, I'm thinking about one anti-nuclear person. I don't know, examples, I guess, there are tons of examples, but this one, I was debating him, and it was Big Hall, debating this guy, and he said that due to the nuclear plant,

there are you there there used to be thousands of shad in the connecticut river but due to the nuclear plant there were only seven he said not seven thousand seven shad and i thought really i mean people can make the most absurd statements but they make them for dramatic effect so it seems to me pretty clear that he really doesn't care that much about the connecticut river because nobody in their right mind would say that there are seven of a certain kind of fish in the Connecticut River. If you could catch seven,

that implies there's some left behind in the river. I mean, the whole thing is so absurd. So I don't know what, you know, I think the other thing is that this business of like, we're going to get off fossil fuels, we're going to not do nuclear, we're just going to live in harmony with nature. This all, this all is considered to be very, very virtuous, even if it's completely nonsensical. You know, I mean, people say we're going to get off fossil fuels. Okay. Here's Meredith, and she's, she's, you know, getting up in the morning, and she's getting out

of bed and she puts her feet on the floor and what's on the floor it's a carpet made with fossil fuels and then she walks out of then she walks out of the house right and uh oh or she maybe she puts on a hat maybe the hat has some cotton in it maybe the hat has some uh something else in it that may be a a synthetic you know because it's supposed to shed rain okay now she's wearing fossil fuels she's standing on and now she's walking down her driveway the driveway is coated with asphalt she's walking she hasn't turned on a single piece of energy equipment yet she's walking out to get the paper and she's surrounded completely with fossil fuels and that people will say we're going to dump fossil fuels it's going to be easy it just takes

it just takes the determination like really it's scary you have a lot of the you have the president in the united states but she goes down this direction right now like very aggressively like how do we let these insane people so that's part of the driving force behind this podcast number one bridge between bitcoin mining industry and the energy industry number two we want to speak sense in this world of insanity like this is not good i have a young child i have a 14 months old son like if we barrel down the path that these insane people want us to his future is very bleak in my mind the energy price go up the reduction of electricity production is not good for for society at large and i agree i think it's important

to get strong voices like yourself on this platform to begin speaking sense or obviously we may have a some confirmation bias with this particular audience right they may come to get this idea reinforced in their brains like how do we reach out to the people pushing us down insane path and have logical conversations around this and try to have logic prevail at the end of day? Is it possible? Do they just stick their fingers in their ears and say, la, la, la, I don't want to hear it? Do we? I think if we could get people to accept progress without these crazy goals, for example, you might say, oh, okay, we don't want to burn as much fossil fuels. There are plenty of reasons to want to not burn as much fossil fuels. I consider NOx production a big

problem even when there's abatement techniques um and let's say well let's see if we can make most of our electricity with a combination of uh nuclear and some renewables and some natural gas and then we won't be burning as much fossil fuels as we're burning now but you see the thing is we have to have that nice base load of nuclear so that we don't have uh natural gas pretty much for everything if the sun isn't shining you know so if we could get people to look at making progress instead of attaining an unattainable goal a completely unattainable goal a completely unattainable you know uh slogan it's not even a goal it's a slogan zero carbon or yeah net zero in my opinion it's more of a slogan than a goal

yeah it's nonsensical because you can't actually get there from here and and and and people will be willing to admit they can't get there from here okay i mean if you really push them they'll really admit it they'll say well yeah i know the developing world is going to be using a lot of carbon yeah i know this i know that but when you get right down to it if you could just say we are going to make progress but people people don't understand that making progress is worthwhile sometimes i think what you have to do is make sure that everybody takes music lessons it has to work for a couple years to become confident in something how's that for the answer to the energy crisis

somebody played the bassoon growing up but i think that's a very uh very virtuous goal to set for people learn how to read music and work hard towards towards the goal to create something beautiful if you will i think that's virtuous but the thing is it also teaches you that you can't do it overnight there's nobody who's who gets up in the morning hasn't hasn't ever seen the best soon and and and gets first position in the orchestra ever soon because they just are so good no it takes it takes perseverance it takes practice you know you know the old joke how do you get to Carnegie Hall oh there's a joke says again guys one guy is walking down the street in New York and he

wants to find Carnegie Hall he doesn't he doesn't know where it is so he uh he asks a new guy who looks like he lives in new york he says hi how do you get to carnegie hall and the guy answers practice man practice practice practice makes perfect it's no yeah learning how to blow into the read let alone like and reading the bass clef and being able to get like the the crescendo the decrescendo down takes time it's not easy you got to go through that process similarly with this stuff right and then and that's the like another goal to set between here and there like so that's what i think at great american mining we do a very good thing of materializing and pushing this goal to the fore which is be more efficient with the energy sources you're pulling out of the ground

particularly with natural gas instead of literally lighting it on fire and sending uh sending the co2 the atmosphere without any economic productivity getting eked out of it let's run it through generation equipment create electricity create bitcoin which adds positive economic value to the economy you don't even have to hold the bitcoin you can liquidate it right away if you want to do us dollars and that adds to the the gdp of the country and the the production overall of economic value now here here we are almost at the end of the hour and i'm going to bring up a question that i i've really thought about so why is bitcoin considered to be so evil and making hydrogen which is much harder to store with excess energy considered to be so virtuous

i don't know again like i think what we're getting at through the conversation that we're having right now is there's nothing is based in logic it's all emotion and virtue signaling and i don't again i think that elite overproduction which is forcing a class of people particularly millennials to attempt to separate themselves which they used to do financially now morally and virtuously is driving them to do insane things that that sound cool and sound virtuous but in reality are the exact opposite they're anti-human they make everybody worse off and people are able to do it from their apartments they can just tweet out using petroleum-based products sending the tweet to a server that consumes a lot of energy and they can virtue signal about this stuff and literally

not lift a finger to actually do anything about it other than tweeting or lift a finger to actually understand how any of this works yeah i i agree and and i i would also say that to get back to since it's the end of the hour and i want people to think about my book a little i would say By getting back to my book, I think that the reason, an age-deep reason that reliability is not honored by the many areas of the country that have auctions for electricity and so forth and so on. The reason reliability isn't honored is really because people are so busy virtue signaling about everything else that they don't put things into effect. And when reliability isn't honored, then you won't have a reliable grid. People will find ways to maximize their profits that aren't necessarily leading to a reliable grid. So what, in your mind, are the best steps forward to create more reliable grids? What do we need to do? What do we need to highlight? How can we make our grid system more anti-fragile and less fragile?

Well, we have to acknowledge that different kinds of fuels have different kinds of uses and not just say every kilowatt hour is the same. A kilowatt hour that's here today, here now and gone in five minutes is worth as much as a kilowatt hour that would be steady for many, many months. And we have to acknowledge differences. And, you know, there's this whole idea that the grid is supposed to be fuel neutral, every kilowatt hour is the same. But when you get right down to it, that can't be. For example, natural gas is delivered in just in time. Well, you could solve that problem by saying every natural gas plant has to have 24 hours worth of... or the many natural gas plants can be dual fire they can burn oil and natural gas and every such

plant has to have 24 hours worth of oil on site at the beginning of every winter you can make a rule of that kind it would raise prices a little bit but it would add a lot to reliability but currently you can't make that rule because you're supposed to treat all uh all fuels equally so now you're treating oil as better than natural gas you're treating it better you're giving it preference to natural gas and the grid operators are supposed to do that i'm like this is craziness you know there are actually the fixes for reliability are not actually that hard limited amount of renewables some renewables yes absolutely but not to the point where where nothing else can make up for them, because when they go offline, there's nothing

big enough around to take up the slack. Oil storage, if you're going to use a lot of natural gas. I mean, these things are not actually, I'm making it sound very easy, and it isn't as easy as that, and I know that, but it isn't really rocket science either. No, it isn't. What I think we need is more strong voices like yours speaking up getting out there and that is the intention of this podcast i may cross post this on tales from the crypt too just to get it out to more voices meredith thank you for joining me it's been an incredible hour it's been a lot of fun i really enjoyed it thank you very much i did as well and anybody listening to this if you've not uh picked up meredith's book yet make sure you do so shorting the grid the hidden fragility of our electric grid

meredith angwin everybody thank you for joining me hope you have a lovely afternoon thank you all right