What A Day - ERCOT Off Guard In Texas
Episode Date: June 16, 2021The main electric grid operator in Texas, ERCOT, is dropping the ball on providing services again, this time during extreme heat. It’s asking residents to conserve electricity until Friday to keep u...p with demand. Approximately 12 gigawatts of generating capacity was offline on Monday, and the electricity demand by residents came dangerously close to exceeding the grid's capacity.The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 climbed over 600,000 yesterday, according to the tracker from Johns Hopkins University. Still, there's progress in the country towards the new normal, with California and New York among the states fully reopening on Tuesday.And in headlines: Israel's military launched airstrikes on the Gaza Strip despite the ceasefire, Biden announces a plan to combat domestic terrorism, and a lawsuit resurfaces phony poison milkshake allegations from last summer.Show Notes:NYT: "The Amazon That Customers Don’t See" – https://nyti.ms/35nsYSHFor a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday.
Transcript
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It's Wednesday, June 16th. I'm Akilah Hughes.
And I'm Gideon Reznik, and this is What A Day, the podcast that is funded by money vapors coming off donations from Mackenzie Scott.
Yeah, it's not the donations themselves. It's just the vapors that are enough to sustain us.
To be clear, Jeff Bezos' ex-wife gave us nothing, and she never will.
Yeah, it doesn't matter how many letters I write.
She's not going to pay these student loans, I guess.
On today's show, we look at two major reopenings as the country hits a grim COVID milestone,
plus we'll have headlines.
But first, the latest.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic.
All right.
Without the video, it's hard to know.
But that was Texas Senator Ted Cruz in a video that he tweeted of himself on Monday reciting
the Pledge of Allegiance to no one typical normal guy behavior instead of showing any
allegiance to the people of Texas who are once again the victims of bad
weather and worse utilities.
So what is the latest down there, Akilah?
All right.
So we spoke last week about the heat wave that's coming in hot across the West and Southwest.
And of course, Texas is also feeling the heat.
And Texas's main grid operator, ERCOT, not to be confused with the more fun Epcot, has
dropped the ball, pun intentional, on providing services again. Approximately 12,000
megawatts of generation were offline Monday or enough to power 2.4 million homes on hot summer
days like the ones we're experiencing this week. ERCOT, aka the Electric Reliability Council of
Texas, hasn't been reliable and is asking residents to conserve electricity until Friday to keep up
with the demand from the hot temperatures. And you'd think it would have gotten its act together after the fiasco in the winter,
where extreme cold led to blackouts around the state and the deaths of about 700 Texans and
Senator Cruz fleeing to Cancun. But a few weeks ago, ERCOT completed 20 visits to plants across
the state to ensure that they would be reliable for the summer. Four of those 20 plants are
currently experiencing outages. Yeah, that is not an insignificant number there.
And do they know why there are so many outages?
It seems like the sooner they figure out the problem, the sooner they could solve it.
Kind of, but, you know, not really.
So 80% of the outages are coming from plants that are largely natural gas fired.
But beyond that coincidence, ERCOT hasn't been able to explain what's going on.
Governor Abbott, who's shown more interest in spreading COVID and mass shooting, signed a bill last week that was written in
response to the winter outages. The law was meant to improve the grid for extreme weather. But the
law doesn't even require that companies weatherize until 2022 at the earliest. So with any luck,
there won't be any more extreme weather in Texas, a state that has been ravaged by hurricanes,
floods, inclement cold and unsustainable heat for the next six months, hopefully.
And to be clear, the legislation is really just a half step.
A report from six former state and U.S. regulators, including five former Texas public utility commissioners, called for much stronger legislation that provides direct aid to consumers without power, requires plants to have backup power.
It stops companies from price gouging during these outages and so much more. But in any case, we can expect to hear from angry Texans on Twitter about it
because their politicians really don't seem to care. Turning now to the pandemic. Yesterday
brought some pretty big indicators of where the country is going and also a horrible reminder of
where we've been. Yeah, that's right. So the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 climbed over 600,000
yesterday, according to the tracker from Johns Hopkins University.
Just really unfathomable.
It's larger than the populations of places like Milwaukee or Baltimore, to put it in some perspective.
And worldwide, almost 4 million people have died, which is thought to be an undercount.
And the U.S. has the highest death toll out of any country.
But the rate of this unbelievable toll has slowed down a lot since
the vaccination campaign began in the US. For example, it was the beginning of 2021 on this
show that we talked about total deaths surging from 400,000 to 500,000 in just one month. But
as of now, deaths have been averaging around 340 a day. Terrible still, but it's a massive,
massive decline from around mid-January when that number
was peaking at 3,400 or more. So overall, things are massively, massively better. But as one
epidemiologist put it to the Wall Street Journal, this milestone is a reminder that still too many
people are unvaccinated at this point. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm preaching to the choir,
but if you can get vaccinated, do it. Just do it. You might be saving your life and other people's. But,
you know, because of this progress, we saw two states that bore the brunt of the pandemic at
various stages fully reopen yesterday. And now, please welcome to the stage,
California Governor Gavin Newsom. Well, good morning, everybody. Good morning, Governor. Is that Optimus Prime?
It is a privilege to stand by your side.
It is good to have you standing by my side.
Oh, my God.
What a fiasco.
Just an absolute catastrophe of planning.
So that was Governor Newsom while at Universal Studios Hollywood with literally the minions, Optimus Prime and a troll, just in case your brain hasn't fully broken at this point.
He was talking about the state reopening after going into lockdown in March 2020.
So what did reopening look like?
Well, for one thing, he announced the vaccine lottery winners and no one at WOD heard their name.
So there must be a problem.
Yeah, I need a recount.
Obviously, they stopped counting the ballots too soon.
And I just think, you know, the mail voting on this lottery was outrageous. Yeah, there will
be audits. Broadly, though, it is a big step for the first state in the country that had any form
of COVID lockdowns to get rid of most of their restrictions yesterday. There are no more state
mandated rules on social distancing or capacity. For example, vaccinated individuals are not
required to wear masks
outside of healthcare and public transit settings,
though, of course, private businesses
can make their own rules about them.
This is all happening because California
is among a group of states where over 70% of all adults
have gotten at least one vaccine dose.
So it's pretty wild to think about
since in March of last year,
we were all watching the Grand Princess cruise ship dock
and things quickly spiraled from there. Yeah, gotta say it has been quite the traumatic year. Then New York State
followed a similar path yesterday. Congratulations to New Yorkers because they are the ones who did
it. We're no longer just surviving. We're not in our homes afraid to go out. We're not in our homes disinfecting everything that we can see.
Life is not about survival. Life is about thriving.
Okay, so Cuomo and I clearly follow the same motivational hustle culture Instagram accounts.
Really need to fix that. Gonna do that after the show. But Gideon, what does reopening look like for New York?
Yeah, those accounts are clearly not good for everybody.
So much of the same as California,
New York also hit 70% of adults with at least one shot.
Because of that, some things that can change here.
Restaurants won't need to space tables six feet apart.
There won't be required space between seats at places like movie theaters
and no more temperature checks required to enter buildings, etc.
There was also a set of fireworks displays last night across the whole state, perhaps to celebrate
or perhaps to drown out the multiple crises enveloping Cuomo, including a possible impeachment
proceeding, but I digress. Overall, though, it is really symbolic that two of the states most
impacted by COVID and with some of the strongest rules have fully reopened. That leaves just four more states to relax their own rules across the
country, Washington, Oregon, Michigan, and New Mexico. Yeah. And to that point, how is the
national picture looking overall? It is looking very solid, but there are still concerns about
that Delta variant that we've talked about before. It's believed to be the most contagious strain so
far, and the CDC classified it as a, quote,
variant of concern.
It's now making up almost 10% of COVID cases in the U.S.,
and epidemiologists think it's going to become
the dominant one later in the summer.
So that's a big concern for the states
where vaccination numbers are significantly lower
than the rest of the country,
lower than the New Yorks and Californias of the world.
But overall, we're up to about 65% of adults in the country with at least one dose.
So getting closer to that White House goal of having at least 70% with one dose by July 4th
and our goal of getting to 69%.
More on all this soon, but that's the latest for now. It's Wednesday WOD Squad, and today we're doing a segment called WOD Recommends,
where we share something we've recently bookmarked using the internet browser called
Life. So Gideon, you had something you read and you wanted to tell people about it.
Yeah, this was definitely going around, but it's this pretty lengthy report on basically the working conditions at Amazon, specifically
this place called JFK8, the site on Staten Island, where some people might know Christian Smalls,
who was on our show at one point trying to organize, published yesterday in the New York
Times. Basically, the gist of it is, one, the working conditions are insane. It's a lot of
the stuff that's like motivating, you know, the unionization efforts in Alabama, there's this
thing called time off task, which is literally measuring your minutes of not shipping and lifting
and packing. And yeah. And the overall thing that I came away with was they are just pretty explicit about the turnover rate and the inability for people to move up in the company.
So the way they approach everything is like, oh, these people are functionally expendable because they will be anyway.
Because we're just going to churn through them over and over.
Really, really gross company culture, I gotta say. It's probably like one of the few things that's put together a lot of like the
animating themes about Amazon recently, like all in one place. It is lengthy. It's like intense
in certain parts with, you know, other things we didn't even talk about, like people discussing
racial inequality within the plant, talking about not getting disability when
they were out for COVID, all these other things. But just a really good thing that I think sort of
helps crystallize why sometimes we are frustrated about how things are going there.
Yeah, for sure. Jeffrey Bezos, you've been put on notice by the Times. Well, thank you so much
for considering Gideon's recommendation. We're going to link that story in our show notes, and we'll be back after some ads.
Let's wrap up with some headlines.
Israel's military launched airstrikes on the Gaza Strip yesterday, making it the first major attack since a ceasefire was declared in May.
The ceasefire was meant to put an end to an 11-day assault that killed over 250 Palestinians.
Hamas rockets and civil unrest killed 13 people in Israel during the same period.
Israel's military claims the latest attacks are a response to Palestinians sending balloons with flammable materials into southern Israel.
And this all follows a far-right Israeli nationalist march through East Jerusalem earlier in the day.
The marchers at times shouted anti-Arab chants while commemorating the controversial March of the Flags,
which celebrates the anniversary of Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem.
The march was postponed from May 10th when tensions were rising over Israel's planned forced displacement of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. During the event,
over 30 Palestinian counter protesters were injured by Israeli police using rubber bullets
and stun guns. At least 17 Palestinians were arrested. Yesterday, the Biden administration
announced a cross-agency strategy to combat domestic terrorism. An effort led by the
National Security Council came to the shockingly unshocking conclusion that white supremacists and militia groups are the most
lethal and persistent terrorism threat facing the U.S. A 32-page plan titled National Strategy for
Countering Domestic Terrorism highlights a shift in the government's approach to counterterrorism,
which for decades prioritized fighting foreign terrorists. Biden's plan calls for an expansion
of staff at the Justice Department and FBI, greater information sharing between relevant parties and government
and more. In a memo accompanying the strategy document, Biden wrote, quote, preventing domestic
terrorism and reducing the factors that fuel it demand a multifaceted response across the federal
government and beyond. Cosign. Yeah. The future is uncertain for what's considered to be the
world's holiest white chip. Communion wafers and the rituals that go along with them may be Yeah. losers. It's especially relevant since President Biden is a devout Catholic and has previously been denied communion by one South Carolina priest due to his support for abortion access. Many Catholic
bishops think that communion shouldn't be politicized and see the effort as a move by
Trump-aligned bishops to damage Biden's public profile. It's notable that Biden is only the
second Catholic president. Going to war with him seems misguided, in the same way that it would be
bad for all of New Zealand to come out and say they hate Lord. For what it's worth, the conservative bishops are unlikely to succeed. They would need
unanimous support from all U.S. bishops or two-thirds support plus approval from the Vatican,
which has already said it opposes this effort to gatekeep eating God.
That's right. Let people eat God if they want to. Come on. They have to do all that other Catholic
stuff to get that right. Let them eat God. All right. Well, here's a follow on a story from last summer about a sweet dairy drink conspiracy.
A former manager of a Manhattan Shake Shack has sued members of the NYPD, the city of New York, and two police unions after cops falsely alleged he had poisoned their milkshakes.
This all happened in June 2020 when protests for racial justice were widespread and officers were channeling their anxiety about being part of a racist
system into seeing every food as a
potential biological weapon.
Three officers described in the lawsuit as
officers Vanilla Shake, Cherry Shake, and
Strawberry Shake, and that is real,
allegedly noticed a strange taste
in their desserts, then did what's known as
hurt tummy detective work and concluded
that they were poisoned. Two police unions
quickly amplified these claims online with no evidence, An NYPD investigation eventually exonerated the
employees. But that wasn't until after the Shake Shack manager behind the suit was arrested and
interrogated until one thirty in the morning. The manager is seeking monetary damages and legal
fees. Listen, hurt tummy detective work is something that is for me after I eat something like Shake Shack on my own.
It's not for police.
That's all I'm saying.
You're right.
Also, like what an expensive way to find out you're lactose intolerant.
And those are the headlines.
That is all for today.
If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review,
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And if you're into reading and not just the adventures of officers,
vanilla shake, cherry shake, and strawberry shake like me,
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Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe.
I'm Akilah Hughes.
I'm Gideon Resnick.
And get the vaccine, Optimus Prime.
Do it.
Set a good example.
Transform and roll out to the nearest vaccine place. Yeah. Roll out on that J&J, on that Moderna,
on that Pfizer, whatever you got to roll out on. Yeah, whatever you got to do.
What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.
Sonia Tun and Jazzy Marine are our associate producers.
Our head writer is John Milstein,
and our executive producers are Leo Duran, Akilah Hughes, and me.
Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.