All I Want for Christmas is a Reliable Grid

The American Grid is in Bad Shape

Society runs on trust. You need to feel confident that the milk you bought last week will cost about as much this week. You need to feel confident that when you walk from your parked car to the grocery store to buy that milk, you don’t get mugged. That’s why inflation and high crime inspire social unrest. They gnaw at you, make you feel like your society wears a ski mask, and wants you to empty your pockets right now or else.

That’s also why you need to feel confident that when you put the milk in your fridge, it won’t spoil because the power will stay on. The power grid doesn’t just route electricity to your home — it’s a conduit of social trust. It’s the physical twin of the more ephemeral social fabric. A trustworthy society has a robust grid.

And that’s what troubles me about the latest Long-Term Reliability Report from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., our grid watchdog. According to NERC, over half the country faces increasing danger of blackouts. The American grid continues to slide toward fragility.

Reserve margin is the amount of power during hours of peak usage. TL;DR— feelsbadman.jpg

Here are the main takeaways from the report:

• Thanks to data centers, industrial demand, and electrification, power demand is on the rise. Thanks to retirements, reliable power plants are on the decline. Thus, in the next 5 to 10 years, the majority of America risks coming up short on power supply.

• Summer and winter look bleak. NERC reports that summer is now adding 15.7% more to current system peaks, an increase of 122,000 MW. Its forecast for summer peak demand over the next decade rose by half as compared to last year. Winter, meanwhile, is expect to see a 149,000 MW rise in demand.

• We are not building new power capacity fast enough to keep up with these dynamics.

Several regions of the country are vulnerable, but the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which stretches from Minnesota to Louisiana, epitomizes everything going wrong with the national picture.

So, what’s happening in MISO?

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In its Reliability Imperative published earlier this year, MISO reported three major challenges to securing a robust, reliable energy portfolio:

• Tightened EPA regulations that would force premature gas and coal retirements

• Investment criteria that makes investing in gas or coal too challenging for investors “even if it is critically needed for reliability purposes”

• The anticipated $370 billion in subsidies for wind and solar from the Inflation Reduction Act

In other words, MISO is losing reliable power plants while gaining unreliable power generators like wind and solar; the “energy transition” to wind and solar is killing MISO. The grid operator’s CEO, John Bear, said as much.

“We have to face some hard realities,” Bear wrote in April. “[T]he transition that is underway to get to a decarbonized end state is posing material, adverse challenges to electric reliability.” [emphasis his]

In Illinois, my home state, which is split between MISO and its easterly neighbor, PJM, the situation looks even worse. Thanks to the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act that Governor Pritzker signed in the fall of 2021, Illinois plans to shut off three Hoover Dams worth of coal by 2030. Almost all of that coal sits downstate in MISO territory.

The easy solution would be to replace all that coal with natural gas, but CEJA aims to get Illinois away from gas-fire generation, too.¹ Nuclear can’t play a role either. While Illinois is one of the most nuclear heavy states in the union (all the nukes live upstate, and therefore sit in PJM), Pritzker’s attempt at a repeal of the state’s moratorium on nuclear construction excluded traditional nuclear. So, Illinois can’t build any nuclear that anyone has any experience building.

There are positive steps to take. In Illinois, Pritzker will have to face some tough choices about his own policy victories, but he’ll likely have to reverse course just like California’s Governor Gavin Newsom did when it came to the closure of Diablo Canyon. And if the Trump administration can cut the subsidies for wind and solar and roll back Biden’s stringent EPA rules on coal and natural gas emissions, the country, especially MISO, would be in better shape. But that’s not even enough to get us out of the woods.

Here’s the point: our grid—our industrial commons—is being mismanaged at the federal and state levels. As a result, we’re looking down the barrel of lethal blackouts. However, the lethality is just one of the wretched consequences of blackouts. The most immediate second order effect is societal demoralization, a loss of trust that our systems and institutions operate legitimately and fairly. In the wake of societal demoralization, a tidal wave of grifters, conmen, and strongmen would wash over the land, like buzzards to the carcass of the status quo.

Getting the grid right isn’t optional. It’s foundational for civilizational health and prosperity.

All I want for Christmas is a society that cares about itself.

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Related Articles

• Did an American Grid Operator Just Deny Climate Change?: Some notes on expertise, "neutral" management, and the public square

• Watching the Fatal Trifecta Unfold: The EPA's new emissions rules, MISO's capacity auction, and the fragilization of the grid

• Energy Modeling as Gambling Addiction

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Crom’s Blessing

1. Natural gas has diminishing reliability returns, anyway. As NERC’s Winter Reliability Report, published in November, lays out, natural gas supplies remain vulnerable to pipeline freezes, which threaten reliability. Over-indexing on natural gas comes with its own challenges and liabilities. It’s trade-offs all the way down.