Wisdom from The Electric Grandma

Podcast Transcript

Ed Coyne: Hello and welcome to Sprott Radio. I'm your host, Ed Coyne, Senior Managing Partner at Sprott Asset Management. I'm pleased to welcome a new and special guest, Meredith Angwin, an author and energy consultant. Meredith joins us today with over 40 years of experience in the world of energy and multiple books on energy and the environment. Her most recent book, Shorting the Grid, is out now. Meredith, thank you for joining Sprott Radio.

Meredith Angwin: Thank you for inviting me. I'm pleased to be here.

Ed Coyne: Meredith, let's start with your background. Energy is an interesting industry to focus on. What drew you to energy to begin with?

Meredith Angwin: I wasn't drawn to energy per se. I was drawn to chemistry and became interested in geology and geochemistry. I was a rockhound, and studying it in graduate school, I began realizing that I was also interested in energy. Geothermal energy was the first, and nuclear energy was the first, and I wasn't as interested in fossil fuels, though I have done work on fossil fuels, especially pollution control. My main thing was, "Oh, look at all these interesting things in chemistry that have to do with energy, too."

Ed Coyne: Well, it had to be groundbreaking. This was in the early '80s. I can't imagine there were that many people focusing on that then. You had to stand out in a crowd, I would imagine.

Meredith Angwin: I stood out in the crowd so much that every time I went to a meeting, it was like, "Oh, Meredith was there. I saw a woman was there." Not quite that bad, but somewhat.

Ed Coyne: It's good to be groundbreaking. We're happy to have you on today, and after reading both of your books, you have some really interesting ideas and topics that open the door. Could you talk a bit about solar? What's going on in that space today? Some of the challenges and some of the opportunities we're seeing.

Meredith Angwin: I'd like to put solar in the context of the grid before solar. In the days of the grid, before solar, there was a general rule: if you had the maximum amount of power that the grid could put out, the top loading it could handle that no individual power plant should be more than 10% of that. This was so that if an individual power plant went offline, there would be other power plants to cover for it because you also wanted to rerun your grid with 20% excess capacity in case the power plant went down.

That was the rule of thumb—10% for a power plant, 20% excess. Well, you see, the thing about solar is people talk about the duck curve as if it were an amazing thing new to the world. What the duck curve is is that in the middle of the day, when solar is cranking out, there doesn't have to be that much more other kinds of energy on the grid, but at sunset, all of a sudden, there has to be a lot of different kinds of energy on the grid and they better come on fast.

That is called the neck of the duck, and then the low point is the body of the duck; if you can imagine a duck swimming, you see the low point is when there's a lot of solar, and the high point is when the solar just went away. Your rooftop solar system saves electricity but gives you, in return, this huge ramp-up in the end. I guess the thing is that I'm unhappy with looking at that because it isn't an efficient way to run a grid. Having such a fierce ramp-up, everything just moving fast and getting there, and it's like if you had a teenage kid and you say, "You can have the car, but don't be such a lead foot. Don't just jackrabbit start at the stoplights. I can't afford off the gas."

What we're doing to some extent is jackrabbit starts at sunset. Yes, I like solar, and in my dream grid, we do have solar, but it is never 80% of the grid.

Ed Coyne: That’s something that I promise very few people know about or think about. Let's shift gears a little bit then and talk about wind. What are you seeing out there in the world of wind power?

Meredith Angwin: Wind power can give you a lot of energy. Most places with many renewables have wind rather than solar, though somebody will say, Meredith. Most places that have a lot of renewables are hydro. That is true, but we're not talking about hydro. We're talking about wind and solar. I studied this for a while and was particularly interested in some people studying Ireland.

Ireland has a lot of wind and makes a lot of electricity with wind. However, even though Ireland has as much wind as could provide 70% of what its grid would require, it only provides about 30% of what the grid would require because it doesn't blow all the time. It also only cuts CO2 by 15%, and that is because whatever is backing up wind is natural gas, and you have this start-stop thing going on with natural gas.

It isn't running steadily. It's like your teenager with a lead foot at the stop sign. I guess the thing is, I wish everything would be used how it's best to use it. Instead of saying, "Oh, wind isn't good because it's unreliable." You could say, "Wind isn't good because it's unreliable, but if you are only using 15% of it, you're not causing that much of the stop-start on the gas plants, and it could be a big help."

If you look at solar energy the same way, people always think you will find some perfect energy source. It's not going to have pollution. It will start and stop readily and quickly, but it will be extremely cheap and reliable when it runs all the time. I'm like, "No, there isn't anything like that. You can look at coal and natural gas if you want cheap and reliable when it runs constantly." Does that make pollution? Yes, it does. If you want to look at starting and stopping without pollution, you can look at wind and solar. There's no perfect method out there.

Ed Coyne: You also talk a lot about nuclear in your books. That seems to have gotten back to the forefront more recently. Can you talk a bit about what's happening in the world of nuclear with existing plants and potentially new plants coming online? In the circles you run in, what's the feeling out there with nuclear today?

Meredith Angwin: The feeling out there for nuclear power is very hopeful, and that's because people are beginning to notice that the things they're planning to have instead of nuclear power are not necessarily perfect either. They can cause more pollution than they want. That's been good. I was talking to some people, and Sierra Club people had invited me, which is a new thing.

I was talking about nuclear power, and a couple said, "Well, we're not trying to shut down the existing nuclear power, but we sure hope we don't build anymore. But we must use nuclear power until we get enough wind on the grid." That's a baby step, but it's a step in the right direction. Then they're the people who are saying, "Well, nuclear power is too expensive and too slow."

I'm looking at that and saying it is in the Western world nowadays. It isn't too expensive or slow in South Korea or China. It's considered a great boon to getting steady electricity in those places.

Ed Coyne: Why do you think that is? Why do you think North America, in some cases, struggles with that? Because you think about France, for example, over 70% of its power, electricity comes from nuclear, and then here I think it's somewhere in the high teens, low 20s, in North America and the U.S. Why do you think that is? Why do you think it's more expensive here in the States versus other parts of the world?

Meredith Angwin: There are many different reasons, and one of the things is that I wouldn't say I like to blame anyone, but I will say that nuclear got itself in a bad state because it was trying too hard to be perfect. For example, recently, just north of here in Quebec, a railroad train loaded with oil was parked on a siding, and they thought they set all the brakes right, but they hadn't, and it just ran into a town and began burning.

It was loaded with oil, and it killed, I don't know what, 40, 50 people. Nobody has said since then that we'll never use oil again, but people are so happy to say anything that happens with nuclear, "Well, this shows you, this just shows you." Then, instead of the nuclear people coming back and saying, "Well, actually, if you look at the number of bad incidents with nuclear, they're very small, and they haven't really caused that many deaths." The nuclear people say, "No, we're going to be perfect." Of course, everybody knows that can't happen. Nothing can be perfect.

Ed Coyne: I never really heard the term duck curve before, but that's a great example of how solar's good for a certain part of the day but not the whole day. Wind's good when it's blowing, but not when it's not, obviously. Then nuclear fills in those gaps, and it sounds like we will move forward once we accept that nothing will be perfect and we need more than one energy source going forward.

Meredith Angwin: I agree with that. Some of my friends in nuclear think all we need is nuclear. I said, "No, I wouldn't like to see 100% nuclear on the grid any more than I'd like to see 100% coal or 100% solar or anything." All these different sources have their strengths and weaknesses. An analogy I sometimes make is that someone will say, "Oh, we need more gas because it's flexible." I'm like, "Yes, it is flexible, which means it can back up wind and solar, so that's good." We don't want 100% of the grid backed up by natural gas because that would be much more natural gas than most people would be comfortable with.

Ed Coyne: Let's talk about storage because as battery technology starts to ramp up, people often think about batteries just in cars. You get a battery, charge it, drive around, consume it, charge it back up, and keep going. Where are we with the storage of energy for the grid? Can we start storing energy from solar and wind farms to help make the grid more sustainable with different energy sources? Can you discuss the storage front, including the grid and energy?

Meredith Angwin: There are two kinds of storage: physical and chemical. In physical storage, we have a fair amount of that. It is pump storage. You have a lake, say down at river level, and the river happens to be next to a big cliff. You make another lake; you dig it out at the top of the hill, and then when there's a lot of excess electricity, you run the pumps at river level to push that water up that hill to the reservoir at the top. Then, when there isn't enough electricity on the grid, you let that water down through the turbines, and it makes electricity.

That pump storage is used quite a bit and is very effective. Of course, not everybody likes it because when you get right down to it, you must make this whole lake atop a hill that never had a lake. Also, moving that water up and down isn't like a normal river. You are going to have some effect on the river ecology. That is a very good physical storage method. When you get right down to it, of course, it's a good physical storage method; water, by its nature, is much less expensive than lithium.

We have the physical methods but are unlikely to build many more because they require big installations. Then we have the chemical methods; our best chemical method so far is lithium batteries. Now, of course, we know that there are problems there. People are constantly working on improving non-lithium storage batteries; hopefully, they will make some breakthroughs. Another issue is if I run a coal plant, it makes power, and all the power that goes to the factory comes from the coal plant.

That's the story; it may lose some in the transmission, but basically, it's that. You leave some energy on the table whenever you get involved in any storage. When you fill a battery or a pond up at the top of the hill, it takes more energy to fill it than you're going to get out of it when you decide to discharge it because that's just the nature of the world. You can call it the second law of thermodynamics, but that's how the world works. You don't get 100% out. If you decide to store energy, you must have a lot of extra energy, not just for storage, but also to not lose it in the round trip into and out of storage.

Ed Coyne: In your most recent book, Shorting the Grid, you talk a lot about the health of the grid or lack of health. Please walk us through that a little bit. What's going on with our grid today? Is it on care and maintenance? Is it cutting-edge technology? Where are we, and where do we need to go?

Meredith Angwin: What is unusual about the grid compared to anything else you can think of is the electricity has to be created and used simultaneously. That's what we call the grid in balance. Every grid has what we call a balancing authority. That is a group or could be a small grid, and I suppose it could be one person who's in charge of making sure that whatever the demand is on the grid, it's precisely met by the supply on the grid in real-time.

You can't say, "Oh, we're a little low now, but we'll make it up later." If you're a little low now, you don't get to make it up later because the power plants and the different equipment on the grid will find turning themselves off. After all, the frequency is dropping.

What happens is the balancing authority is there, and if things are good on the grid, the balancing authority is the one who says the demand is rising Power Plant A, come online now, or the market is falling. Power Plant B, get offline. We don't need you anymore. If things are bad on the grid, the balancing authority is the one who, unfortunately, has to say, "I've got every power plant on the grid that I could get on. That's not enough. I'm going to have to shed load. Turn off that area of Houston; turn it off. We can't supply it. Okay, we've had it off for half an hour. Turn it back on."

Now, we'll turn off a different area of Houston. That's called rolling blackouts. You blackout one area and then another area. It's the miserable thing the grid operators must do, but hopefully, not very often.

Ed Coyne: I can't believe that's even an option for us. We're supposed to be one of the most advanced parts of the world from a technological and creative standpoint. We're still talking about having rolling blackouts as one of our solutions. How do we change that? What needs to change for that not to be an issue because we all assume that when we flip on a light switch, we get light. We all take electricity for granted. We do. We've been spoiled. This is the way it is. How do we make sure that's what we get? I've lost power in a storm, and the world has started looking different after a few days. People are standing in line for gas and stuff. How do we avoid that?

Meredith Angwin: We avoid that by having a very reliable grid. From my point of view, the way the grid can be reliable is by accepting the way the grid operates. I hear people saying things that make no sense, but as they make no sense to me, I'm sure they make sense to the people saying it.

Ed Coyne: Don't be so sure.

Meredith Angwin: We don't need baseload anymore. What we need is a flexible grid. I'm like, I have seen studies, and I could tell you about them, but basically, 60% of the electricity that is used on a grid is electricity that is on 24/7. It is truly the base of the grid. Then, when you see fluctuations, duck curves, and stuff like that, that's on top of that base load.

In other words, when everybody gets up and turns on their lights, power demand on the grid goes up. When everybody comes home and begins making dinner, the power demand on the grid goes up. When you get right down to it, there's always a lot of power demand on the grid. People don't accept that. If we look at it as what do we want for our base load and what do we want for our load following?

We're currently trying to load follow with peaker plants and doing base load with peaker plants. What I mean by a peaker plant is a plant that is good at coming up to speed quickly because, all of a sudden, the demand on the grid surged. Too many grids are going down the route of the fatal trifecta. The fatal trifecta route is that you put in as many renewables as you can, even though they're intermittent. Don't worry about that; we will back them up with natural gas.

Then, if the backing up with natural gas doesn't work, we will get it from the neighbors. The problem is that renewables are intermittent. That's true. Natural gas is supplied just in time. Unlike uranium or coal, it is rarely stored at the power plant. It has to be delivered in time. Now, renewables go on and off when they want to. Natural gas is delivered just in time unless there's a problem with a compressor on the line or a real cold snap. Too many households, which have first priority, are using natural gas for heating. In other words, tons of things can mean something delivered just in time doesn't get delivered just in time.

Then they say, "We'll borrow from the neighbors." The neighbors are probably having the same problems because often it's a weather issue that starts the problems off-- the weather doesn't know where your balancing authority's grid ends and the next-door neighbor's balancing authority grid starts. Can I tell you a funny grid story?

Ed Coyne: Yes, please. I have never heard a funny grid story, so let's hear it.

Meredith Angwin: It's not all that funny, but in terms of the balancing authority in Britain, many people watch various football games or soccer games, rugby games, or cricket games. A lot of people also have electric kettles. It turns out that at the various break times in these games, people go and click on their electric kettle. This means there's a spike in demand on the grid. The balancing authority people are watching the game to get enough plants ready to go on when people turn their electric kettles on.

Ed Coyne: That's a modern story. This isn't like from the '30s and '40s.

Meredith Angwin: Oh, no, that's today.

Ed Coyne: That's unreal.

Meredith Angwin: I think you can see that on some YouTube. Those of us who are interested in the grid have an odd sense of humor.

Ed Coyne: It's amazing you say that. More and more people are interested. If you think about what's going on in technology, AI is consuming so much more electricity and is in 24/7 demand. Data centers, 24/7, crypto mining, 24/7. All these different things. It seems like we're getting more and more 24/7 demands for electricity. I'm taken aback when people say we don't need a base load system; we need a flexible system, and we need both, of course, but I think baseload has to be the number one priority at all times. Am I right in thinking that? What would you say to that?

Meredith Angwin: When I think about the base load system, what makes it up, what is it? You've got your hospital that has to run all the time. You've got your water treatment plant that has to run all the time. You've got your refrigerator at home and refrigerators in the food stores that have to run all the time. You've got your industrial processes that they'll lose a fortune if it cuts out at the wrong time. The base load is about our prosperity and our health. When we get down to it, would you like to see the water treatment plans and food storage all messed up? They're running base load; they're 24/7.

Ed Coyne: I forget who coined this phrase, but electricity is life. I don't know enough to ask enough questions, but you are packed with information, and I have to tell you that I went through the book fairly quickly in preparation for this. I need to go back now and read it cover to cover because there's so much good stuff in there. I'll tell you, anybody on this podcast listening that has an interest in this, I encourage you to listen and read the work of Meredith, whether it's her current book, Shorting the Grid, or her previous book, Campaigning for Clean Air, to get more information on this.

I got the okay before we started this podcast. Meredith said you could certainly reach out to her directly. She has a Gmail account, meredithangwin@gmail.com. That's M-E-R-E-D-I-T-H-A-N-G-W-I-N@gmail.com. I believe you're also on Substack. Is that correct?

Meredith Angwin: Correct. Meredith Angwin on Substack. It's also Electric Grandma. You have both your name and whatever the name of your Substack is.

Ed Coyne: I have to ask you real quickly, Electric Grandma. It has to be a grandkid who called you that. How did that come about?

Meredith Angwin: I thought, "Well, what are important things in my life?" My grandkids and the grid, I guess. My husband comes in there, too, as an important person in my life. That's why I did it.

Ed Coyne: I love it. I love it. Meredith, it has been a real treat to have you on. This is fantastic. Hopefully, we got a few more investors and listeners thinking about energy in a way they may haven't thought about before. Thank you once again, Meredith, for being on Sprott Radio.

Meredith Angwin: Thank you for inviting me.

Ed Coyne: Well, once again, I'm your host. Thank you for listening.