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Speaker 1

00:00

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Our main story tonight concerns electricity. It's like Oscar Isaac in that without its involvement, nothing in my house gets turned on. -♪♪ Electricity is such an integral part of modern life, It is hard to believe that we used to have to sell people on the idea of electric appliances with ads like this.

Speaker 2

00:21

When you step inside the total electric home, you step into an entirely new concept in living, organized around electric centers, such as this entertainment center. The pride and joy of the man of the house is the weather control center. A center that puts you in charge of the electric heating and air conditioning and the electronic air filtering of the entire house.

Speaker 1

00:46

Yes, the pride and joy of the man of the house is, of course, the temperature control system. Just invite all your thermo bros over on a Sunday, crack open a few brews, and watch the temperature for hours. Sorry, ladies, you wouldn't understand.

Speaker 1

01:00

It's a guy thing. Specifically tonight, we're gonna talk about the power grid. The system of generators that produce electricity and the vast latticework of wires that get it to our homes. The grid is something that you probably don't think much about until it goes down, which unfortunately, has been happening more and more in recent years.

Speaker 3

01:19

Millions of Texans woke up to cold homes when the power grid failed.

Speaker 4

01:23

This video shows lights going out as parts of the power grid failed.

Speaker 3

01:26

Now, that power grid failed yesterday when Hurricane Ida ravaged parts of Louisiana.

Speaker 5

01:31

The lights went out across downtown Detroit, cutting power to 1,400 buildings. Watch as the lights go out during a murder trial these lawyers left in the dark.

Speaker 1

01:41

Holy shit! When the lights go out during a murder trial, 1 of 2 things is happening. You've either got a power grid deeply in need of repair, or the murder victim has come back as a ghost and is seeking revenge.

Speaker 1

01:55

Either way, your priorities have shifted and it's time to focus on a much bigger problem. If it feels like there have been more outages than usual recently, that's because there have. By 1 estimate, from 2015 to 2020, the number of annual blackouts in the U.S. Doubled.

Speaker 1

02:11

And that is not good for numerous reasons. The most obvious being, sitting around without power for any period of time absolutely sucks. What are you supposed to do without TV and the Internet? Go outside?

Speaker 1

02:24

That's where snakes live, you idiot! So, what else are you supposed to do? Read a book? That's where snakes sleep, you idiot!

Speaker 1

02:32

Why do you think we invented Kindles? But it's not just inconvenience. Losing electricity wreaks havoc on everything from sewage treatment plants to water purification systems, and can be life-threatening to people who rely on medical equipment like ventilators and powered wheelchairs.

Speaker 3

02:48

It's traumatizing, it's terrifying. For Terhorst, an outage is more than just an expensive inconvenience.

Speaker 6

02:55

This isn't like I'm gonna lose... A casserole in my fridge. You know, this is, I may not be alive tomorrow.

Speaker 1

03:06

Exactly. This is clearly about much more than just lost casseroles. Especially because, and let's be honest here, all casseroles are shit. They don't rely on specific ingredients so much as whatever's in someone's house.

Speaker 1

03:19

Casseroles are a sad smorgasbord of other leftovers desperately cobbled together to make a pathetic almost meal with names like tuna surprise and chicken I'm sorry. But to have a casserole leftover, That is abandoned food that didn't make the cut 2 rounds in a row. I'm sorry. But if that is your only option, there are genuinely worse fates than being dead.

Speaker 1

03:40

And look, while things are bad now, they could get a lot worse in the future, because the U.S. Has a goal of net 0 carbon emissions by 2050, which we absolutely must meet. But 1 study estimates that that's gonna require a 40 to 60 percent increase in peak electricity consumption, which when you think about it, does make sense. If we are switching to electric cars, cooking and heating, all that electricity is gonna have to come from somewhere.

Speaker 1

04:07

And the truth is, if everyone suddenly had an electric car tomorrow, that might be great for the planet, but it could push our grid to its absolute limit. So tonight, let's talk about the power grid, the current state that it's in, and what we can do to fix it. And let's start with the fact that while I'm saying grid singular, our system is actually made up of 3 grids. There is the Eastern interconnection, the Western interconnection, and the Texas interconnection.

Speaker 1

04:33

It's basically like Major League Baseball in that there are 2 dominant groups and then assholes in Texas who'd rather make up their own rules. And it all started in 1882, right here in New York, when Thomas Edison unveiled the country's first central power station on Pearl Street. Interestingly, it was then Edison's sometime rival, Nikola Tesla, who helped develop the technology enabling electricity to travel for long distances. Something all the more remarkable, given Tesla's, let's say, eccentricities.

Speaker 7

05:04

Tesla suffered from bizarre compulsions, like his consuming need to rescue injured pigeons and nurse them back to health.

Speaker 8

05:11

He has an infirmary for them right outside his bedroom window, where he's trying to heal some that have broken wings, broken legs. And in fact, at 1 point, he actually referred to 1 bird as his wife. And he said, you know, when she died, the inventive spirit left him.

Speaker 8

05:27

Huh.

Speaker 1

05:28

Did it now. Look, this isn't the point of this story or really anything, but if Tesla were alive today, I genuinely wonder which would upset him more. The fact that his name has been co-opted by history's first edgelord billionaire, or the fact that modern pigeons have just gotten so unfuckable.

Speaker 1

05:45

Listen, I said no, respectfully. Thank you for your attention, but I'm not interested. Please leave me and my friends alone. And when it was built, our power grid wasn't just a technical marvel, it was a civic 1.

Speaker 1

05:57

Until the 1930s, electricity was a luxury, mainly for dense, urban areas of the country. But after FDR created the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935, that began to change.

Speaker 9

06:10

The REA was set up by the president and the Congress in 1935 to help farmers to get the power and light at a price they can afford. Here is the first thing women ask for after light itself. If you have ever ironed for an hour, you'll know why.

Speaker 9

06:27

An electric iron may not look important to a man, but it lightens 1 whole day's burden for a woman.

Speaker 1

06:34

Yes, don't worry, ladies, with hubby naturally busy staring at the thermostat. You'll have plenty to do to occupy your time, like ironing his clothes, or teaching a different woman to iron his clothes. And if there is still time, pressing the iron to your neck just for a moment, simply to feel something.

Speaker 1

06:51

You thought getting lights would make things better, but it only made things clearer, didn't it? Didn't it? Now, in the end, we wound up with 600,000 miles of transmission lines and around 5 and a half million miles of local distribution lines, like the ones that you might see outside of your house. All of which form our modern electrical grid.

Speaker 1

07:11

It has been called the supreme engineering achievement of the 20th century. Which is not to say that it is completely invulnerable. Of course not. When you string wires in the air, they're going to be subject to interference from all sorts of things.

Speaker 1

07:25

A website that tracked disruptions found that there have been over 600 outages caused by squirrels, over 200 by birds, 53 by raccoons, and a number of others caused by everything from snakes to slugs. Let me just quickly say here, kudos, slugs. Out of everything on that list, you are honestly the ones that I underestimated. The nicest thing I can say about you is that on your best day, you look like sassy poop.

Speaker 1

07:50

But you really showed us something by disrupting our power, so once more, slugs, kudos. But it is not just animals that can wreak havoc. There have also been multiple balloon-based disruptions. And if you're wondering how on Earth a balloon could cause a power outage, the answer is like this.

Speaker 10

08:09

Oh, no! Oh, shit! 000000!

Speaker 1

08:19

Excellent! Not 1 single note. I hope no 1 standing there was hurt, but honestly, even if someone was, it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. But disruptions have always been an issue for the power grid.

Speaker 1

08:34

What makes it especially vulnerable now is a combination of 2 key factors. The first is old age. Most power lines were constructed in the 50s and 60s with a 50-year life expectancy, which they're clearly now well past. And the second is climate change.

Speaker 1

08:50

Meaning there's now more danger posed by extreme weather like hurricanes, tornadoes, and abnormally hot or cold temperatures. And that combo of old equipment and new climate threats has been disastrous. The massive campfire in California a few years ago happened because there was a drought in the area, making it essentially a tinderbox, and in intense winds, some Pacific Gas and Electric equipment failed, and for a pretty infuriating reason.

Speaker 6

09:16

This is the hook that killed 84 people.

Speaker 1

09:19

♪♪

Speaker 7

09:23

That groove took about 98 years to wear in. It's not a defect. These hooks are what are holding the electrical lines off the ground.

Speaker 7

09:35

And PG&E's decision was simply just to let these things hang until they broke.

Speaker 4

09:40

When this old hook did break, the power line made contact with the metal tower, showering the ground in sparks. That's how PG&E started the campfire.

Speaker 1

09:51

Yeah, and let that be a lesson to you. You can't just keep something that old in place and expect it to keep working forever. PG&E basically took the same approach to their equipment as Democrats did with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Speaker 1

10:04

And in both cases, it didn't end well. So, basically, we've got a power grid built in the 20th century that is not equipped to deal with the needs and stresses of the 21st. And if you're thinking, well, okay, let's upgrade it then, you're absolutely right. But that is also a massive undertaking because there are a lot of fixes, both small and huge, that the power grid badly needs.

Speaker 1

10:28

The small ones we don't have time to get into tonight like investing in microgrids and weatherproofing, as well as better storage capabilities so the excess power we generate doesn't go to waste. But we're gonna focus on the huge 1 here. Because our shift to renewable energy is gonna require a fundamental shift in what our grid looks like. 1 of the few benefits of fossil fuel plants is that you can put them anywhere.

Speaker 1

10:51

That is why most are located near densely populated areas close to the people that they serve. But you can't just replace every coal plant with a wind farm because that is not necessarily where the wind is strongest. And that fact alone changes everything.

Speaker 3

11:07

This is a model created by Princeton mapping out possible places in the continental US where wind and solar projects could, in theory, be built. Aside from some offshore wind farms, it's mostly in the middle of the U.S. Another study found that these states have most of the wind and solar potential, yet the people living there would only make up 30% of the electricity demand.

Speaker 3

11:31

In a decarbonized future, we're going to need to get electricity from here to here.

Speaker 1

11:37

Right. And you probably don't even need me to tell you why this is going to be an uphill battle because as soon as you saw that graphic and realized updating the grid was gonna require a Princeton researcher telling a Midwestern farmer, we need to build something in your backyard so someone in California can power their electric car. You already called the next 8 election cycles for Republicans. But there is actually some good news here, because we've already made considerable progress in building out renewable energy power sources.

Speaker 1

12:06

Last year, for the first time ever, renewables like solar, wind, and hydropower accounted for the largest portion of new generating capacity. And that is good, not just for consumers, but in many cases, for the communities where those facilities are built. In 2019, wind energy projects alone provided $706 million in land lease payments to rural landowners. So, entire towns and areas can benefit from the money and the jobs renewables can bring, as this mayor in Wyoming can attest.

Speaker 6

12:36

My personal belief is it provides money, it provides jobs, taxes. And then I look at the towns that they're by and just think of what people have that they wouldn't have had. A lot of infrastructure, police cars, those kind of things.

Speaker 6

12:51

When I look at a wind farm, all I think about is cha-ching.

Speaker 1

12:55

And that's great. Well, to be clear, when you look at a wind farm, you can't think cha-ching, because That's the cash register noise. I know you're trying to make a different point, but this is important too.

Speaker 1

13:04

Wind farms go, thwoom, thwoom, thwoom. That's how wind farms go. A cash register goes, cha-ching. A solar farm goes, tsss.

Speaker 1

13:12

A cat on the day everyone forgot its birthday goes, meow. A horny cartoon wolf goes, a-woo-ga. And again, wind farms go, thwoom, thwoom, thwoom. Just so we're clear about how things go.

Speaker 1

13:25

So the physical generation of renewable energy isn't really the problem here. The key issue is the transmission of it. Basically, how do you get that energy from where it's made, like a wind farm in Wyoming, to where it is needed, which could be a thousand miles away? And that brings us to transmission lines, because they are at the absolute heart of our grid.

Speaker 1

13:45

And we're gonna need a lot more of them, partly because due to limitations of our aging transmission infrastructure, in some places we actually have more electricity than we have the capability to transport. For instance, in Vermont, they had to put a moratorium on new solar and wind projects because the transmission lines couldn't carry any more electricity. So building out newer, higher capacity lines is crucially important, but so far, we haven't done nearly enough. And that is for a couple of reasons.

Speaker 1

14:16

And the first big 1 is location. Stringing power lines out across the country is a logistical nightmare. Unlike interstate gas lines, which only require approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with power lines, you must secure the buy-in from multiple state and local agencies in every state you pass through, alongside all the individual landowners whose property you need to use. And look, there are legitimate reasons for people to not want power lines in their backyard.

Speaker 1

14:43

For instance, if it disrupts their farming operation, or goes through environmentally sensitive areas, or cultural or sacred sites for Native Americans. Other objections are simply aesthetic. The fact is, high voltage lines, capable of carrying more electricity, require bigger towers than their predecessors. And some people just don't want to see them.

Speaker 1

15:02

This is such an issue that some countries have actually made efforts to beautify their towers. In Hungary, they decided to build ones that look like jesters. In Iceland, they proposed these designs for a project called Land of Giants. And in Argentina, there is Colosso, the giant transmission line robot.

Speaker 1

15:20

At night, Colosso lights up and can even smile and wink. And look, I get the smile part. You want Colosso to come off as friendly, so children aren't terrified of the giant, electrified robot with glowing monster eyes. But why does it need to wink?

Speaker 1

15:36

What is it trying to communicate there? Is it coming onto us? Because I feel the same way about Colosso as I do about that pigeon. Never in a million fucking years.

Speaker 1

15:45

No, thank you. Please stop looking at me like that. It's making me uncomfortable. It's my friend's birthday.

Speaker 1

15:50

We're just trying to give her a nice evening. Although I will, I will keep the Long Island iced tea. Thank you. And good night.

Speaker 1

15:58

And the thing is, local opposition can be very effective in killing transmission line projects. A few years back, a company proposed plans to build 16 miles of new lines through Pennsylvania. But local landowners formed a grassroots group to push back, even releasing videos like this 1 to detail their objections.

Speaker 11

16:16

I understand everybody needs electric. And everybody has to have electric. I wouldn't want to be without electric.

Speaker 11

16:21

But from what I understand, you know, this is only going to help people in Western PA, Maryland and Virginia. And what's it doing? You know, I mean, I chose to live here. And they chose to live there.

Speaker 11

16:33

So don't make your problem my problem. That's how I feel.

Speaker 1

16:38

Okay, I mean, that is a little bit maddening. The mirrored sunglasses definitely don't help, but it's a lot more than that, because I do get, I don't want this on my land. I really do.

Speaker 1

16:49

But to make your argument, I don't want this here, if it'll only help someone there, just makes you sound like a dick. Also, if we don't upgrade the grid, absolutely everyone is going to have problems, including you. It's like saying, don't make your problem my problem when your neighbor's yard is full of bears. Sure, but when it gets over that fence, guess what?

Speaker 1

17:09

It's your fucking problem now, too. And when you consider all the hurdles transmission projects have to clear, It is no wonder it can take up to a decade to get new ones approved, if they're approved at all. And this can make it harder to bring renewable energy onto the grid in the first place. Fewer than a quarter of proposed energy projects, like solar and wind, actually ever make it to commercial operation because of transmission hurdles.

Speaker 1

17:35

And that is really not good. Now, the second big obstacle to overcome here is cost. Because the truth is, this won't be cheap. 1 study projects decarbonizing our power grid could cost 2 and a half trillion dollars over the next decade.

Speaker 1

17:49

And to put it mildly, not everyone is on board with spending that money. When Congress was considering the Clean Future Act, a bill that would, among other things, provide for expanding our transmission system, Representative Bill Johnson absolutely refused to entertain the notion that it could possibly be worth it and would not back down.

Speaker 12

18:08

Whether the American people are stuck picking up this tab via higher taxes or rate increases on their utility bills, can you honestly say that they'll be receiving a return on their investment?

Speaker 10

18:21

As you look at the cost benefit for the health and safety of communities.

Speaker 12

18:27

No, what's the return on investment? What is the return on investment? They're making a monetary, investment with their taxes or their rate increases.

Speaker 12

18:38

What is the return on their investment?

Speaker 10

18:41

So the return on the investment is access to clean energy, it's access to...

Speaker 12

18:46

No, that's not a return on investment. A return on investment is a monetary thing. That's why you make an investment.

Speaker 1

18:52

Okay, a few things. 1, shut up. 2, if you let her talk for more than 2 fucking seconds there, She might have told you that many studies have found that it is cost-effective.

Speaker 1

19:04

For instance, a federal lab looked into expanding transmission lines across the country and found that such a project could return up to $2.50 in benefits for every dollar of cost, which is, As an asshole might put it, a return, a return on a fucking investment. But look, set that aside. Set aside also that blackouts can cost us a lot of money, as the people of Texas will tell you after what happened to them earlier this year. There are also many benefits here that are not purely monetary.

Speaker 1

19:33

A cleaner grid helps combat climate change, meaning that maybe your grandkids won't die in weekly lava hurricanes, which does seem pretty worthwhile. Framing this purely as a matter of debt profit is so weird. It's like saying, what's the return on investment in funding the fire department? How much money do we make off that?

Speaker 1

19:52

Well, I guess technically none, but if your house is on fire, someone will come with a hose to put it out. Plus, we get those sexy firefighter calendars full of oiled up fire hunks, so we get to be safer and hornier, I'd call it a win-win. And look, I admit, this is going to require a lot of compromise and flexibility from all of us. But there are ways to overcome the hurdles that I've described tonight.

Speaker 1

20:16

When it comes to transmission line location, we can ease people's concerns, not necessarily by going full creepy colossal here. We don't have to be winked at. But we can make sure that people are compensated fairly for the use of their property and place lines to the extent possible on already disturbed lands, like along railroads and highways. And when it comes to cost, we are finally making some progress.

Speaker 1

20:40

The infrastructure bill that passed the House this week devotes over 65 billion dollars to improve the power grid, with a portion going directly to transmission upgrades and expansion. It is a good start while also being not nearly enough. But the key thing going forward here might be to start thinking about this differently than we currently are. Because for far too long, whenever we've experienced blackouts, we've tended to think of it as the power grid failing.

Speaker 1

21:06

But the truth is, it's not failing us. We are failing it by asking it to do something it was not designed to do, in conditions that it was not designed to handle. So we need to act boldly and quickly as if both our lives and our shitty casseroles depend on it. And if we do this, if we manage to properly upgrade our power grid, it will genuinely be 1 of the biggest accomplishments of the 21st century, and 1 definitely worth celebrating.

Speaker 1

21:34

Perhaps, I don't know, with some balloons. You know, balloons are always fun, aren't they? They're little... Oh, shit.

Speaker 1

21:41

Oh, fuck! Oh, shit! Oh, shit. Oh, no.

Speaker 1

21:46

Oh, hold on. I'm okay. That's our show. Thanks so much for watching.

Speaker 1

21:56

We'll see you next week. Good... Fuck! Good night.

Speaker 1

22:15

Thank you.