The question isn’t whether the grid will buckle and fail — it already has in places. Or when; obviously during summer heat waves or winter storms. Or why: Because of more air conditioning and electric cars.
The question is how did we screw up our power system, and who screwed it up? The answer is that super-bad decisions were made by government policymakers, so here we are. To explain:
“The seeds of chaos were sown in the 1990s, when states began ‘restructuring’ electricity markets to force more competition among power plant operators. Undergirding this change was the belief that pitting plants against each other in hourly battles for market share would take profit away from the power plants and hand it back to the consumer in the form of lower prices on energy bills. As a result, electricity rates went from reflecting what monopoly utilities and the elected commissioners that regulated them said was needed to cover long-term costs to the lowest price in a daily bidding war. The market shift not only failed to deliver steadily cheap electricity, it allowed short-term thinking to dominate the system.”
(Quoted from here.) Well, you know what happened; electricity bills doubled and tripled; and when coupled with deregulation led to abuses like the Enron scandals that resulted in power blackouts and astronomical electricity bills for customers. It was an epic policy failure.
Huffington Post (link above) estimates shifting to more climate-friendly heating and vehicles will increase electricity demand by 38% by 2050. That figure sounds too low to me. Anyway, their article proceeds to debate generating sources like coal and nuclear plants (noting opposition to nuclear due to fears of “Chernobyl-style accidents” and unresolved issues of nuclear waste disposal, but not mentioning the nuclear industry’s many scandals, including the highly-publicized murder of a whistleblower.)
(Here, I’ll reveal a personal bias: I’m against nuclear power because I don’t trust the nuclear industry. Bad welds, falsified paperwork, coverups of faulty construction and maintenance, and silencing whistleblowers; the industry is so lacking in honesty and conscience I wouldn’t trust them with a routine car repair.)
The problem isn’t only generating capacity, though. You have to get power from where it’s generated to where it’s used, and American’s transmission grid is creaky and old. Why don’t we improve it? If you don’t have the money required, you can’t; but even if you do have the money, you still can’t, because
” … power lines are notoriously hard to build in a country where property laws tilt in favor of not-in-my-backyard landowners and where corporations bent on slowing the transition to cleaner energy wield tremendous political influence.”
(Quoted from link above.) How greatly does updating the grid matter? Texas is a lab experiment of sorts. That state’s decision to isolate itself from regional and national grids, and to take deregulation to extremes, has led to grid failures that literally killed people in Texas.
I’m writing this piece partly because I think the Republican mania for deregulation is a major culprit in the current and potential problems with our electricity grids, in addition to their Neanderthal attitude toward generating methods bearing on climate change (which increases the need for power as summers get hotter).
Under the traditional regulated-utility model a single company served an assigned area, and regulators approved rates and oversaw customer service. This model evolved because it was impractical and economically inefficient for competing companies to build parallel power distribution networks. It’s practical to string only one set of power lines in a neighborhood. Regulating what utility companies could charge customers was necessary because they had a monopoly, but the tradeoff of price regulation was permitting rates that guaranteed a reasonable return on investment and provided utilities with funds necessary to maintain the system in good working order.
Upending that system in a quixotic quest for cheaper consumer electricity rates was a stupid mistake.
So why dwell on the mistakes of 30 years ago? Because, as Santayana said, “Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” A corollary is that unless we learn from our past mistakes, we’ll keep making more mistakes. That’s why you should pay attention to the sorry shape our grid is in, the debate over what to do about it, and understand how we messed up. Ideology-driven deregulation isn’t the only error, but it’s at the heart of the problem.
Changes in technology (e.g., wireless phones that eliminated the need for landlines) can change business models and whether a regulated-utility model is the best approach, but these kinds of policy decisions need to be carefully thought out, not knee-jerked.
As a final thought, I wouldn’t include this kind of spending as a necessary and reasonable investment in utility power.