on the Texas energy catastrophe

Like most people I’ve watched the Texas power grid collapse and the resulting cascade of failures with dismay, though perhaps with less shock than is typical. The modern way of life is utterly dependent on copious and freely-flowing energy (85% of it from fossil fuels), and ordinary people take that for granted to a degree that is maddening from the perspective of an energy engineer.

This morning the New York Times has an article about people in Texas who didn’t lose their power, but are facing 5-figure monthly electric bills because of the specifics of the rate plans they signed up for in the de-regulated market. Apparently among the over 200 competitive plans in the state, some have the schtick ‘wholesale plus $10/mo’; when wholesale rates railed out at $9/kWh, those plans duly passed the cost on to the homeowners. (The average home uses about 30kWh per day; surely big Texas homes in a cold snap use much more.)

Besides falsely blaming renewables for the state’s failures, the governor is now promising to protect Texans from that market functioning as intended – from the same article:

“We have a responsibility to protect Texans from spikes in their energy bills that are a result of the severe winter weather and power outages,” Mr. Abbott, who has been reeling after the state’s infrastructure failure, said in a statement after the meeting. He added that Democrats and Republicans would work together to make sure people “do not get stuck with skyrocketing energy bills.”

I believe it was Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute who said something to the effect that “Markets are designed to be Efficient, not Sufficient,” and this is a great example of that. The provision of affordable, reliable, non-planet-destroying energy to over 300M Americans and nearly 8B humans is not primarily an economic project, it is primarily a technological project. Economic systems are technology, markets are an extremely powerful tool to lubricate the inner workings of that project, and financial tools could be an engine of transformation (e.g. a global carbon tax), but by themselves they don’t magically solve much of anything.

The power grid is practically the textbook example of a natural monopoly, at least for transmission and distribution, and the trouble in Texas obviously started with a lot of equipment (mostly around natural gas) shutting down in conditions it wasn’t designed to run in. The modern electric grid operates essentially ‘just in time’ without significant energy storage at any step or scale. Most homes don’t have backup systems and aren’t very well insulated; pipes burst below freezing and homes flood, and from there things go to hell pretty quickly.

The wildest thing about this story is that $9 per kWh is still a bargain in human energetic terms. As I wrote in Energy Enlightenment and the better angels of our exotherm, an average human at hard labor (say pedaling to power an apple cider mill) can only produce about 1kWh per day. A human diet of 2000 dietary calories per day is only 2.3kWh, and this puts a hard ceiling on what a person eating that much could deliver on an ongoing basis. The amount of energy that typical Americans take utterly for granted is a ginormous thundering torrent in absolute human terms. If more people realized this, they might refocus some of their pandemic home improvement efforts on superinsulation, backup systems, self-generation (i.e. rooftop PV), and modest onsite energy storage – likely some combination of firewood, propane, and lithium.

The problem of ‘lifestyle’

I hate the word ‘lifestyle’, at least in relation to anything that matters, because it trivializes that which should not be trivialized. Much like Consumers, it is a word that slips in easily to replace something harder and more important.

Collectively, humans have colossal power – including the ability to defeat (or not) viral contagion and transform, devastate, or renew landscapes.  In the fossil fuel era, we have materially altered the temperature of the entire surface of the planet in a few short decades, and are creating in a century an extinction event that will be visible over the sweep of billions of years. We also have choices, and so we have responsibility for our actions.  “They” did not do these things, WE are doing them – you and I do them every time we pump gas, eat a steak, or step onto an airplane. While each person’s individual contribution is miniscule, they add up exactly to our collective impact – there is nothing else.

Engaging meaningfully with global environmental challenges requires scientific literacy and the ability to see past appearances.  Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, mercury in fish – these things are literally invisible, and undetectable without the tools of science.  And the chains of causation between my everyday actions and my infinitessimal contribution to them are invisible likewise. One must dig under the surface to understand them.  But Lifestyle is all about appearances.  It points attention at cultural signifiers, gloss, and status, not the sinewy reality of material and energy flows and actual impacts of behavior.

At some point in college I did a quantitative accounting of my carbon footprint, and on many fronts I did well – living in a cooperative community with nearly 30 other young people, eating a vegetarian diet, riding a bicycle as my daily commuter. But I was surprised to find that well over half of my impact came from frequent car trips to the White Mountains of New Hampshire to go hiking – despite driving a relatively efficient vehicle for the time. This took me aback, and got me thinking harder about actual impacts as opposed to easy perceptions of what constituted “environmentally-aware lifestyle activities”.

Often I have lamented here when the superficial gaze of the New York Times style page lands on rural life and finds improbably clean chickens clutched against pristine leather jackets. It’s not just that this is precious and inauthentic, it is actively leading us astray.  The combination of innumeracy and a focus on style over substance is the same instinct that causes people who travel by air to concern themselves with plastic soda straws.  A ‘rural lifestyle‘ that occupies prime farmland, consumes agricultural inputs, and releases agricultural methane without actually producing agricultural goods in a low-impact way is no more sustainable than flying across oceans to go hiking.

Much is written about the influence of money in our politics, and to be sure it is malign.  Apparently the 2020 election cost $14B, which seems like a huge sum, but in the context of over 300M people it is amazingly little – only about $40 each – the average American spends far more on energy every week.  Recent violent outbursts acknowledged, the abiding reality is mundane complacency, with smokestacks and tailpipes belching all the while.  In this context, how we use our dollars day in and day out is much more impactful than our voice or our vote. 

The pandemic has made it clear that there is a large class of people who are deeply, pathologically allergic to the idea that they are responsible for the effects their actions have on others.  But responsible they are, and responsible we are, the childish tantrums of adults notwithstanding.  Whether it’s invisible viruses spreading in close-packed rooms or ten-cylinder engines roaring freedom on a wide-open highway, we are bound together in the fabric of a reality much deeper than the gloss of fashion or the ring of tinny internet rhetoric. But “Lifestyle” says it’s all good – just a matter of freedom and fashion or personal taste.  Will it be “My lifestyle is to minimize air travel and grow vegetables”? Well then, good on you!  Or how about “My lifestyle is to jet-set around the world hunting endangered species”  Well then, good on you! If how we behave is just a matter of personal style and preference, these choices are equivalent.

These choices are not equivalent.  I believe we have a moral obligation to act as if our actions matter, and life should be about far more than style.  I want people to learn about the physical, quantitative effects of our choices, reflect on them, and change our lives so we have less negative impact on the planet, and more positive impact on our communities.  In doing this, and in keeping with the great coming together that is needed in the wake of the past few years, I hope we can pay less attention to “Lifestyle” and more to the actual gallons and miles and gigatons of reality.

The Innovator’s Dilemma: evidence from Richard Scarry

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen is a classic of innovation literature. I was introduced to the basic ideas by Ely Sachs, inventor of one of the major types of 3D printing as well as two impressive kerfless silicon wafer manufacturing technologies, and I finally read it a year or two ago. A major theme is that established dominant market players are good at ‘sustaining innovation’ to incrementally improve their products in service to existing customers, but are lousy at ‘disruptive innovation’, applying new technologies to adjacent, emerging market segments. More typically a new technology is incubated by startups in adjacent markets until it matures to the point where it (and the startups pioneering it) rapidly crush and replace the older technology.

The meaty academic example he uses in the book is the hard drive industry, but chapter 3 gives much more tactile and approachable example, that of mechanical excavators. As the story goes, in the steam era an impressive industry grew up to produce cable-operated, forward-scooping excavation machines (‘steam shovels’) to serve the construction industry, and the leaders in this industry successfully navigated the transition from steam to gasoline to diesel-electric drives in the period from the mid-1800’s through 1950. Then, between the 1950s and 1970s they were suddenly crushed by the rapid emergence of new companies building hydraulic-actuated equipment. Hydraulics established itself in the niche of small, maneuverable tractor-based digging machines used by building contractors to do utility hookup work in the massive post-war building boom, and then quickly scaled up, switched to track-based drives, and grew to all but eliminate cable-driven shovels at the large end of the market. I remember as a kid seeing old rusting cable-driven shovels scattered around, and I remember in the early 1980’s that the cellar hole for my grandparents’ house was dug by a local guy with a yellow backhoe, and I remember tracked hydraulic excavators gradually becoming an everyday thing, but I never put it all together as an example of disruptive innovation.

One of the neat things about my mother being a kids’ book author is that she has an infinite collection of old picture books, and Z has been the beneficiary of that. One of his favorites is Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, originally published in 1963. There’s not much electronics in it (he wouldn’t recognize the television set even if we had one, and we haven’t bothered to teach him what the telephones are), and the cars look a bit funny with tailfins and the like, but otherwise it’s surprisingly mostly relevant. So in light of the excavation example in Christensen’s book, I was interested to see how different things are on the ‘Work Machines’ page, showing construction equipment:

The cable-driven ‘shovel’ is the most prominent piece of equipment in the lower left. There is only one machine that’s clearly hydraulic, the clunky-looking yellow ‘tractor shovel’ in the upper right. The apparently chain-driven mobile ‘bucket loader’ on the right is a piece of equipment I’m not familiar with at all, and it’s not clear how the ‘tractor scraper’ at upper right is actuated. The most interesting thing to me is the bulldozer in the upper left, whose blade appears to be raised by a cable-pulley arrangement rather than by hydraulics. I can dimly remember from when I was a kid that bulldozers often had cable winches on the back, but I never put the pieces together that originally the winch would have been used to raise the blade, and when I asked my dad confirmed that this was indeed the norm back in the day. Having done a moderate amount of earthwork using small equipment, I can imagine how the inability to apply down-pressure using the blade would be a major limitation in the usefulness of a bulldozer, so hydraulics must have been a revelation when they came along.

According to wikipedia, the Fresno scraper was invented in 1883, and it was a major innovation – for millenia the state of the art had been picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and carts, but in the fevered pace of the industrial era the Fresno quickly evolved into the tractor scraper, dozer, and other modern equipment. When I was a kid my grandparents had a small yellow John Deere bulldozer; it was kind of a joke that it belonged to my grandmother, because my grandfather got it for (himself for) her birthday. They used it for clearing and firewood-harvesting around the land, and it was generally underpowered and marginal for our needs. The blade angle was manual, and by the time I was old enough to run it one of the steering brakes had stopped working, so it was like one of those old cheap RC cars where the way to go left was to go backwards and turn. But the blade raise/lower was at least hydraulic, and on contemplating this history I have a new appreciation for it. It’s remarkable how much even a mundane-seeming area of technology can improve in a fraction of a lifetime!