The Interruptible Future

It’s always a great feeling to be surrounded by smart folks aligned on the mission of protecting others. Such was the case today at NASEO’s 2nd Energy Security Bootcamp. Joining moderator Paul Holloway from the Mass Department of Energy Resources, were McKinsey’s Jesse Noffsinger, Rebecca O’Neil from PNNL, Sharla Artz of Xcel Energy, and me. Our panel, presenting to an audience of US state energy officials and others, was titled “Planning for Emerging and Worsening Threats.”

Jesse held forth with smart natural gas market projections through 2035 given the very many variables in play right now. Rebecca shined a light on the very many risks to reliable grid operations she and her lab colleagues are tracking, and reprised some of what she discussed yesterday about the wildfire mitigation strategies (not just contentious Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPSs)) being put into practice by utilities in 2024. Sharla stressed the need to look at threats holistically. Conveying that all the different parties, infrastructure operators and defenders from multiple interdependent sectors and government, need to establish and maintain diverse communications channels if they’re to have a chance at keeping up with these challenges. And I shared my sobering thoughts about the need to plan and prepare our states for outages of higher frequencies and longer durations coming at us in the near to mid-term future.

Moderator Paul ensured we had time to field a few questions from attendees before quitting time, and one yielded perhaps the most shocking part of our session just before the bell rang. Sharla revealed that some linemen and linewomen walking power lines in Colorado to inspect them following the PSPS action – Colorado’s first – were harassed by residents angry that their power was off. And that this was not the only place this type of thing was happening. That made my blood boil.

Linemen are already risking their lives working intimately with electricity; to berate them while they are helping get the power back on is simply vile, idiotic, inhuman. Perhaps the ornery residents would have preferred to have the electricity stay on, spark fires, and have their homes, businesses and families incinerated, as some were in pre-PSPS California.

Better preparatory comms like Hawaii’s excellent recent messaging ahead of the 1 July start to its PSPS program would have helped. Many folks in Colorado, like my daughter in Boulder, had no idea why the power went out for as long as it did. But she did not verbally accost people trying to get it turned back on.

My après-workshop guidance to state energy officials and everyone who takes 99.9% reliable electricity for granted in the US is this: Be more like Ukrainians. There’s nothing like a common enemy threatening your very existence to build community spirit. Power workers in that besieged country are treated like rock stars as they risk life and limb attempting to rebuild bombed out power plants and substations and more. And no small number of them have been killed, doing their jobs, by Russian missiles.

We are so busy fighting each other and feeling aggrieved over real and perceived slights and insults that we completely overlook the wonderfully reliable energy, water and communications services that make life in a modern, first world country so easy and comfortable. Now here’s the Nostradamus part:

1. All three of those services – all dependent on the provision of electricity – will be more prone to (sometimes lengthy) interruptions in the coming years. I won’t spend time in this missive cataloguing the causal reasons, but suffice it to say, there’s a number of them.
2. Many of us will be pissed off and confused when this happens, and some will lash out like the aforementioned jerks in Colorado. Fingers will be pointed every which way and that’s going to further confuse us and retard better, faster adjustments.
3. But eventually we will adapt our lives and our business processes to a new, more interruptible, and importantly, more resilient, future. And Ukrainians, recalling how they did the same in 2022 to whenever Putin stops, finally being able to breath a bit easier, will be perhaps our very best role models and advisors.