This Is the Case for Building a More Robust Power Grid

Joe Weisenthal (0:09)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

Tracy, you know, a cliche that I hear a lot, or I don't know if it's a cliche, but a line that I hear a lot, is that our electrical power grid is not made.

What's so funny? Sorry.

Tracy Alloway (0:29)

When you say a cliche that you hear a lot, like you think everyone is just walking around going like, oh, the electrical power grid is not ready for renewables. Who are you talking to on like a daily basis?

Joe Weisenthal (0:42)

You're right. I'm talking to my six-year-old daughter. She says that to me a lot. She says, dad, it's great to have renewable energy, but our electrical power grid is not made for intermittent renewables.

But you have heard people say that.

Tracy Alloway (0:54)

Yes, yes. There are lots of people, I mean, not just in the energy space, but in politics as well, who will make this point repeatedly.

Joe Weisenthal (1:03)

But I actually don't know what that means. So I hear it, it gets repeated, but I actually do not know what they're saying when they say that. Like it sounds like a smart thing to say, but I don't have any intuitive sense of like what that means or what the difference between our existing grid and how it works versus a grid that is optimized for a world of much more wind and solar and intermittent sources of clean energy.

Tracy Alloway (1:26)

I mean, I have this simplistic view of it, I guess, which is that, I guess we need more grid, right? Like just, this is the simplest possible like interpretation of that, just that our infrastructure isn't where it should be. And so we should be building newer, but you're right. I have no idea whether or not there are technical differences between like the types of electricity transmission you need for something like solar and wind versus more traditional energy generation by, you know, natural gas or coal or whatever.

Joe Weisenthal (1:59)

So the one thing that kind of does make sense to me, and everybody knows, you know, it's like, you know, wind turbines don't do anything when the wind isn't blowing or you don't get any solar power when the sun isn't shining or if there's a lot of clouds or something.

But if you had really widespread geographical reach of the grid, then you could sort of diversify away some of those risks so that if there isn't wind in one area, maybe it's more likely that at least somewhere it's windy. So you sort of ameliorate some of these risks by longer wires, a bigger grid, but beyond that, that's it. That's the only thing that I sort of like, can sort of intuit about maybe what's insufficient about our existing grid.

Tracy Alloway (2:37)

I mean, it also seems like doing something like that would just be a massive undertaking, both in terms of the actual amount of money you would need to build something like that, but also just getting different groups of people, different states to work together, especially in the current environment, that seems like a long shot. The idea that, I don't know, if Texas is generating a lot of energy from solar, that they're going to be willing to send it over to a place like Vermont or New Hampshire. And Texas, of course, has its own energy grid, so that's a really bad example, but it does kind of, it gets to those issues, yeah, exactly.

Joe Weisenthal (3:15)

Yeah, and so I am also aware of this. I think there was some plan to bring in more Quebecois hydro power in the Northeast, but there was like a vote in Maine, and I think they shot it down. And sometimes you hear about these big land use battles in the West where people want to make wires over big ranches and those can get held up. Anyway, there is a lot, we need to learn more about the grid itself.

Tracy Alloway (3:40)

Yeah, let's do it.

Joe Weisenthal (3:41)

Okay, I'm very excited to bring in our current guest. We are going to be speaking to Rob Gramlich. He is the president of Grid Strategies, which consults with all kinds of different players in the energy space on grid issues. He's been involved in the grid business for about three decades, and he's going to explain what that actually means, what an ideal grid would look like. So Rob, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Rob Gramlich (4:08)

Great to be here, Tracy and Joe. I really appreciate it.