Swimming With Fiberglass: The Fallout from the Nantucket Turbine Accident

 

On the surface, wind-turbine-generated electric power has been one of the green-energy success stories of the twenty-first century.  In 2000, only about 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind power was installed in the U. S.  In 2022, that number had risen to 434 GW, fueled by a combination of government subsidies, advances in mechanical and power technologies, and generally favorable public opinion. 

 

But no large-scale technology is entirely without its problems, and one of the downsides of wind energy started showing up very prominently on Tuesday, July 18, when chunks of fiberglass-carbon composite material began to show up on a number of Nantucket beaches.  They turned out to be from a blade of a wind turbine that had failed the previous Saturday about 13 nautical miles south of the beaches, in an Atlantic-Ocean-based wind farm called Vineyard Wind.  The local environmental authorities shut down the beaches and called out Vineyard Wind for its failure to notify them promptly after the failure, according to reports in National Review.  The system off the New England Coast is the second-largest ocean-based one in the U. S., and began operations only in January after receiving over a billion dollars in indirect federal subsidies. 

 

Now, Vineyard Wind may be able to recover from this incident, in which no one was killed or even injured, as far as we know.  It's not exactly clear why the turbine blade broke, but there is a possibility that manufacturing problems in France may have been responsible, as an identical type of blade also ruptured recently in the U. K. 

 

Broken blades are not the only problem that wind turbines can cause.  Vineyard Wind is in a prime commercial fishing area, and fishing interests opposed the installation because snagging an underwater power cable with a dragnet can capsize a boat.  And there's also the bird problem.

 

Estimates vary, but one source says that up to a million birds are killed every year in the U. S. by wind turbines.  This is a little-known but depressing thought which is easy to ignore, as the turbines are installed either offshore where they are out of sight to everyone except a few boaters (and those fishing boats), or in remote areas such as, well, Texas and Oklahoma.

 

This isn't the first time that governments have put their heavy thumbs on the scale of energy development.  Many of the hydroelectric projects built in the 1930s, ranging from Hoover Dam to the multiple installations of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were paid for partly or completely with government dollars.  At the time, private utility interests protested about the unfair competition that such organizations as the TVA represented.  But in the depths of the Depression, anything that put people to work and made the perceived blessings of electricity available to more consumers was viewed favorably, and history has shown that viewpoint to be substantially correct.

 

Things are different now.  While demand for electricity is increasing, largely due to recent developments such as server farms for AI and cryptocurrency trading, we are not about to run out of electricity.  If environmental concerns militate against building more coal or natural-gas-fired plants, the nuclear option is one that makes a great deal of engineering sense, but is burdened with a lot of cultural baggage and regulatory barnacles.  In the headlong dash toward "net-zero" carbon emissions, the trendy thinkers and politicians have thrown billions at wind and solar power with more enthusiasm thsn discrimination, ignoring the fact that no hardware lasts forever, and it takes energy and physical stuff to build, and then when it wears out you have to put it somewhere.

 

I am told that after the carbon-fiberglass-composite wind turbine blades reach their end-of-lifetime date, which may be only a few years in some cases, the operators replace then and have to bury the old ones, intact, in the ground.  Recycling them would probably cost as much as making a new blade, and they're too big to take to a standard landfill.  And some of the chemicals in solar panels are nothing that you'd want to put on your morning cereal either, but acres and acres of them are going to have to be disposed of some day.

 

These are partly technical problems, and may have technical solutions.  But it's surprising how the same people who talk about how every technology must be sustainable, tend to turn a blind eye to the life-cycle issues of their favored technologies, simply because while in operation, they don't use fossil fuels. 

 

I'm sorry the beachgoers of Nantucket are having to stay out of the water temporarily while experts in haz-mat suits clean up the mess made by Vineyard Wind.  But some thought should have been given to the possibility of something like this happening, and maybe just a few miles away from some very popular beaches wasn't the best place to put the turbines. 

 

New England, unlike Texas, doesn't have a lot of good places on land to put wind turbines.  About thirty years ago, a mechanical engineer I knew at the University of Massachusetts managed to erect an experimental wind turbine on a prominent "mountain" (really a large hill) visible from I-95 in Massachusetts.  But every time I drove past it, I never saw it operating, and one day at a meeting, somebody finally asked him why they never saw it running.  His reply?  "It runs at night."  Sometimes it's hard being a pioneer.

 

It's a matter of judgment as to whether our era has gone overboard in its fiscal and political enthusiasm for wind, solar, and other renewables,as opposed to the tried-and-true fossil fuels and the controversial option of nuclear energy.  There are real hazards ahead if we displace too many old-style "dispatchable" sources (controllable on demand) with systems that depend on the wind blowing and the sun being out.  We still can't store large amounts of electricity economically, and there are technical reasons that too much wind and solar energy on a grid can make it hard to control, although these may be worked out in time.  And grid reliability is a vital feature that will affect the entire economy adversely if we lose it. 

 

I hope people in Nantucket get their beaches cleaned up before the summer swimming season is over, but even if they do, I'm not planning a trip up there.  This Texas wimp can't swim in water that cold.

 

Sources:  I referred to articles on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nantucket-beaches-closed-after-wind-turbine-breaks-apart-sending-fiberglass-shards-into-ocean/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/the-biden-harris-green-crown-jewel-just-shattered-literally/.  The statistic on birds killed annually by wind turbines is from https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bird-deaths, and the growth in wind energy in the U. S. is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/189412/us-electricity-generation-from-wind-energy-since-2005/.

 

CrowdStrike Violates "No Headlines" Rule

 

An old friend of mine summarized engineering ethics for me once in two words:  "No headlines."  Meaning, I suppose, that if an engineering firm does its job right, there is no reason for it to show up in news headlines, which tend to focus on bad news. 

 

Well, the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, based just up the road from me in Austin, Texas, managed to break that rule spectacularly last Friday, July 19, when they issued what was supposed to be a routine "sensor configuration update." 

 

CrowdStrike makes cloud-based software that helps prevent cyberattacks and other security breaches, and one part of doing that involves sensing attacks.  Because the nature of cyberattacks changes daily, security software firms such as CrowdStrike have to update their software constantly, and so that includes updating the sensor parts too.  It's not clear to me whether it gets installed by IT departments or individuals, but I would suspect the former.  Its product that was involved in the update last Friday, called Falcon, is used exclusively on Microsoft Windows machines, of which there are about 1.4 billion in the world.

 

Something was radically wrong with the update sent out near 11 PM Austin time, because on about 8 million PCs, a logic error in the update caused them to freeze up and exhibit the famed "blue screen of death" (BSOD).  One way I tell my students that they can assess the relative importance of a given technology, is to imagine that an evil genie waves a magic wand at midnight, and suddenly all examples of that technology throughout the world vanish.  How big would the disruption be? 

 

Well, something like that happened Friday, and the disruptions made a ton of headlines.  Most major U. S. airlines suddenly found themselves without a scheduling or ticketing system.  Schools and hospitals across the U. S. were deprived of their computer systems.  Some 911 emergency-call systems in some cities crashed. 

 

CrowdStrike CEO and co-founder George Kurtz issued an apology Saturday, saying on a blog post "I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you for today's outage."  Once their engineers discovered what was going on, CrowdStrike rushed to provide a fix, which involved rebooting the paralyzed PCs into safe mode, deleting a certain file, and rebooting.  But multiply that fairly simple task, which could be done easily by an IT tech and with difficulty by anyone else, times 8.5 million PCs, and it was clear that this mess wasn't going to be cleaned up overnight.

 

As computer foulups go, this one was fairly minor, unless you were trying to get somewhere by plane over the weekend.  I don't know for sure, but it's possible it could have been avoided if CrowdStrike had a policy of trying out each of their updates on a garden-variety PC to make sure it works.  Maybe they did, and there's some subtle difference between their test bed and the 8.5 million PCs that froze up.  That's for them to figure out, assuming that they weather the storm of lawsuits that may arise on the horizon once the accountants of affected organizations figure out how much revenue was lost in the flight delays, scheduling problems, and other issues caused by the glitch.

 

The crowning irony of the whole thing was, of course, that the problem was caused by software that was designed to prevent problems.  This isn't the first time that safety equipment turned out to be dangerous.  In the auto industry, a years-long slow-motion tragedy was caused by the carelessness of Takata, a manufacturer of airbag inflators, which sold inflators with a defect that caused them to detonate and send flying metal shrapnel into the car's passengers instead of just inflating the airbag.  After years of recalls, Takata declared bankruptcy in 2017 and is out of business.

 

One hopes that this single screwup will not spell doom for a cybersecurity company that up to now seems to have been doing a good job of preventing computer breaches and otherwise keeping out of trouble.  It's a public corporation with about 8,000 employees, so it's unlikely that giant firms such as American Airlines could recoup their losses without just bankrupting the whole outfit.  If Microsoft itself was directly responsible, that would be another question, but Microsoft's only involvement was the fact that the product was used only on Windows machines. 

 

This whole episode can serve as a cautionary experience to help us prepare for something bigger that might come down the technology pike in the future.  Malicious actors are constantly trying to exploit vulnerabilities for various nefarious purposes, ranging from vandalistic amusement all the way up to strategic military incursions mounted against multiple countries.  It would be worth while to imagine the worst that could happen computer-wise, and then at least ask the question, "What would we do about it?" 

 

My sister works at a large hospital where they have toyed with the idea of deliberately turning off all their computers once every so often, and trying to keep their operations going with paper and phones.  They've never mustered the nerve to do it, partly because there are some things that would be flat impossible to do, and the reduction in service capabilities would be a disservice to the public they have committed to serve. 

 

But for organizations that could manage it, it would be a worthwhile exercise to see if doing without computers for a set time is possible at all, and what would have to change to make it possible if it isn't presently. 

 

In researching this article, I discovered that of those 1.4 billion PCs running Windows out there, about 1 billion of them are still running Windows 10, which is set to go out of business some time in 2025.  I happen to own one of those legacy Windows 10 machines that can't be upgraded to Windows 11 because of some newfangled Windows 11 hardware requirement.  So we can expect another disruption around October of 2025 when Windows 10 support ends.  Let's just hope it isn't as sudden and startling as the CrowdStrike blue screens of death.

 

Sources:  I consulted the articles "Huge Microsoft Outage Caused by CrowdStrike Takes Down Computers Around the World" at https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-windows-outage-crowdstrike-global-it-probems/, "CrowdStrike discloses new technical details behind outage" at https://www.scmagazine.com/news/crowdstrike-discloses-new-technical-details-behind-outage, https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-windows-10-too-popular-for-its-own-good/

for the statistic about Windows computers, and the Wikipedia article on CrowdStrike.

Will High-Speed Rail Ever Succeed in the U. S.?

 

So far, the answer seems to be no.  While Japan, China, and some European countries enjoy the benefits of rail travel at over 100 MPH (160 km hr^-1), the closest thing the U. S. has to a major (rather than single-point to single-point) high-speed rail system is the Acela system in the Northeast.  Yes, it does go up to 150 MPH (240 km hr^-1), but only over a stretch that's about 10% of its length. 

 

The rest of the time, Acela slows down to the relatively glacial pace of the rest of the Amtrak system, which this summer especially has been suffering more than the usual amount of delays and other problems, according to a recent article on the Slate website by Henry Grabar. 

 

Before you can enjoy high-speed rail, you have to build it.  And building such a thing in the U. S. presents an extraordinary number and magnitude of challenges, as Grabar shows from a recent New York University study on how hard it is, and how we could do things better. 

 

First off, there's the permitting process.  If you want to take a piece of land and build anything more industrial or transportation-like than houses or apartments (and sometimes even those), you must go hard-hat in hand to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which acts for all intents and purposes as a grouchy de-facto landowner who would rather have undisturbed snail darters on his property than the world's most valuable factory.  I have nothing against snail darters, but if primitive man had acted toward the natural world like the EPA tries to make the rest of us act, we'd all still be living in trees and eating nuts and berries—but only government-approved nuts and berries, of course.  And there might be as many as 50,000 of us scattered over the North American continent.

 

Even if the environmental obstacles are overcome, the next problem is getting equipment such as rails, signaling equipment, and, you know, trains.  Not surprisingly, there are no domestic high-speed rail manufacturers, and so it becomes a question of which imported model you're going to choose.  And because every high-speed rail project so far has been a one-off deal, you go out and hire consultants (because nobody has in-house expertise on high-speed rail), who then steer you this way and that and charge exorbitant fees. 

 

And even if you make it through all those difficulties, there's the not-in-my-back-yard problem.  And here we run into an issue we haven't even discussed yet:  if you build it, will they come?

 

Here I'm reminded of a much smaller-scale rail project that is familiar to me:  Austin's CapMetro rail line.  By the time it opened in 2010, it had cost north of $100 million, and while it's still running, only about 1800 people ride it on a typical weekday.  In other words, a system that cost a tenth of a billion dollars fifteen years ago keeps maybe a thousand cars off the streets of Austin.  Although it's a silly comparison, that's about $100,000 per car.  To make a noticeable dent in the hundreds of thousands of cars that make up Austin commuter traffic, you would have to improve that cost per rider number a lot, or else bankrupt the city.

 

The NYU folks have suggestions to improve the delivery of high-speed rail projects, including standardizing the equipment, streamlining the federal permitting process, and enacting a nationwide plan that would supersede little local efforts that never seem to get to reality.  I can't fault these ideas, and if the political winds blew favorably they would probably work.  But I move the previous question: if we built it, would people use it?

 

That doesn't seem to be the case with Austin's rail line.  The reason is that transportation is fundamentally a service, not a product.  And the mechanical means you use to provide the service depends on a lot of factors that are not always considered seriously.

 

Population density and local infrastructure are two of them.  In the Northeast, there are numerous cities on the Acela corridor which have public transportation systems of their own—Washington's subways, Boston's surface rail, the New York City subways—which make it not only feasible but preferable to travel entirely without aid of a private automobile.  And those cities are so situated for historical reasons—they got big before the era of the automobile got serious around 1920, and built the right-of-ways and housing and commercial patterns that make such a situation work.

 

The rest of the country, outside of maybe Chicago, and San Francisco if you count cable cars, is not so situated.  If there was a high-speed rail line from San Marcos to Fort Worth that opened tomorrow, I still probably wouldn't take it, because although I might manage to get a cheap cab to the rail station here in my town, once I got to Fort Worth I'd either have to ride the slow intermittent buses or catch Uber everywhere I went.  And frankly I'd rather have my own car with me, and the four-hour drive from here to there isn't that big a deal to me. 

 

Multiply that tradeoff by a few hundred million, and you get the real reason that the U. S. does not yet have high-speed rail, and may never have it.  It's only a partial solution to the problem, and unless and until every town of 50,000 or more people has local public transportation of comparable quality to the best subway system in the country (which used to be Washington, DC, but I'm not sure now), you will end up spending billions on a large-scale version of CapMetro's rail line:  it's pretty, it works well, and almost nobody rides it.  In other words, a smoothly-running version of Amtrak. 

 

For a while it looked like autonomous vehicles, eventually electric ones, were going to solve the problem.  But self-driving cars, at least the Level 5 kind that you can sleep in, seem to be as chimerical as they always were, and so it's not clear how people in 2060 are going to be getting to work.  My guess is that high-speed rail won't be a big part of the picture, but I might be wrong.  It's happened before.

 

Sources:  Henry Grabar's article "Train Dreams:  How high-speed rail in America can become a reality" appeared on July 12, 2024 on the Slate website at https://slate.com/business/2024/07/high-speed-rail-amtrak-transportation-policy-china-japan-europe.html.  The NYU report can be viewed at https://transitcosts.com/high-speed-rail/.  I also referred to a Wikipedia article on CapMetro Rail.

Paternoster Lifts and Safety Regulations

Last week my wife and I took a short trip to New Orleans to see the National World War II Museum.  While that institution is full of old technology, I'd like instead to remark on a venerable device I saw not at the museum, but in the parking garage used by the hotel we stayed at downtown. 

 

Folks in "NO" have a different attitude toward old technology than you might find in a forward-looking place like Austin.  For example, on a walk we took on the way to supper one evening, we passed a fenced parking lot.  Just sitting on a grassy area inside the fence were two antique mechanical artifacts, probably left there because they were too heavy to move when the building they were in was torn down.  One was a drum winch and electric motor for an elevator, and the other was a rusty two-cylinder York refrigeration compressor, about four feet high.  In Austin these things would have been hauled away for scrap value decades ago, but somebody decided just to leave them there, maybe for other NO residents to puzzle out what they were.

 

Maybe something of this same attitude has kept the Paternoster elevator going in the parking garage we used.  A Paternoster elevator uses a string of elevator cars suspended from an endless belt which never stops moving.  The elevator compartments just move slowly up or down past each landing, and to use it, you simply step on as one is passing your floor and step off again when you get where you're going.  If you miss your floor, I suppose you can just ride over the top and down again in some types, but then again, maybe not.

 

Paternoster elevators were popular in the early years of the 20th century, especially in Europe where space and funding for new construction was hard to come by, but safety concerns have led to many of them being replaced by conventional elevators in many countries.  That isn't the case for the one I saw, however.

 

This one was more technically called a "belt manlift."  A rubber-coated belt about eighteen inches (0.4 meters) wide traveled around a rotating drum or pulley fastened to the ground floor.  Every six or seven feet (~2 m) there was a steel handhold and a triangular footstand jutting out from the belt.  To use the device to go up, you grabbed a handhold as it was rising past you, stepped onto the footstand, and hung on till it lifted you to your floor.  Then you jumped off.  There were footstands facing the other way for going down.

 

I say "you" colloquially, although the device was behind a locked chain-link cage and intended only for the use of valets who were parking cars.  I don't think it was ever intended for use by ordinary untrained drivers, but the garage was so old, it may have been at one time.  On our last day there, I had the privilege of seeing a young black man in the act of arriving on the ground floor on the manlift.  Once he got off safely and emerged from the cage, I asked him, "You ever have trouble with that elevator?"

 

He paused for a second and said, "Sometimes.  Quite an antique!" 

 

While there are conical plastic guard rings around each hole that the belt goes through from floor to floor, you can easily imagine what could go wrong with either the elevator-car Paternoster or the belt manlift.  When I finally found out after an Internet search what the thing was called, I wondered if it got its name because every time you used it you said a prayer ("Pater noster . . . ").  (Actually, it's from the device's vague resemblance to rosary beads.) 

 

The Wikipedia article on Paternosters says that many countries have banned them altogether because of accidents, some fatal, which typically happen either to children or elderly people.  The valets who use the one I saw are not in these categories. 

 

The way safety customs and regulations change with time is a reflection of larger trends that happen so slowly they are hard to notice.  But these changes go on at different rates in different countries, and even in different parts of the same country, as I've mentioned.  Without doing any research, I'm pretty sure there are no Paternoster elevators or belt manlifts in any Austin parking garages.  The safety inspectors wouldn't put up with it.

 

But why do you find one in New Orleans?  There is no way to be sure, but it may be part of the same attitude toward the past that leaves old refrigeration compressors sitting in parking lots.  Or it may be that the kinds of people who use the belt manlift are not in a position to complain that it's dangerous.  There was that little pause the valet made before he answered my question.  He was probably figuring out that this old guy holding a camera was a tourist, and whatever he said wouldn't get back to anybody important, so it was okay to be frank with him. 

 

At any given time, a culture has a finite amount of resources to expend on new construction and on fixing up old construction.  If that parking garage was about to collapse in an obvious way, I expect the city authorities would have shut it down, or at least insisted on repairs.  But the fact that it has an old and somewhat dangerous belt manlift for the convenience of the valets hasn't seemed to exercise the powers that be to the extent of having it shut down and making the valets take the stairs like I did.  After all, it's behind a cage, there's a big sign explaining that nobody can use it without training, there's a pair of ropes next to the belt you can yank on to stop the motor, and the valets seem to want the convenience enough to put up with the hazards. 

 

But some time or other, the parking garage will get torn down, and the belt manlift will go with it, unless the future owner decides to keep the big pulley on display as a mute memorial to outdated technology that one era thought was safe enough, and the next thought was too dangerous to use.

 

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia articles "Paternoster lift" and "Belt manlift."  The parking garage in question is near the corner of Gravier Street and Camp Street in downtown New Orleans. 

The Future of U. S. Energy: More like Texas or Germany?

 

In an article in the August issue of National Review, Mario Loyola warns of a looming energy crisis in the U. S. that would be largely self-inflicted.  Stated simply, it's a case of increasing demand and decreasing supply of reliable power.

 

First, the increasing demand.  For many years, it looked like the future of electric power in the U. S. was one of slow growth, mainly because the increased efficiency of traditional power-hungry industries such as manufacturing was combining with the overall transition to a service economy to create a situation in which we were doing more every year with only slight increases in power consumption. 

 

That is no longer the case.  And one of the big reasons is a new type of industry:  server farms.  The explosion in demand for computing power for novel applications such as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining is now one of the biggest growth sectors for electric power.  Loyola says electricity demand will grow by at least 15% by 2032, only eight years from now. 

 

How are we going to meet that demand?  Right now, nobody knows.  From an economic point of view, building new power plants is a long-term process.  Investors want to be sure that the billions they put into new plants are going to pay off profitably during the lifetime of the equipment.  That requires, among other things, a stable regulatory environment.  But electric power is one of the most heavily regulated and perversely subsidized industries around.

 

The perverse subsidies right now are all in favor of renewable energy such as solar and wind power.  The reason for this is not economic as much as it is ideological.  A substantial and powerful political sector would like nothing better than to see all fossil-fuel facilities tossed into the ocean (except for the pollution that would cause) or otherwise banished from the planet.  We won't go into the well-known reasons for the hatred of fossil fuels here, but the fact of the matter is that if all fossil-fuel facilities vanished tomorrow, most of us in the U. S. would die in a matter of weeks. 

 

The result of all these incentives is that the "interconnection queue," which is kind of a waiting list that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission keeps for prospective generating facilities, is currently 95% solar power, and hardly anyone seems to be planning new natural-gas or nuclear plants. 

 

No matter what politicians say, you get no power from solar or wind on a windless night, of which there are many during the year.  And it is still largely true that we can't store large amounts of energy in batteries, although about 4 GW of battery capacity is now on the grid.  For comparison, the total generating capacity available in the U. S. in 2022 was over 1,600 GW.  That's 0.25% of our total capacity.  To get it up to even 10% would require 40 times as much storage as we have now, and we won't get there for years, even if we could afford it.

 

For the foreseeable future (which feels like it's shorter all the time), a reliable, dispatchable power grid will need to have at least a majority of its power coming from sources you can turn on and off whenever you want.  Right now that means nuclear, gas, and (pardon the expression) coal-fired plants.  But for various mainly ideological reasons, coal-fired plants are getting as scarce as DVD rental stores, and nuclear is under both a political cloud and subject to extremely encumbering regulations, as are most types of power infrastructure, even renewable-energy ones. 

 

In a separate article in the same issue, author Dominic Pino points out that the only U. S. industry largely free of any kind of regulation is the tech sector, meaning software-websites-social-media stuff.  Any activity that needs large numbers of people working for it, large amounts of stuff on land, or large amounts of imports runs into a forest of regulatory trees that requires years of bushwhacking to get through—except for tech.  And what industry is doing famously well compared to all the others?  Don't ask.

 

Even tech needs power, though, and if we keep going the way we're going, we will end up like Germany, which made the politically favored but empirically stupid decision a few years ago to shutter all its perfectly good nuclear plants.  So now Germany depends for its energy largely on natural-gas plants running off Russian gas, which is like chickens buying chicken feed from the fox.  Experts at the Harvard International Review attribute Germany's lackluster economic performance the last few years to its extremely high energy prices, which in turn result from slow growth even in the renewables sector and bureaucratic barnacles on the ship of state.

 

On the other hand, Texas, with its famously independent electrical grid, is going ahead with plans to add a lot of dispatchable power in the forms of natural gas and possibly even nuclear energy.  Texas A&M (still fondly known as Aggies despite the fact that the agricultural school is dwarfed by high-tech engineering these days) is planning to build not one, but several small nuclear power plants right on their campus in West Bryan.  Governor Abbott likes to do news releases every time a generating firm announces plans to build new power plants, whether it's natural gas, nuclear, or something else.  Just one recent announcement from his office stated that 42 new gigawatts of power was being planned by one firm, which goes a long way toward getting us to the 150 GW or so that Loyola says Texas will need by 2030.

 

And while I chilled out along with everyone else during the February 2021 Texas cold-weather grid failure, which might not have been as bad if Texas's grid wasn't independent of the rest of the country, that same independence makes it easier to plan new capacity in Texas than anywhere else in the country, where the Environmental Protection Agency and other bureaucratic blockades slow the process. 

 

So which shall it be?  A stagnant, energy-starved, but green economy?  Or energy enough to power all those electric cars that people allegedly want to drive, and the AI server farms, and maybe even some old-fashioned hands-on factories that we've almost forgotten how to build?  The choice is pretty clear, although energy policy doesn't rank very high on this year's political agenda.  But it's something that affects the lives of everyone in these United States, which makes it inevitably political.  And I only hope that the political process can handle it in a way that at least doesn't do a lot of harm.

 

Sources:  Mario Loyola's article "Our Coming Energy Famine" appeared on pp. 23-25 of the August 2024 issue of National Review.  I also referred to the websites https://www.utilitydive.com/news/entergy-proposes-gas-fired-power-plants-1200-MW/718036/, https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leading-economy-is-falling-behind/, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php, and https://wtaw.com/small-nuclear-power-plants-to-be-built-on-the-rellis-campus/.