The Power Grid: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

our main story tonight concerns electricity it's like oscar isaac in that without its involvement nothing in my house gets turned on electricity is such an integral part of modern life it is hard to believe that we used to have to sell people on the idea of electric appliances with ads like this when you step inside the total electric home you step into an entirely new concept in living organized around electric centers such as this entertainment center the pride and joy of the man of the house is the weather control center a center that puts you in charge of the electric heating and air conditioning and the electronic air filtering of the entire house yes the pride and joy of the man of the house is of course the temperature control system just invite all your thermo bros over on a sunday crack open a few brews and watch the temperature for hours sorry ladies you wouldn't understand it's a guy thing specifically tonight we're going to talk about the power grid the system of generators that produce electricity and the vast lattice work of wires that get it to our homes the grid is something that you probably don't think much about until it goes down which unfortunately has been happening more and more in recent years millions of texans woke up to cold homes when the power grid failed this video shows lights going out as parts of the power grid failed that power grid failed yesterday when hurricane ida ravaged parts of louisiana the lights went out across downtown detroit cutting power to 1400 buildings watch as the lights go out during a murder trial these lawyers left in the dark holy when the lights go out during a murder trial one of two things is happening you've either got a power grid deeply in need of repair or the murder victim has come back as a ghost and is seeking revenge either way your priorities have shifted and it's time to focus on a much bigger problem if it feels like there have been more outages than usual recently that's because there have by one estimate from 2015 to 2020 the number of annual blackouts in the us doubled and that is not good for numerous reasons the most obvious being sitting around without power for any period of time absolutely sucks what are you supposed to do without tv and the internet go outside that's where snakes live yeah idiots so what else you're supposed to do read a book that's where snakes sleep you're idiots why do you think we invented kindles but it is not just inconvenience losing electricity wreaks havoc on everything from sewage treatment plants to water purification systems and can be life-threatening to people who rely on medical equipment like ventilators and powered wheelchairs it's traumatizing it's terrifying for tur horst an outage is more than just an expensive inconvenience this isn't like i'm going to lose a casserole in my fridge you know this is i may not be alive tomorrow exactly this is clearly about much more than just lost casseroles especially because and let's be honest here all casseroles are they don't rely on specific ingredients so much as whatever's in someone's house casseroles are a sad smokers board of other leftovers desperately cobbled together to make a pathetic almost meal with names like tuna surprise and chicken i'm sorry but to have a casserole left over that is abandoned food that didn't make the cut two rounds in a row i'm sorry but if that is your only option there are genuinely worse fates than being dead and look while things are bad now they could get a lot worse in the future because the u.s has a goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 which we absolutely must meet but one study estimates that's going to require a 40 to 60 percent increase in peak electricity consumption which when you think about it does make sense if we are switching to electric cars cooking and heating all that electricity is going to have to come from somewhere and the truth is if everyone suddenly had an electric car tomorrow that might be great for the planet but it could push our grid to its absolute limit so tonight let's talk about the power grid the current state that it's in and what we can do to fix it let's start with the fact that while i'm saying grid singular our system is actually made up of three grids there is the eastern interconnection the western interconnection and the texas interconnection it's basically like major league baseball in that there are two dominant groups and then arseholes in texas who'd rather make up their own rules and it all started in 1882 right here in new york when thomas edison unveiled the country's first central power station on pearl street interestingly it was then edison's sometime rival nikola tesla who helped develop the technology enabling electricity to travel for long distances something all the more remarkable given tesla's let's say eccentricities tesla suffered from bizarre compulsions like his consuming need to rescue injured pigeons and nurse them back to health he has an infirmary for them right outside his bedroom window where he's trying to heal you know some that have broken wings broken legs and in fact at one point he actually referred to one bird has his wife and he said you know when she died the inventive spirit left him did it now look this isn't the point of this story or really anything but if tesla were alive today i genuinely wonder which would upset him more the fact that his name has been co-opted by history's first edgelord billionaire or the fact that modern pigeons have just gotten so unfuckable listen i said no respectfully thank you for your attention but i'm not interested please leave me and my friends alone and when it was built our power grid wasn't just a technical marvel it was a civic one until the 1930s electricity was a luxury mainly for dense urban areas of the country but after fdr created the rural electrification administration in 1935 that began to change the rea was set up by the president and the congress in 1935 to help farmers to get the power and light at a price they can afford here is the first thing women ask for after light itself if you have ever ironed for an hour you'll know why an electric iron may not look important to a man but it lightens one whole day's burden for a woman yes don't worry ladies with hubby naturally busy staring at the thermostat you'll have plenty to do to occupy your time like ironing his clothes or teaching a different woman to iron his clothes and if there is still time pressing the iron to your neck just for a moment simply to feel something you thought getting lights would make things better but it only made things clearer didn't it didn't it now in the end we wound up with 600 000 miles of transmission lines and around five and a half million miles of local distribution lines like the ones that you might see outside of your house all of which form our modern electrical grid it has been called the supreme engineering achievement of the 20th century which is not to say that it is completely invulnerable of course not when you string wires in the air they're going to be subject to interference from all sorts of things a website that tracked disruptions found that they've been over 600 outages caused by squirrels over 200 by birds 53 by raccoons and a number of others caused by everything from snakes to slugs let me just quickly say here kudos slugs out of everything on that list you are honestly the ones that i underestimated the nicest thing i can say about you is that on your best day you look like sassy poop but you really showed us something by disrupting our power so once more slugs kudos but is not just animals that can wreak havoc they've also been multiple balloon-based disruptions and if you're wondering how on earth a balloon could cause a power outage the answer is like this [Music] excellent not one single note i hope no one standing there was hurt but honestly even if someone was it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me but disruptions have always been an issue for the power grid what makes it especially vulnerable now is a combination of two key factors the first is old age most power lines were constructed in the 50s and 60s with a 50-year life expectancy which they are clearly now well past and the second is climate change meaning there's now more danger posed by extreme weather like hurricanes tornadoes and abnormally hot or cold temperatures and that combo of old equipment and new climate threats has been disastrous the massive campfire in california a few years ago happened because there was a drought in the area making it essentially a tinderbox and in intense winds some pacific gas and electric equipment failed and for a pretty infuriating reason this is the hook that killed 84 people that groove took about 98 years to wear in it's not a defect these hooks are what are holding the electrical lines off the ground and pg e's decision was simply just to let these things hang until they broke when this old hook did break the power line made contact with the metal tower showering the ground in sparks that's how pg e started the campfire yeah and let that be a lesson to you you can't just keep something that old in place and expect it to keep working forever pg e basically took the same approach to their equipment as democrats did with ruth bader ginsburg and in both cases it didn't end well so basically we've got a power grid built in the 20th century that is not equipped to deal with the needs and stresses of the 21st and if you think well okay let's upgrade it then yeah absolutely right but that is also a massive undertaking because there are a lot of fixes both small and huge that the power grid badly needs the small ones we don't have time to get into tonight like investing in microgrids and weatherproofing as well as better storage capabilities so the excess power we generate doesn't go to waste but we're going to focus on the huge one here because our shift to renewable energy is going to require a fundamental shift in what our grid looks like one of the few benefits of fossil fuel plants is that you can put them anywhere that is why most are located near densely populated areas close to the people that they serve but you can't just replace every coal plant with a wind farm because that is not necessarily where the wind is strongest and that fact alone changes everything this is a model created by princeton mapping out possible places in the continental u.s where wind and solar projects could in theory be built aside from some offshore wind farms it's mostly in the middle of the u.s another study found that these states have most of the wind and solar potential yet the people living there would only make up 30 of the electricity demand in a decarbonized future we're going to need to get electricity from here to here right and you probably don't even need me to tell you why this is going to be an uphill battle because as soon as you saw that graphic and realized updating the grid was going to require a princeton researcher telling a midwestern farmer we need to build something in your backyard so someone in california can power their electric car you already called the next eight election cycles for republicans but there is actually some good news here because we've already made considerable progress in building out renewable energy power sources last year for the first time ever renewables like solar wind and hydropower accounted for the largest portion of new generating capacity and that is good not just for consumers but in many cases for the communities where those facilities are built in 2019 wind energy projects alone provided 706 million dollars in land lease payments to rural land owners so entire towns and areas can benefit from the money and the jobs renewables can bring as this mayor in wyoming can attest my personal belief is it provides money it provides jobs taxes and then i look at the towns that they're by and just think of what people have that they wouldn't have had a lot of infrastructure police cars those kind of things when i look at a wind farm all i think about is cha-ching and that's great well to be clear when you look at a wind farm you can't think to ching because that's the cash register noise i know you're trying to make a different point but this is important too wind farms go through that's how wind farms go a cash register goes to ching a solar farm goes a cat on the day everyone forgot his birthday goes meow a horny cartoon wolf goes ugh and again wind farms go just so we're clear about how things go so the physical generation of renewable energy isn't really the problem here the key issue is the transmission of it basically how do you get that energy from where it's made like a wind farm in wyoming to where it is needed which could be a thousand miles away and that brings us to transmission lines because they are at the absolute heart of our grid and we're going to need a lot more of them partly because due to limitations of our aging transmission infrastructure in some places we actually have more electricity than we have the capability to transport for instance in vermont they had to put a moratorium on new solar and wind projects because the transmission lines couldn't carry any more electricity so building out newer higher capacity lines is crucially important but so far we haven't done nearly enough and that is for a couple of reasons the first big one is location stringing power lines out across the country is a logistical nightmare unlike interstate gas lines which only require approval from the federal energy regulatory commission with power lines you must secure the buy-in from multiple state and local agencies in every state you pass through alongside all the individual landowners whose property you need to use and look there are legitimate reasons for people to not want power lines in their backyard for instance if it disrupts their farming operation or goes through environmentally sensitive areas or cultural or sacred sites for native americans other objections are simply aesthetic the fact is high voltage lines capable of carrying more electricity require bigger towers than their predecessors and some people just don't want to see them this is such an issue that some countries have actually made efforts to beautify their towers in hungary they decided to build ones that look like jesters in iceland they proposed these designs for a project called land of giants and in argentina there is colossal the giant transmission line robots at night colossal lights up and can even smile and wink and look i get the smile part you want colossal to come off as friendly so children aren't terrified of the giant electrified robot with glowing monster eyes but why does it need to wink what is it trying to communicate there is it coming on to us because i feel the same way about colossal as i do about that pigeon never in a million years no thank you please stop looking at me like that it's making me uncomfortable it's my friend's birthday we're just trying to give her a nice evening although i will i will keep the long island iced tea thank you and good night and the thing is local opposition can be very effective in killing transmission line projects a few years back a company proposed plans to build 16 miles of new lines through pennsylvania but local landowners formed a grassroots group to push back even releasing videos like this one to detail their objections i understand everybody needs electric and everybody has to have electric i wouldn't want to be without electric but from what i understand you know this is only going to help people in western pa maryland and virginia and what's it do you know i mean i i chose to live here and they chose to live there so don't make your problem my problem that's that's how i feel okay i mean that is a little bit maddening the mirrored sunglasses definitely don't help but it's a lot more than that because i do get i don't want this on my land i really do but to make your argument i don't want this here if it'll only help someone there just makes you sound like a dick also if we don't upgrade the grid absolutely everyone is going to have problems including you it's like saying don't make your problem my problem when your neighbor's yard is full of bears sure but when it gets over that fence guess what it's your problem now too and when you consider all the hurdles transmission projects have to clear it is no wonder it can take up to a decade to get new ones approved if they're approved at all and this can make it harder to bring renewable energy onto the grid in the first place fewer than a quarter of proposed energy projects like solar and wind actually ever make it to commercial operation because of transmission hurdles and that is really not good now the second big obstacle to overcome here is cost because the truth is this won't be cheap one study projects decarbonizing our power grid could cost two and a half trillion dollars over the next decade and to put it mildly not everyone is on board with spending that money when congress was considering the clean future act a bill that would among other things provide for expanding our transmission system representative bill johnson absolutely refused to entertain the notion that it could possibly be worth it and would not back down whether the american people are stuck picking up this tab the higher taxes or rate increases on their utility bills can you honestly say that they'll be receiving a return on their investment as you look at the cost benefit for the health and safety of communities what's the return on the investment what is the return on investment they're making a monetary investment with their taxes or their rate increases what is the return on their investment so the return on the investment is access to clean energy it's access to no that's not a return on investment a return on investment is a monetary thing that's why you make an investment okay a few things one shut up two if you let her talk for more than two seconds there she might have told you that many studies have found that it is cost effective for instance a federal lab looked into expanding transmission lines across the country and found that such a project could return up to two dollars and fifty cents in benefits for every dollar of cost which is as an might put it a return a return on a investment set that aside set aside also that blackouts can cost us a lot of money as the people of texas will tell you after what happened to them earlier this year there are also many benefits here that are not purely monetary a cleaner grid helps combat climate change meaning that maybe your grandkids won't die in weekly lava hurricanes which does seem pretty worthwhile framing this purely as a matter of debt profit is so weird it's like saying what's the return on investment in funding the fire department how much money do we make of that well i guess technically none but if your house is on fire someone will come with a hose to put it out plus we get those sexy firefighter calendars full of oiled up fire hunks so we get to be safer and hornier i'd call it a win-win and look i admit this is going to require a lot of compromise and flexibility from all of us but there are ways to overcome the hurdles that i've described tonight when it comes to transmission line location we can ease people's concerns not necessarily by going full creepy colossal here we don't have to be winked at but we can make sure that people are compensated fairly for the use of their property and place lines to the extent possible on already disturbed lands like along railroads and highways and when it comes to cost we are finally making some progress the infrastructure bill that passed the house this week devotes over 65 billion dollars to improve the power grid with a portion going directly to transmission upgrades and expansion it is a good start while also being not nearly enough but the key thing going forward here might be to start thinking about this differently than we currently are because for far too long whenever we've experienced blackouts we've tended to think of it as the power grid failing but the truth is it's not failing us we are failing it by asking to do something it was not designed to do in conditions that it was not designed to handle so we need to act boldly and quickly as if both our lives and our shitty casseroles depend on it and if we do this if we manage to properly upgrade our power grid it will genuinely be one of the biggest accomplishments of the 21st century and one definitely worth celebrating perhaps i don't know with some balloons you know balloons are always fun aren't they their lips are oh oh oh oh oh no oh uh uh hold on i'm okay uh that's our show [Applause] thanks so much for watching we'll see you next week good good night thank you that's it which way is uh i'm gonna go i'm gonna go this way look it's over here we'll be back next week we'll be back we'll be back next week you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 5,809,989

Keywords:

Id: qBpiXcyB7wU

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/hoeskioeh]

I just leave that one here:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2296480-drone-used-in-attack-on-us-electrical-grid-last-year-report-reveals/

no comment :(

[u/dumnezero]

Submission statement:

John Oliver discusses the current state of the nation’s power grid, why it needs fixing, and, of course, how fun balloons are.

John Oliver presents the situation of the US electricity grid in the context of not just needed maintenance, but needed upgrades to keep up with the promises of decarbonization via more long-distance electrification (i.e. solar, wind). And, with this, pours a bunch of cold water on steamy hopium by showing the problems of NIMBYs, bureaucracy, stupidity, financing, and complexity.

Essentially, it's a "limit to growth" story, with lots of hints for those unaware of collapse.

[u/hydez10]

What’s the return on investment we get on the 800 billion a year we spend on the military ? And I want a number !

[u/dirkles]

Shouldn't the focus be shifted to demanding less electricity from the system?

[u/Logiman43]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think John didn't mention the elephant in the room called "Where do we take all the raw materials from"?

It's all fine and dandy to have a need to rebuild the infrastructure and go 100% green but you need a f* ton of metal, rare elements and sand to name a few. China is mining most of Africa already and the US is doing what? Nothing.

The earth doesn't have enough rare elements and metals to go 100% green. We don't have enough to build all the wires, power cells, grids, concrete buildings to sustain and/or to expand our energy needs. Sand is running out and China controls 97% (or more) of rare earth metals.

Old paper from 2013 from Yale

Researchers and industry workers alike woke with a shock to the problems caused by these dodgy supply chains in 2011, when the average price of “rare earths” — including terbium and europium, used in fluorescent bulbs; and neodymium, used in the powerful magnets that help to drive wind turbines and electric engines — shot up by as much as 750 percent in a year. The problem was that China, which controlled 97 percent of global rare earth production, had clamped down on trade.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/a_scarcity_of_rare_metals_is_hindering_green_technologies

Edit: Oh and let's not forget the whole building process. You need to somehow build a wind turbine or a solar farm right? It will be transported from the factory in Chile on foot?

And people still believe we have a shot. Eh....

[u/BadAsBroccoli]

Oil pipelines get put where they are wanted, despite "local opposition" because of profits, backed by those in Congress with investments (read as greased hands).

Electrical towers can't go where they're needed not because of any local opposition (read as citizens are never listened to unless they're being used as an excuse not do a thing) but because the (caution: link is rw) investment in utilities doesn't make the gobs of return on investment oil does and therefore doesn't have the backing by our fearless (read as greedy self-serving idiots) leadership.

[u/it_is_all_fake_news]

They finally figured out switching to electric vehicles puts more energy demand on the grid. Better late than never.

[u/NickeKass]

I know the video focuses on the logistics and tech of the out dated grid but can we blame bitcoin miners for part of the massive stress on the grid? Also, Id say that just gaming and computers in general. All those work PCs that get left on overnight for updates, all the servers running 24/7.

Im honestly surprised there has only been 2 "dry runs", Metcalf Sniper Attack, Pennsylvania Substation, on our power grid in recent years. I remember just after 9/11 and all the "what ifs" and losing power was on of the biggest ways to throw things into chaos with the least amount of effort. Most substations are "out in the open" behind a 1-2 story fence.

There used to be a transformer station about half a mile from my house. It blew up one winter in a bad thunderstorm. My house was without power for a week. We managed to survive thanks to having camping stuff for Boy scouts on hand.

[u/Numismatists]

Using comedy to distract from the fact he is shilling for the fossil fuel industry that owns everything "Green™️".

There is no planned "Energy Transition", it's their lie, one of many. "Updating" energy systems in America won't save anyone from the ravages Ecosphere Collapse! Yet, here we are, spending trillions of petrodollars on "Upgrades", lol, utter bullshit.

Do not expect change! The fossil fuel industry chose our current president and vice president.