What Your Utility Isn't Telling You | In Depth

hey everybody I'm Zack and I'm Jesse and you're watching in-depth on now you know so you were reading a Vox article this week and you were kind of item mixed minute yeah so basically the article first lays out that research shows that there is overwhelming support by the public for a 100% renewable energy okay yeah that makes sense but utilities have invested a lot of money in their existing infrastructure and they don't want to make the switch quickly or at all really yeah that makes sense too mmm-hmm I kind of picture this as the analogy of the kids in the back of the car you remember when you're in the back of the car and it's all been a long drive already and it's like when are we gonna get there I'm so tired of being in the car and then the parents turn around to the kids and lie to them and say don't worry we're almost there it's just a little bit further those are the utility companies you know in the front seat basically telling us a lie where we're not closer right it's gonna be a long time they don't want to make the change and they're just you know lying to us so in the Vox article Malinsky and partners which is a research firm they analyzed existing utility messaging they interviewed utility executives and environmentalists they ran a national opinion survey and they did a couple of three-hour sit downs with media informed customers in Minneapolis and Phoenix and what did they find out well it's cut to the chase 100% renewables is a wildly popular goal yeah I mean as you're seeing right here basically all the surveys they did show that everyone they surveyed wants to get to 100% renewables as fast as humanly possible it again as we've said many times before 100% renewable is a great goal for basically everybody if you're right leaning this is energy independence if you're left leaning this is good for the environment it's good across the board and there's so many jobs in every country now that are supported by renewable jobs it's not like in the in the old days where it was like will you be taking my job from the coal mine it's like well there's more solar jobs and there are coal jobs right and I mean this includes us the small energy customers like you and I this also includes huge energy customers like Apple Google Amazon and even Lego so I mean lots and lots of companies are saying we want 100% renewable and source of energy why mostly because every it's so wildly popular every company's like what can we do to improve our PR image and the PR department goes let's just see what's popular across the board o renewable energy that would be a good thing now it's not just about public opinion everyone really needs us to go 100% renewable right our planet needs it the climate change that we are observing in our atmosphere and in our world right now is being caused by the co2 that's in the atmosphere that we've been putting out for about a century and we're continuing to put out at record amounts and also I just also want to remind people that even if you're like I don't think that the world is warming up it's the Sun or it's you know xantho fro the the the benevolent alien god that's looking over our planet pollution is also a very bad thing it's something that we would like to get rid of if you don't believe me that you know coal power plants put out pollution just look at China it's nice muggy smoky smoky and I mean a lot of that is cars but keep in mind now you can call it clean coal all you want right it's not clean it's disgusting now utilities don't want to strand their assets I still slow down their strand assets right what do you mean they don't want they've built all of this infrastructure they've built all of these coal plants and natural gas peaker plants and they don't want to get rid of them because it's all built already and they can just profit off of this oh right and if this is one of the problems with capitalism in my opinion I love capitalism but we need conscientious capitalism which is when you build a peeker plant let's say you have a price tag associated with that you can walk around be like I spent 5 billion dollars on this plant as a person who lives near the plant I can't walk around and say what what harm you're causing me I have no number to put on that I can't say how many years less on my life you're gonna kill me I can't say how many millions of dollars you're causing and health damages to me and my family so your number always Trump's my number because I don't have a number right and you can't point exactly to like that plant is putting out so many thousands of tonnes of co2 every year and that is contributing to global climate change and that is going to have an impact here's the dollar figure here's the the bill here's the invoice for all the crap you've cost right thanks a lot basically utilities can't let us know that they don't want to switch to renewables quickly okay so when they get in the boardroom they're actually saying to each other we got to keep these peaker plants going as long as possible get our money back we're saying well in order to continue continue the profits like we had predicted you know 10 20 years ago we need to continue a business as usual correct we can't be adding all sorts of solar and wind projects that was it in our budget right through the focus groups they found that they can't tell people that they're not going to move towards renewables so in the board room they're saying we can't do any of this stuff but if they were to go to you the customer and be like we're not gonna do renewable energy what are you stupid that wouldn't make any money people would be like excuse me uh no right we want renewables now and we'll fight for it so what they've done is through these focus groups they've figured out that they again they can't say it directly to our faces I get that so they have to start with a positive message we're committed to renewables it's the way of the future no that's like good you know oh we're going to do renewables yeah my power company is committed to renewable right what they're not telling you is that the plans for it are in like yeah 30 40 years and they're just gonna do a base level whatever but here's what they do that's even worse first they start with the positive message okay we're committed to renewables but then they add a bit of fear going to renewables too quickly could lead to price increases power outages or even curtailment oh no again you're like oh no reliables aren't the aren't some kind of silver bullet solution oh they're scary they're scary because maybe Mike price would go and I could lose power now the focus groups one of the things that the focus groups found was that a majority of people would still be in favor of 100% renewables even if it meant a 30 percent price increase in their electricity that's unheard of that's insane I mean Americans never want to pay more for anything that's just like built into the Constitution I think it's amendment like 26 is like we will not pay more for anything right and well and if you do if we have to pay more out I mean that's why we started this whole thing yes I didn't like paying so much 40 Walmart yeah wait so Americans are willing to spend 30% more to get green energy 51% of people said a 30% increase fine by me and they would be okay with it Wow why don't the utilities just take advantage of that and raise rates and put in solar panels I don't know so with the utilities then say after they've put that little twinge of fear in you is that they claim that they're working on a mix of strategies to be clean not 100% renewable but clean oh I see so they just added the word in there and it makes you feel good right even though there's still burning coal and rifle gas and oil yeah so I guess the important question here is what does clean mean if they're going towards this clean thing what what are we talking about so what they're talking about is natural gas basically is the biggest contributor of what they're talking about they're you know they're saying we're gonna institute a bunch of different strategies for the most part it's just natural gas right now natural gas can really sound really good it's natural on paper natural yep and it's a gas gasses are just anyway it's invisible now natural gas is methane mm-hmm now methane is 86 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than co2 Wow so yeah it's it's pretty bad to get into the air so you might be saying well Zack and Jesse that sounds fine burning natural gas sounds fine because you're not the methane is being burnt into the co2 which is 86 times less potent than the methane oh great well first of all natural gas is cheap because we're drilling for oil so frequently and in fracking and doing all sorts of crazy methods to get extract oil from the ground and this is a byproduct of it so it's relatively cheap right now which means that energy companies are saying that stuff oh that's those really cheap right the thing that makes it the most unperfect is that no matter how you transport natural gas it seems like it will always leek yeah and so while the exhaust from the the power of the peaker plant the power plant seems to be oh just co2 over here it looks good it's really not what you should be looking at usually factoring everything in the whole pipeline the whole stream all of the leaks that are happening along the entire thing so that methane is going into the air and it's a very potent greenhouse gas yeah I mean we know right here in Massachusetts that 2.7% and this is what's reported by the utility companies 2.7 percent of our natural gas is just leaked into the atmosphere right every day and those are just from ones that are going to our houses right so I mean you can imagine a bigger pipe you could have a bigger leak and they can say well just a little leak of explodable gas it's invisible now are the utilities right should we be going along with their balance sheets as opposed to doing what we consider to be the the right thing what most people consider to be the best thing to do now the energy companies can find Studies everywhere to support their costs a lot of people are pragmatic you know they want to say what can we do that's best in terms of co2 because that obviously makes the most sense and I agree with them but here's what they do they say oh thank you energy company let me just review your documents here oh I found oh I see the the co2 from from natural gas plants not that bad and again we're forgetting about the leaks and so a lot of studies can come out to say oh this is good natural gas is good compared to compared to coal compared to other fossil fuels right I mean it's a great kind of transition but again we're ignoring the leaks completely well and in when you compare something to something that's completely awful anything seems better so yeah when you compare something to call it's always gonna be better right and so you get quotes like this this is from Nestor Sepulveda he is from MIT he says every dollar we spend on addressing climate change is also another dollar we can't use to tackle other pressing societal problems such as eliminating poverty or disease that sounds good what sounds good about that well isn't he saying that we should be saving our money to spend on you know eliminating poverty and disease well I mean he is saying that but what he's not factoring in is that in the future there will be more poverty and more disease if climate change is to continue at the rate that we're predicting which is going to be horrific it's going to be horrific and that means far more poverty I mean right now it's sort of Pennywise pound-foolish to say okay let's not spend too much on climate change right now right cuz it you're going to be spending a factor of huge factor more I'm saying every imaginal problem you could possibly think about so it seems like things like poverty and disease they're right in your face right now it seems like you should be spending the money on them right now right but what you're saying is that I don't care about all right but you're saying it's a climate change is going to cause even worse property and disease issues down the road exact we have to tackle the people are going to need to leave their homes that creates it's kind of like the dam is about to burst and we're saying don't worry about the dam let's worry about you know this other problems downstream right and it's little Tammy skinned his knee let's put a bandaid on that and it's like you're in front of the dam sir please let's move out of the way of this insane crazy idea and so this kind of gets back to the utilities themselves because I think that we all have an unrealistic view of what villains look like we've all been told what evil looks like in our media it looks like a devil a super villain a witch or a psycho killer and sometimes there are evil capitalists but usually their motivations are portrayed as you know being for evil itself so you know yes they're you know doing something bad and yes it could be for money but most of the time it's also just to be like it's not like and we're gonna make so much money in the real world almost no one intends to do harm okay because we're all pretty rational people right and in the situation that you find yourself in you can you can be rational and still do a lot of harm people in these utilities who are making the decisions to not switch to renewable energy as fast as possible they simply want to protect their way of life and those that they work with they want to be like you know that would be bad for our company if we were to switch to 100% renewables and their shareholders right and they simply don't want to do that harm does that make them evil no because we're not used to thinking of evil as that way right I mean these are capitalists in their job is to make money for their shareholders and they're doing a good job of making money for the shareholders so we should hold them up as you know pillars of society right and if you met them on the street or in a coffee shop or you know probably even at a conference or something where you were protesting it you'd meet someone who sounds pretty reasonable pretty rational you're not gonna meet someone who's you know twisting their moustache and going I'm going to cause so much climate change and I think that we kind of have the wrong idea in our head as to what evil looks like right these people aren't trying to do evil in sort of an evil way no they're just carrying on what they've always done and for decades everyone said you're doing a great job you're providing power predictably to the grid by this point I'm so used to people sometimes they'll just leave a comment on the channel like oh so you're saying that all of this fossil fuel stuff that we've been doing for a century was worthless do you want to be a caveman what you don't like energy or how do you even plug how would we even have discovered electricity if it weren't for coal and this and it's like look I'm not saying that you know we dug fossil fuels out of the ground in the first guy who was like oh wow coal if this is I could make a factory out of this was some kind of like evildoer however once we have discovered that by burning this fossil fuel we are contributing to changing our climate of our planet which is the only spaceship that we have mm-hmm I think that it's time to decide you know what we need to do the right thing here it's not about making money since we're dealing with the entire planet right I've been alive for quite a few years and one of the first investments that I made when I was a kid was in PG&E Pacific Gas and Electric it was a good had a good dividend it seemed like a nice solid investment and I used to pour through all the quarterly and annual reports and I started to pick up on something they didn't like the people that they served they were monopolies there was no competition for their services a wire from their grid comes to your house and you buy their power this is back in the 80s when local utilities had a complete monopoly to regulate these monopolies States had departments of Public Utilities or DEP use which would usually review requests by utilities each year and hold hearings where they would listen to ratepayers and then decide on whether electricity rates should go up or go down but the problem was with no competition came no incentive for utilities to change so get cleaner get more efficient bury the power lines etc so in 1992 the federal government enacted the Energy Policy Act of 1992 this Act opened electric grid transmission lines to competition so starting in 1996 in California now on your bill you would pay separate rates for transmission of electricity and the generation of electricity that sounds great right open market competition yay not so fast it wasn't a completely open market it was a partially deregulated market where 40% of installed capacity or about 20 gigawatts in California was sold to independent power producers and the big three utilities in California like PG&E had to buy their power from the newly created day ahead only market along came Enron and other companies that gamed the system they saw this new market and they're like we know how to play this game so to make a long story short because of how this partially deregulated system was set up it drove PG&E into bankruptcy and it gave incentives to spike the price of electricity by taking power plants offline this regulation of energy prices incentivize suppliers to ration supply instead of expanding production so rolling blackouts occurred all throughout the 90s the resulting scarcity created opportunities for market manipulation by Energy speculators now during this time California's population increased 13% this is during the 90s but because of this whole deregulation fiasco California didn't build any new power plants during that time that's why we got all these rolling blackouts in fact it affected whole governor's you know they lost their races because they're the state was running out of power and everyone was upset all the time so I shared this bit of history to demonstrate that the way our federal and state governments have handled power regulation in the past is pretty horrible lawmakers listened to energy lobbyists and the public generally gets screwed what we need is energy democratization an open market for energy now large utilities have no incentive to improve their grids think about it if they bury your powerlines will you pay more for them to do that No so look around I bet right outside your window right now you can see power poles with power lines here in New England we have hundreds and thousands of miles on practically every street running through trees that will of course follow on them during wind storms or get taken down in the snow or ice storms leaving tens of thousands of people without power for days the utilities say they have plans to bury them but they don't ever bury them in fact when you were born I went to a lot of meetings in town and heard from the utilities that said don't worry we have a ten-year plan and in 10 years all of your utilities will be buried in this town I'm 24 and not one of them has been buried practically right right but what if each building was its own power plant solar on the roof power pack done we'd still have a grid but it would be a series of micro grids much harder to have a single line that takes out thousands of homes you know why the utilities say it can't be done because it'd be really expensive or really difficult it's because it cuts them out of the business oh if it couldn't be done then why for instance is Green Mountain power up in Vermont doing it right now as we speak with 1500 households installing solar and Power Packs so what will we see in the future now that almost everyone wants renewable energy and almost every utility company doesn't want to give it to us but they know that they can't say that they can't give it to us it's kind of like they don't know that we know they know we know what you should be prepared to see is a bunch of bright green logos promotional material with leaves and smiling children stock photos and b-roll of solar and wind projects are usually better already I feel like they're doing something right but basically what you're getting is more natural gas and a lot of excuses damn it Zach and Jessi you just tell us all this bad news every week so what can you do first of all you can educate yourself you can yet educate others how can you do this you can share your videos like this and we'll do it for you you know we'll we can educate support elected officials and candidates that get it go to some boring meetings yeah I won't talk about going to boring me yeah boring meetings are designed to be boring to keep you from going to them like none of us wake up in the morning going oh I got a board meeting to go to today most of those meetings no one shows up to accept the lobbyists and you know the people in the know mm-hmm they don't want you to go to those meetings they don't want to hear from you they want to just move right along with whatever their agenda is let me tell you I've been in government for 20 years I know that's how it works just for just for our viewers what kind of government tell you any some kind of yeah I'm in a local government I've run for state government didn't make it surprise surprise but also what like 17 I was 20 yeah okay they don't want you to go to these meetings in fact you you probably know what I'm talking about meetings wise you're like what meaning could I even go to I'm talking about meetings like with the Department of Public Utilities in your state there are meetings you know usually in the Capitol where you can go and listen to and talk and be heard to these groups but you've probably never been to one because they don't advertise them and you don't know if you're even invited and you don't know what to do when you get there and they seem scary and overwhelming and I don't know all the lingo and they're totally boring exactly because you don't know the lingo right so here's the thing you don't have to go to those meetings if you don't want to but join a group right there are groups of people already doing this and they need your help they need your monetary support they need your moral support go protest write letters make phone calls hold signs knock on doors I mean if this was easy it would already be done there's other things you can do obviously buying an e v huge that's one way that you can stick it to you know maybe you're not sticking it to your utility company but you're definitely sticking it to the oil company that's right that's one less our that is not burning you know hundreds of gallons of gasoline every year put solar on your roof that'll really stick it to your utility piping and again unfortunately your single voice is not strong enough you cannot with a couple phone calls make this change no it is not enough for you specifically to make this change you need to group up you need to find people locally you need to find a you know certain legislation that you can attack yeah we're push and Jesse and I have been talking about this I mean we would like to be a clearinghouse for this we would like to help in this we don't know exactly how to do that yet I mean we have amazing things already on our website like be free which is where people who want to help ilan employees can advertise their businesses we have things like our supercharger reviews which is I think the only website in the world that has video reviews of superchargers and destination chargers right we could do something like this we could have a map of the world where people put pins and they say like I want to do this and you know Here I am how can I help or maybe someone puts a pin that says I have this group already and if you're anywhere in the area please contact me write in the comments down below let's start coming up with some ideas that you know Zach and I can do because honestly we're very fortunate we have a channel that is growing and everyone on our channel every subscriber that we have is amazing that's right and you might already have a group and you might know some solutions that we haven't thought of so please reach out to us and let us know because sharing this information with a vast number of people who care is super powerful what the utilities and the other groups want to do is keep us and our isolated in our own little corners not talking to each other thinking I can't do anything right or to think you know oh I called my utility and I told them what I wanted and I said okay cool they will write that down absolutely okay bag see you later cuz we've already told you they've done the focus groups they know what you want they don't need to hear of that anymore they know that you want renewables so calling them up and telling them that means nothing and we know from actual meetings where they all go and meet they know that they're not they don't take it to heart they're not saying oh my gosh renewable energy hey it make sense in a bunch of these cases and everyone loves it and it's all because of stranded assets they have these things they already invested in they can't think of a way out of it thank you so much for watching this episode of in depth we know that it's not you know always so fun and exciting it's fun and exciting we it is we're gonna work together to solve this problem there's so many solutions that we do have I mean we just mentioned EVs and solar those are huge solutions those completely change what your family is is doing instead of polluting with the car you're now completely not polluting with it right especially with the solar I mean yeah solar solar solar exactly it is so awesome and I mean another idea let's just put these utilities out of business exactly just become your own utility right we don't more anymore it's an antiquated idea or just make your own big utility well many towns there are towns in Massachusetts there's a neighboring town that has their own utility company because they've just decided as a town we will run our own utility company you can do it right so thank you so again so much for watching now you know

Channel: Now You Know

Views: 39,238

Rating: 4.8782611 out of 5

Keywords: tesla time news, now you know, zac, jesse, news, update, elon musk, model x, model 3, model s, model y, supercharger, NYK, electric cars, EV, technology, science, funny, autopilot, electrek, tesla roadster, SFSF, The Boring Company, model 3 performance, model 3 dual motor, patreon giveaway, Tesla Model 3 Autopilot, BMW, BFREE, in depth, utility, power, company, conspiracy, solar, roof, wall, tesla energy, coal, power plant, vox

Id: af71qwFqVeQ

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 09 2018