The driver behind my #shrug call to action was to drive honest conversations about energy.  More specifically, that all forms of energy are important forms of energy and each source has trade offs.  The trade off we, as humans don’t talk about is that we manipulate the climate (houses, heat, air conditioning etc) so that we can live in comfort.  There was a time we didn’t do that and it’s depicted really well in ‘The Revenant.’  I want no part of trapping, hunting, freezing, being mauled by a bear, or cutting open a horse to stay warm in a snow storm.  I don’t have to have any part of it because we have abundant, reliable (mostly) and affordable energy.

In the past few years, as ‘Climate Hysteria’ has taken over the media narrative, it has been forgotten the reason we have energy in the first place.  Comforts.  Warm.  Air conditioned.  Airline travel.  Vacations.  Transportation.  All of it is brought to us by energy.  As a result, life expectancy and the quality of life we experience today is higher than at any point of time in the past.  We know this.  We don’t talk about it.

Over the weekend, we accidently shrugged and offered a glimpse of a future with less reliable power, including natural gas.  With freezing pipelines and wind turbines, the ability to create electricity in parts of the country that needs it has fallen and without electricity, houses get cold, Tesla’s don’t get charged, but demand doesn’t abate.  As a result, spot power and natural gas prices have increased as much as 1000%.  Are these resolvable issues?  Of course.  It’s “Canada cold” and Canada has solved some of the cold weather reliability issues.  Texas and Oklahoma just didn’t know they needed to implement some of the solutions because the ROI of that investment wasn’t very good.  Clearly, things will change in the months ahead.  In the meantime, it’s important to talk about the power grid.  Intermittent power sources, back up power sources and base load power sources.

Over the weekend, I was in Nebraska, where 60% of the grid is powered by coal and happened to drive by a coal plant.  It was beautiful because it was – 10 F and our hotel room was 71 F. It ran flawlessly.  As it usually does, because coal technology has been with us for a very long time, has high energy density, and Nebraska is used to cold weather.  Coal plays an important part in the United States as part of “the base power load”.  It can’ be stored on location; it doesn’t freeze (as natural gas pipelines do); and it runs constantly (hence… BASE LOAD).  As you can see from the graphic below from EIA Grid Monitor (which, incidentally had data issues over the weekend and so haven’t updated this graphic yet), nuclear and coal form the “base” and natural gas generates the backup for when wind and solar are off.

As renewables have come forward, we all know they produce power when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and natural gas is the backup method to fill in the peaks.  Wind and solar power are a responding variable, natural gas generation is the manipulated one.  They are interconnected, but you can’t have wind without natural gas.  The narrative management you are seeing from the weekend is it is the failure of thermal sources to power Texas… this is true.  Natural gas pipelines froze; roads in the Permian made it impassable to get some oil which led to shut ins; power conservation shut in refineries (plus… they were freezing off without heat tracing like in Canada) which dropped the demand for oil, which led to more shut ins.  It’s an intricate balance and like a hurricane, or a forest fire, nothing has 100% reliability.  What we need to remember is that no one likes being cold.  Or hot.  Or stranded.  Or unable to fly.  Or unable to plug in their car.  We like when we flip a switch and things work.  And this deep freeze in the South needs to remind us that when the power goes off, nobody cares why… they just want it back on.  And that’s why ALL forms of energy, are good forms of energy.  Like 14 days to flatten the curve, let’s not lose sight of why we have energy in the first place.