I appreciate your unbiased discussion on the cause of the outage. Just like you said, everyone decided what happened by what fits their own narrative best. We see that pattern over and over again, from both sides. It is rare that people care about the objective truth nowadays, or even acknowledge that it exists.
And that is exact what true experts should do. To Pyrrho's point, true expertise can be a north star, but is must be untainted and as objective as possible.
What a great discussion of the complexities of grid design! Part of our problem in the USA is our politicians are not engineers and this is complicated stuff. China by contrast IS run by engineers as so well described by Dan Wang in his book “Breakneck”.
Agree that political terms like “renewables” along with “clean” and “dirty” energy do not help the discussion!
To China - on the one hand, I often argue against a totalitarian government run by 'technocrats,' because there is no recourse in case 'the experts' get it wrong. We have witnessed several occasions of that happening, e.g. in the WHO. However, I agree that China does quite a few things better than the West (and better than the international blob). One of those is that China still requires actual skills to land a technical job and does not care for 'characteristics.' That reduces the probability to have 'experts' who are in the dark themselves.
In the case of the power grid, though, we still have true experts in the governing bodies in the West. Maybe that is why NERC issues objective reports and warns against the consequences of political decisions.
I appreciate your unbiased discussion on the cause of the outage. Just like you said, everyone decided what happened by what fits their own narrative best. We see that pattern over and over again, from both sides. It is rare that people care about the objective truth nowadays, or even acknowledge that it exists.
And that is exact what true experts should do. To Pyrrho's point, true expertise can be a north star, but is must be untainted and as objective as possible.
What a great discussion of the complexities of grid design! Part of our problem in the USA is our politicians are not engineers and this is complicated stuff. China by contrast IS run by engineers as so well described by Dan Wang in his book “Breakneck”.
Agree that political terms like “renewables” along with “clean” and “dirty” energy do not help the discussion!
Thank you!
To China - on the one hand, I often argue against a totalitarian government run by 'technocrats,' because there is no recourse in case 'the experts' get it wrong. We have witnessed several occasions of that happening, e.g. in the WHO. However, I agree that China does quite a few things better than the West (and better than the international blob). One of those is that China still requires actual skills to land a technical job and does not care for 'characteristics.' That reduces the probability to have 'experts' who are in the dark themselves.
In the case of the power grid, though, we still have true experts in the governing bodies in the West. Maybe that is why NERC issues objective reports and warns against the consequences of political decisions.