Horses like running

on the pasture, not on a treadmill

I was walking along the fence where our property meets Six Hooves Ranch. On the other side were Flurry and Whirlwind, two of their best mares. They were exhausted. They said they had been running inside a trommel all day. Now they just wanted to lay down and never see that device again. Initially, I couldn’t understand why a ranch would have horses run inside a spinning device, but the fog soon dissipated and I started to see what was going on. Brendan, the owner of Six Hooves, pulled by to have a chat. “PowerLink forced me to install one of those smart meters,” he said. “They can cut your power off at any time. We all gotta make sure that we have a back-up. I had some of our finest horses run the trommel today. It makes quite a bit of juice.”

Horses are strong, but ranches should not have to rely on them to generate power. AI-generated image from openart.ai.

The situation started to make sense. Except for the fact that they could just have installed a back-up generator, but hey, I’m not here to criticize our neighbours. In fact, smart meters are being rolled out in many places across the “West.” The official story is that they measure power demand in real time and provide instant feedback to the grid operator, who can then more accurately supply the network demand. That would all be rosy, right? Who can object to having a power grid that never wastes energy?

The big omission in all of this, though, is that smart meters can have more capabilities than just providing data feedback. In fact, they could be used to remotely switch power supply off. Some will object that most smart meters presently on the market will not have the capability to do so. However, that doesn’t imply that future versions will never be able to switch power off, nor that there is no government intention to use them in that way. Quite the contrary is true. Last year, the British Houses of Parliament passed the Energy Act 2023, a lengthy text in opaque wording, with potentially divergent legal interpretations. On smart meters, which are a subset of “energy smart appliances,” the text is pretty unambiguous, though:

“Energy smart appliance” means an appliance which is capable of adjusting the immediate or future flow of electricity into or out of itself or another appliance in response to a load control signal; and includes any software or other systems which enable or facilitate the adjustment to be made in response to the signal.”

Devices that can “adjust the flow of electricity” can reduce your energy consumption, should there be a need to do so. But, power grid operators don’t have such a need, do they? Well, actually, increasingly they do. Why so? Because power grid operators across much of the West have gone from having networks supplied by just a handful of reliable, high capacity generating units to a mishmash of hundreds, sometimes thousands of intermittent sources. Many will hail that transformation as “progress,” since such intermittent sources are labeled “renewables.”

A smart meter. Image CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.

Renewables, most notoriously wind and solar, are not even forty percent reliable, even in countries that have some of the most professional and experienced operators. The reasons for that being the case, are very straightforward. Several other energy sources, such as nuclear or fossil fuel based power plants, can operate rain or shine. Wind and solar, not as much. In fact, wind turbines will shut down in both low and high wind scenarios and in the latter scenario, can still become a hazard even when shut down. Solar panels obviously do not produce energy at night, nor when they are snow covered. All of this was not an issue as long as those energy sources constituted a small fraction of total the energy mix, but it increasingly becomes one when there are thousands of them. So where do we stand? Well, in 2023, as much as 14% of the total energy generated in the United States was generated from the intermittent sources of wind and solar.

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Power grid operators’ main responsibility is to match supply and demand, which ensures that the lights stay on for all consumers. As they depend on a growing capacity share with unreliable supply, that task becomes increasingly challenging. On the one hand, there is customer demand, which fluctuates with multiple levels of seasonality: residential power use will typically be higher in the early morning, late afternoon and evening and lower in the daytime and at night. Likewise, energy consumption may be high both in the summer and winter, but lower in the autumn and spring, when not as much heating or cooling are needed. It was already a challenging task to match such an undulating demand accurately from reliable energy sources. However, since the share of unreliable sources has been growing rapidly, it has become an increasingly daunting task to precisely meet demand. Imagine, for example a winter storm, in which both residential and industrial demand will be high, yet solar power generation will drop to zero. In such a scenario, demand can only be met … if there is a reliable back-up for the unreliable sources.

Reliability, reported as capacity factor, for different energy sources. Source: US Office of Nuclear Energy. Image public domain.

Reliable power generation is tantamount to keeping the lights on. However, there seem to be those forces in today’s society who do not want us to have them. On the one hand, the US EPA recently issued revised emission regulations, which would lead to a rapid phase-out of coal and gas fired powered plants. Since the measure was not accompanied by an announcement of major investment in other reliable sources, it would inevitably lead to rolling black-outs, which has prompted NRECA, the interest group that represents electric co-operatives in the United States, to file a lawsuit against the EPA. Soon after, MISO, SPP, PJM and ERCOT, four major interconnection authorities whose area, when combined, covers over half of the United States, filed an amicus brief in support of NRECA, citing that the policy will lead to rolling blackouts. When interviewed, the EPA admitted that they had not examined the effect of their policy on network stability. In other words, their policy is a poster child for policies from indoctrinated government operatives who will do anything, or are being told to do anything, to side with the “woke new agenda,” even if that means ignoring the most essential science and incur the risk to put people without power.

Map that highlights the area responsibility of interconnection authorities mentioned.

If overly hasty and unsound government policies to attain unrealistic “Net Zero” targets weren’t enough, utility companies are also under pressure from their investors and from nonprofits. Many utilities are publicly traded companies. Certain activist investors will push them to set more aggressive environment, social and governance (ESG) targets, which incentivizes them to accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuel based power generation. Moreover, some utilities engage with so-called “green” non-profits, with disastrous consequences. Talen Energy, which operates the coal-fired Brandon Shores power plant in Maryland, engaged in a contractual agreement with the Sierra Club, which would force it to close the plant by 2025. Interconnection authority PJM (Pennsylvania, Jersey and Maryland) intervened and decided that the plant needs to remain operational at least through 2028 to safeguard network stability. Over the last year, PJM has also been vocal at advocating for a more balanced power mix that enables to maintain grid stability. Prolonged operations at Brandon Shores were much to the dismay of the Sierra Club, who would prefer putting people without power over producing a limited amount of carbon emissions. Let’s recall that they are also a non-profit who claim that the question should be asked if “wild horses belong in North America altogether,” since they “trample fragile vegetation with their hooves,” yet advocate to pave that same vegetation over with solar panels and windmills. Likewise, they advocate for massive expansion of offshore wind power, which is not only unreliable and much more maintenance intensive than onshore, but also has a destructive effect on the habitats of whales, cod, clams, scallops, lobster, among others, as well as on the fishing industry.

While utilities are being strong-armed into reducing their dependency on reliable energy sources and making the grid more susceptible to blackouts, demand for power is predicted to increase drastically. In fact, US data centres are projected to consume as much energy as a quarter of the United States by 2030. On a global basis, they are forecast to consume the equivalent of the entire country of Japan (population: 124 million) as soon as by 2026. One can only imagine which effect such an increase in demand would have on the grid.

Tech giants Google, Amazon and Microsoft all realize that their massively increased demand cannot be met by the present power generation architecture. Just like ordinary consumers, they want a 100% reliable power supply, to ascertain that their data centres are continuously operational. Therefore, they have collectively drawn the conclusion that they have to engage in power generation themselves. As they require constant, dependable and carbon free power generation, all three have resorted to the single most energy dense, most reliable solution we have: nuclear. While both Amazon and Google have engaged with providers of small and modular nuclear reactors (SMR), Microsoft has signed a long-term supply contract with Constellation Energy, allowing the latter to reopen its Three Mile Island nuclear plant.

The Three Miles Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.

Where will all of this lead us? Let’s start by pointing out that the present state of affairs is undesirable. As it stands, the outlook is that big tech corporations will have access to clean and reliable energy to power their AI data centres, which among other applications, are used to monitor citizens’ behaviours. Yet those same citizens depend on power grids that are increasingly unreliable due to activist governments and investors, who push publicly traded utilities to drastically accelerate their energy mix into one that contains more unreliable sources. Today, their engineers are still able to solve power flow problems and alert the media about the dangers of unstable grid operations. However, owing to the pressure of those same uninformed, activist ESG investors, their hiring preferences are changing. In fact, if the bad practices of ESG investment remain unabated, we may soon see grid operators prefer hiring those employees who can most creatively come up with a new set of pronouns every other day over the ones who can solve an optimal power flow problem, and then fire the more experienced employees who can solve such a problem, but engage in “harassment” of silly new hires by failing to refer to them as “xim/xer/floops.” The present state of affairs leads to a situation in which big tech will have a massive, fully decarbonized and perfectly reliable power supply, while individual consumers must accept to have water kettles that switch off after twenty minutes to “save energy” and have smart meters and appliances that only operate when the grid operator allows them to. Want to do the laundry? Not today during the snowstorm … your smart appliance switches off. It seems that individual consumers will be nudged or mandated to increase their own power demand by switching to electric vehicles and heat pumps, but will only be allowed to use those when the authorities agree.

While the present state of affairs seems to lead to a dystopian outcome, it is easy to mend. We should immediately withdraw subsidies for what are the wildly unreliable and environmentally destructive wind and solar boondoggles. In lieu, we should massively invest in onshore, energy dense power generation solutions. That includes building up capacity with existing technologies, as well as massively investing in research. We should foster the commercialization of small and modular reactors and we should also invest sizeable government resources into researching potential next generation energy dense technologies, such as cold fusion or zero-point energy. If we can bring the world’s brightest together to build atomic bombs, why can’t we do the same for clean energy? Truly clean energy, that is. Finally, as I argued before, we should also immediately make ESG reporting illegal, the only effect of which is to make companies less efficient, up to the point where their ESG-induced corporate policies are becoming a danger to society.

We horses can run outside, we don’t belong in a treadmill. AI generated image from openart.ai.

Finally, let’s state again that there is no reason to blame animals for their “emissions.” If we want to tackle an impending climate catastrophe by reducing emissions, we have to focus on areas that can make a significant impact. One of those is to invest into energy-dense, on-shore, low-emissions power generation.

Animals do not play a role into solving the climate conundrum. We horses should be left to graze and roam. I am a strong pony. I like running, but I don’t want to have to do so on a treadmill.

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