Glance up and around and you’ll know the horizon is changing. From Canada to South Africa, Brazil to China, windmills and solar panels are telling a story of change.

In the United States, the landscape is collecting a kind of 21^st-century raiment. Wind farms, solar farms, and just stray windmills and solar panels on roofs are signaling something big and different.

When they were making “Tom Jones” in 1963, the very funny film based on the Henry Fielding classic, the big problem was finding English villages which dated from the 18^th century and still looked it. The filmmakers found plenty of appropriate villages, but all the skylines were despoiled with television aerials. No filmmaker today can avoid windmills and solar panels, and computer graphics will have to come to the rescue for period dramas.

Alexander Mirtchev, a respected member of the Washington foreign policy establishment and vice chairman of the Atlantic Council, in a new book based on a study he conducted for the Wilson Center, names this changed horizon for what it is: a megatrend. In doing this Mirtchev joins other megatrend energy spotters of the past, including environmentalist Amory Lovins and economist Daniel Yergin. Mirtchev’s book is titled “The Prologue: The Alternative Energy Megatrend in the Age of Great Power Competition.”

Energy has been shaping society and the relationship between nations since humans switched from burning wood to coal. The next step after that was the Industrial Revolution, ushering in what might be called “the first megatrend.”

Mirtchev builds on how energy supply changes relationships and looks to a future where the balance of power could be upended, and energy production could affect neighbors in new ways. For example, I have noted, the Irish are unhappy about British nuclear activity across the Irish Sea. There also is tension along the border between Austria and Slovakia: the Slovaks favor a nuclear future, and the Austrians are into wind and opposed to any nuclear power. As a result, windmills line the Austrian side of this central European border.

Mirtchev’s book is a serious work by a serious scholar which pulls together the impact of alternative energy on national security, the interplay between great powers, and the changing landscape between great powers and a few lesser ones. It is wonderfully free of the idealistic tropes about alternative energy as a morally superior force.

There also are changes within countries. Recently, I wrote about how Houston — the holy of holies of the oil industry — is seeking to rebrand the oil capital as a tech mecca as well as holding onto its oil and gas status as those decline.

If you look at the world, you can see how President Joe Biden can stand up to Saudi Arabia in a way that other presidents couldn’t do. Saudi oil reserves don’t mean what they once did. They aren’t as essential to the future of the world as they once were. There is more oil around and the trend is away from oil. Historic coal exporters like Poland, Australia, South Africa, and the United States are losing their markets.

Other losses, including U.S. technological dominance in energy technology, are more subtle. For example, although jubilation over solar and wind is widely felt in the United States by environmentalists, it should be tempered by the fact that solar cells and wind turbines are being provided by China. China has seized manufacturing dominance in alternative energy, endangering national security for dependent countries.

Mirtchev’s arguments have found powerful endorsements. A number of big-name, international security thinkers have come forward to endorse the concept of a realignment caused by the megatrend of alternative energy. These range from Henry Kissinger to a who’s who of foreign policy stalwarts here and in Europe.

James L. Jones, retired Marine general and President Barack Obama’s national security advisor, said, summing up thoughts expressed by a full panoply of experts, “ ‘The Prologue’ offers a valuable new framework for international strategic action.”

Retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, an executive of the Carlyle Group and other enterprises, said the book is “a masterpiece of original thought, and it should be must-reading in universities and war colleges.”

Who would have thought of the wind and sun as players in the rivalry between nations or that they would spearhead a megatrend?

It is underway. It has huge momentum, and it will change everything we do — work, leisure, health care, education, use of resources — and, as a bonus, how the world sees us.

It is the Great American Reset, where things will be irreversibly changed. It is a seminal reset that will shape the decades to come, just as the New Deal and World War II shoved the clock forward.

The reset is being driven in part by COVID-19, but in larger part by technology and the digitization of America. Technology is at the gates, no, through the gates, and it is beginning to upend the old in the way that the steam engine in its day began innovations that would change life completely.

Driving this overhaul of human endeavor will be the digitization of everything from the kitchen broom to the electric utilities and the delivery of their vital product. Knitting them together will be communications from 5G to exclusive private networks.

President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals could speed and smooth the innovation revolution, facilitate the digital revolution, and make it fairer and more balanced. Biden’s plan will fix the legacy world of infrastructure: roads, bridges, canals, ports, airports, and railroads. It will beef up the movement of goods and services, supply chains, and their security, even as those goods and services are changing profoundly.

But if Biden’s plan fails, the Great American Reset will still happen. It will just be less fair and more uneven — as in not providing broadband quickly to all.

Technology has an imperative, and there is so much technology coming to market that the market will embrace it, nonetheless.

Think driverless cars, but also think telemedicine, carbon capture and utilization, aerial taxis, drone deliveries, and 3D-printed body parts. Add new materials like graphene and nanomanufacturing, and an awesome future awaits.

We have seen just the tip of digitization and have been reminded of how pervasive it is by the current chip shortage, which is slowing automobile production lines and thousands of manufactures. But you might say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” The future belongs to chips and sensors: small soldiers in mighty armies.

Accompanying digitization is electrification. Our cars, trucks, trains, and even aircraft and ships are headed that way. Better storage is the one frontier that must be conquered before the army of change pours through the breach in a great reshaping of everything.

Central to the future — to the smart city, the smart railroad, the smart highway, and the smart airport — is the electric supply.

The whole reset future of digitization and sensor-facilitated mobility depends on electricity — and not just the availability of electricity going forward, but also the resilience of supply. It also needs to be carbon-free and have low environmental impact.

An overhaul of the electric industry’s infrastructure, increasing its resilience, is an imperative underpinning the reset.

The Texas blackouts were a brutal wake-up call. Job one is to look into hardening the entire electric supply system from informational technology to operational technology, from storm resistance to solar flare resistance (see Carrington Event), from catastrophic physical failure to failure induced by hostile players.

The electric grid needs survivability, but so do the data flows which will dominate the virtual utility of the future. It also needs a failsafe ability to isolate trouble in nanoseconds and, essentially, break itself into less vulnerable, defensive mini-grids.

Securing the grid is akin to national security. Indeed, it is national security.

Electricity is the one indispensable in the future: The future of the great reset.

Klaus Schwab, the genius behind the World Economic Forum, called this year from his virtual Davos conference for a global reset to tackle poverty and apply technology and business acumen to the human problems of the world. We are on the cusp of going it alone.

In the end, the route to social mobilization is jobs. The Great American Reset will throw these off in an unimaginable profusion, as did the arrival of the steam engine a little over 300 years ago.

A world commodities rebalancing is underway, and China is in a position of dominance. Take lithium, where China is a major processor and battery manufacturer; cobalt, where China has dominated the supply chains; and rare earths, where China has an almost total monopoly. Taken together, these three commodities are key to the future of alternative energy, electric vehicles, mobile phones, and even headphones.

Having stated that he was “fervently Sinophile,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the House of Commons recently described lithium deposits in England’s rugged southwestern county of Cornwall as “the Klondike” of lithium. Johnson is known for his grandiloquence, but he knows about the importance of lithium in the age of the lithium-ion battery, and a big lithium mine will open in Cornwall in 2026.

This kind of economic activity points to the re-evaluation and rebalancing of the world’s vital, non-agricultural commodities, reflecting the need for new raw materials for national survival as the demands of technology have changed.

The rare earth elements — there are 17 of them but only four are in demand — are the great multipliers of the modern electronic age. I have seen how this works with the equivalent of a refrigerator magnet. A traditional magnet has a slight pull toward the metal surface. Try it with a magnet that has been enhanced with one of the rare earths, neodymium, and you will find the attraction to the metal of the refrigerator so strong that the magnet will fly out of your hand — and it will take a muscular tug to remove it.

Enhanced magnetism is what makes wind turbines economically feasible. Wind turbines wouldn’t produce enough electricity to make them economical without that multiplier.

The problem is that 95 percent of the rare earths now mined and processed come from China.

This gives the Chinese the ability to choke off the West’s economies while the struggle to produce the vital elements elsewhere (and they are well distributed throughout the Earth’s crust) is mounted.

David Zaikin, a Ukrainian-born Canadian citizen working in London, knows as much about the world resource line-up and China’s influence as anyone. He is the CEO of Key Elements Group, and an alumnus and founder of the Mining Club at the London Business School.

“China is out there and is trying to win every race globally. The West must do everything it can to subvert its efforts and find alternative nations to work with,” Zaikin says.

“The good news is that there are friendly nations like Canada, Australia, and India that are naturally very rich in rare earths. They are well-positioned to bridge the gap in potential rare earths shortages, or in the event those are weaponized by the PRC,” he says, “The bad news is that it takes a long time to begin commercial production, and the right time to start was yesterday.”

The Mountain Pass mine, which lies in the Mojave Desert in California, is in production after a hiatus. But that doesn’t mean much in terms of our Chinese dependence. The production from California is shipped to China for processing and then shipped back to the United States. The mine has also been financed by the Chinese.

The inhibition to mining for rare earths, as John Kutsch, executive director of the Thorium Energy Alliance, explains, is thorium, which isn’t a rare earth element, but which is found in conjunction with rare earths, especially in the United States.

Thorium is a fertile nuclear material and is classified as such by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, so miners have to account for it, and it has to be stored and disposed of as nuclear waste.

Until a national thorium bank is established, as supported by Kutsch and his group, we will be looking elsewhere.

Zaikin says, “As the West pursues green policies and becomes more independent of imported oil, it will reduce the influence that the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] and other oil-producing nations have on domestic and international policies.”

He adds, “However, by moving from oil into renewable energy, the West increasingly finds itself at the mercy of China. This is why it is crucial that the West includes nuclear power in its green vision of the future, in order to avoid the weaponization of energy by hostile powers.”

Long COVID is the condition wherein people continue to experience symptoms for longer than usual after initially contracting COVID-19. Those symptoms are similar to the ones of another long-haul disease, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, often called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

For a decade, in broadcasts and newspaper columns, I have been detailing the agony of those who suffer from ME/CFS. My word hopper isn’t filled with enough words to describe the abiding awfulness of this disease.

There are many sufferers, but how ME/CFS is contracted isn’t well understood. Over the years, research has been patchy. However, investigation at the National Institutes of Health has picked up and the disease now has measurable funding — and it is taken seriously in a way it never was earlier. In fact, it has been identified since 1955, when the Royal Free Hospital in London had a major outbreak. The disease had certainly been around much longer.

In the mid-198os, there were two big cluster outbreaks in the United States — one at Incline Village on Lake Tahoe in Nevada and the other in Lyndonville in northern New York. These led the Centers for Disease Control to name the disease “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.”

The difficulty with ME/CFS is there are no biological markers. You can’t pop round to your local doctor and leave some blood and urine and, bingo! Bodily fluids yield no clues. That is why Harvard Medical School researcher Michael VanElzakker says the answer must lie in tissue.

ME/CFS patients suffer from exercise, noise and light intolerance, unrefreshing sleep, aching joints, brain fog, and a variety of other awful symptoms. Many are bedridden for days, weeks, months, and years.

In California, I visited a young man who had to leave college and was bedridden at his parents’ home. He couldn’t bear to be touched and communicated through sensors attached to his fingers.

In Maryland, I visited a teenage girl at her parents’ home. She had to wear sunglasses indoors and had to be propped up in a wheelchair during the brief time she could get out of bed each day.

In Rhode Island, I visited a young woman, who had a thriving career and social life in Texas, but now keeps company with her dogs at her parents’ home because she isn’t well enough to go out.

A friend in New York City weighs whether to go out to dinner (pre-pandemic) knowing that the exertion may cost her two days in bed.

I know a young man in Atlanta who is able to work, but he must take a cocktail of 20 pills to deal with his day.

Some ME/CFS sufferers get somewhat better. The instances of cure are few; of suicide, many.

Onset is often after exercise, and the first indications can be flu-like. Gradually, the horror of permanent, painful, lonely separation from the rest of the world dawns. Those without money or family support are in the most perilous condition.

Private groups — among them the Open Medicine Foundation, the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, and ME Action — have worked tirelessly to raise money and stimulate research. The debt owned them for their caring is immense. This has allowed dedicated researchers from Boston to Miami and from Los Angeles to Ontario to stay on the job when the government has been missing. Compared to other diseases, research on ME/CFS has been hugely underfunded.

Oved Amitay, chief executive officer of the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, says Long COVID gives researchers an opportunity to track the condition from onset and, importantly, to study its impact on the immune system – known to be compromised in ME/CFS. He is excited.

In December, Congress provided $1.5 billion in funding over four years for the NIH to support research into Long COVID. The ME/CFS research community is glad and somewhat anxious. Glad there will be more money for research, which will spill into ME/CFS, and worried that years of endeavor, hard lessons learned, and slow but hopeful progress will be washed away in a political roadshow full of flash.

Ever since I began following ME/CFS, people have stressed to me that more money is essential. But so are talented individuals and ideas.

Long COVID needs carefully thought-out proposals. If it is, in fact, a form of ME/CFS, it is a long sentence for innocent victims. I have received many emails from ME/CFS patients who pray nightly not to wake up in the morning. The disease is that awful.

Delve into your bank account or find a credit card that isn’t maxed out and do it. You know you want to. You know you must. You know you can’t resist. You want, must have, to hell with the expense, the latest cell phone.

Of course, the cell phone you have is perfectly good and does everything you want. That isn’t the point. When you are in need of a technology fix, utility isn’t a consideration.

Your old cell phone, truth be told, was such a whizzy little computer that you could ask it to read your email aloud or you could surreptitiously enjoy watching old television shows like “Mister Ed.” Now it must be cast out. You have read the CNET review which details pixel counts, camera capacity, and battery longevity. The new phone, the one that you may have to raid your child’s college fund to acquire, is a must-have.

Here is a tip: Google until you are bug-eyed. It is lazy just to buy the top Android from Samsung or the latest iPhone from Apple. There are about 120 companies making cell phones. There are a dozen you can buy without going to China.

Imagine if you have a phone that is unique, the opportunity for one-upping your pals is limitless. Think of these conversations just waiting:

“Bill, is that a new iPhone? I just bought a Blankety Blank. Actually, it is superior. You should see how I mapped a trajectory for a Mars flight on it.”

Or “Susan, you got the latest from Samsung? I guess it is great, but I really need extra functions. I can shoot and edit a feature film on this little beauty from Blankety Blank. It writes the script, too.”

Warning: When you have made one of these asinine comments, move away.

You can spend more than $3 million on a cell phone. An Australian businessman commissioned such a phone. It was replete with a 22-carat gold case, rubies, and diamonds. I wonder what it weighed. More, I wonder if it worked. I don’t expect to find that model at Walmart. But don’t be downcast, if you have just $2.5 million to blow on a phone, there are several in your price range. Of course, these have nothing to do with telephony, they are pure fashion — like those watches that cost millions and are made in Switzerland, the home of great watches, with humble, Chinese-made moving parts.

Even if you hold onto your old instrument or buy the latest, it seems the one thing you won’t be doing is making phone calls.

We are living in the post-phone age. If, God forbid, we are to speak to someone on the phone, an appointment has to be set up by email or text (a cell phone capacity actually used). So a simple phone call becomes work, something to cause tension, apprehension, dread. I don’t think anyone ever made an appointment to call you to tell you that you are coming into money or to tell you they have accepted your marriage proposal.

I have lived through the ages of the telephone, as defined by an instrument connected to similar that enables you to talk to someone else.

The first age was the party line. I call it the public line because you could listen to anyone on the same line.

Then there was the age of the rotary. Dial, dial, dial. If, like me, you had to make a lot of phone calls, it was hell. We had pencils with rubber-blob ends to insert into the dial to ease the finger labor. The pushbutton was nirvana. A huge advance in user-friendliness.

Then came the age of the answering machine. It was the thin end of the wedge which subtracted years from lives because it led inexorably to those automatic phone systems that won’t let you speak to a human being, whether it is a doctor or a manager about your, yes, telephone account.

No doubt there will be sociologists writing about the death of talking on the telephone. I, for one, always loved a ringing telephone, before robocalls, of course, because that call might be something that, as Omar Khayyam said, transmutes “life’s leaden metal into gold.”

Sometimes phone calls (RIP) did that.

Where I live things are beginning to turn green with a hint of spring. But it isn’t just the flora here that has an intimation of green. The whole country, indeed, the whole world, is greening for St. Patrick’s Day.

The most extraordinary thing happens on that day: People around the world shed their ethnic identities to take on an Irish one. On March 17, the world decides it is Irish and that it must, as the Irish do, take a drink.

No other country commandeers the world more than that small island nation set in the North Atlantic. On the day when an otherwise obscure saint is celebrated, the world wears some item of green and quaffs something fermented or distilled.

For me, Ireland has always been a place of glorious contradictions and great writers – Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Swift, O’Brien, Beckett and Lewis, come to mind in no order, and there are hundreds more.

It isn’t just that its writers are among the greatest, but also that the Irish speak poetically, eschewing the simple answer, embroidering the boring cloth of fact, and sometimes confusing those who don’t have the gift of deciphering eloquence.

An Irish friend, John McCaughey, and I were walking with our wives in Kinsale, on the southwest coast of Ireland, when we came upon a tempting pub and were tempted. It wasn’t open, but an old man – and the old men of Ireland are a breed apart — was patiently waiting.

“When will he be open?” John asked.

“He’d hardly be open now,” said the old man.

“Well, when will he be open?”

“Oh, he’ll be open in good time.”

I asked John what he meant by “in good time.”

It means, said John, that he didn’t have a clue, but he wouldn’t like to say something so bald and down-letting.

In Ireland, the facts are often delivered in fine gift-wrapping.

In a restaurant, my wife asked whether the fish was fresh. The waiter replied, “If it were any fresher, it would be swimming, and you wouldn’t want that now, would you?”

I spent two decades visiting Ireland as the American organizer of the Humbert Summer School in Ballina, Co. Mayo. Summer schools in Ireland are study groups that meet once a year and can focus on literature, like the Yeats school, or politics like the Parnell school. They are akin to Bill Clinton’s Renaissance weekends.

The Humbert Summer School, created by John Cooney, the eminent historian and journalist, and sadly no longer operating, was named for Gen. Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, who was sent by Napoleon to assist the Irish with the uprising against the English in 1798, remembered in “The Year of the French” by Thomas Flanagan. The uprising failed, but Humbert became an Irish hero. (He fought gallantly in the Battle of New Orleans and ended his days in the city as French teacher.)

Our summer school examined the position of Ireland in the world, especially its role in Europe. Every year I would try and bring a few Americans to the northwest of Ireland to enjoy the discussions, the great lamb, salmon and potatoes, and, of course, the free flow of Guinness, Murphy’s (another stout), Smithwick’s (the dominant beer), and Bushmills and Jameson whiskeys, refreshments we found conducive to good talk.

That part of Ireland historically had been hard used by the English, from the time of William of Orange in the 17^th century to the Black and Tans in 1920, who were ill-trained and equipped English policemen, many teenagers, raised in England and inserted into the Royal Irish Constabulary, to oppose the Irish fight to overthrow English rule. They wore surplus green tunics and khaki trousers, hence their naming. Their conduct was brutal and thuggish.

I had told this dreadful history of English oppression in some detail to one of my American guests, Ray Connolly, who was from Boston. Driving back to Dublin, after the summer school session, we stopped at a pub. When the publican heard my English accent, he asked me about the weather “over there.” I knew he meant England. I told him that I used to live in England, but I had lived in the United States for many years and had become an American citizen. Rather than curling his lip at me, he threw his arms around my neck and said, “God bless you. You haven’t lost your accent.”

My friend was askance. I explained to Ray that the Irish love to denounce the English, but they are especially proud when their children have homes and careers in London.

In Ireland, your enemy can also be your friend. That is why I shall wear the green on the great day and sip something stronger than usual and celebrate a Frenchman who fought with the Irish against my ancestors. Slainte!

 

 

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Photo: Ballina Pub Windowsill, Linda Gasparello

There is a lot of chat about the future of work: Will we do it at home, or will we revert to commuting to the old traditional workplace?

But there is an additional, different question: What will we wear?

Go to the mirror and look at yourself. Except for the odd Zoom meeting you might have tried to dress for, you are a different person.

The fact is that even a traditionalist like me, who has worn a jacket and tie since his first days of school, is, well, letting down.

Worse, after a year of sweats and other baggy, comfortable clothing, I feel constricted and ill at ease when I put on a suit – which is mainly when I record television programs on Zoom or some other video hook-up.

I suspect that you are like me for these Zoom, or the like, formals; you wear a jacket and jeans or exercise pants, hiding your lower half under a table. Notice how cramped you feel above the waist.

Women, do you remember, putting on full makeup — known in the cosmetic trade as “war paint” – now that you’ve grown accustomed to the au naturel look? Maybe for morale, you wear just a slash of lipstick now and again. Those nice suits in the closet, or flattering dresses, do you remember how confining they were? How hard it was managing that dangling bling?

On that Hallelujah Day when the pandemic is over, will men and women be prepared to get out of those oh-so-comfortable sneakers for Oxfords and pumps?

Was it worth it, yesterday’s clothing? After Covid-19, the way we were isn’t going to be the way it will be. Anyone for going back clotheswise? Or have we been emancipated from wardrobe tyranny and shoe slavery?

There have been various attempts in recent years to dress us down, like Casual Friday. I remember giving a speech at the prestige law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom when they were trying to dress casually all week. The women partners looked miserable; they had made partner, bought Chanel suits, but now they were expected to wear their law school rags. And, oh, the misery of the middle-aged men partners, who had looked to bespoke suits to cover up the expansion of their waists, which had accompanied the collection of fat fees with the advance of age.

The only assault on male fashion before the change agent that is Covid-19 was the abandonment, for reasons unknown, of the poor necktie. What did it do wrong? Let me tell you, no one looks better without them. The naked male throat in a shirt designed for a tie isn’t lovely. Compensation is at hand in a revived interest in the pocket handkerchief or pocket square (which was once used for drying the tears of distressed damsels but is now used for cleaning one’s eyeglasses in the time of #MeToo).

Formality in dress has been under attack for a long time. The tech titans, like Steve Jobs, and rock musicians were the shock troops. No longer do smart restaurants enforce coats and ties for men and look askance at women in pants. Wearing sweats, shorts, sneakers? “Your table is ready, sir or madam.” Ugh!

Going forward, we may be so casualized in dress that we go to church in pajamas and work in anything that covers the body and is comfortable. The god of comfort has conquered the heavens.

I hope that for the sake of everyone, the fashion mavens, goaded on by the magazines like Vogue and GQ, devise a new era of clothes as comfortable as sweats and as flattering as, well, what we used to wear. Meanwhile, if you know anyone who would like to buy some suits (portly), sports coats (Scottish tweed), and shoes (leather lace-up), have them call me. I’m going to get with the new fashion, where comfort is the only criterion.

 

 

 

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Photo by Alexander Naglestad on Unsplash

The horror of the Texas electricity catastrophe should chill the whole country. Nothing strikes at the survivability of a modern society more than the failure of its power supply, maybe nothing at all.

When the power supply fails, the failure of human life is not far behind. Yet, at a time when we should expect a united front to help Texas and other affected Southern states, petty and unbecoming point-scoring is in full swing.

The power supply collapse in Texas was caused by extreme and aberrant cold weather, freezing the electric generators. The system wasn’t designed to withstand what occurred — and what may occur elsewhere in a time of new and terrifying instability in the world’s weather systems.

Coal plants froze, gas lines froze, a nuclear plant froze, solar panels froze, wind turbines froze, and Texans faced their greatest crisis in generations: terrible cold without heat and without water in some locations.

Lives were lost from freezing to death and from carbon monoxide poisoning as people struggled to create warmth by running cars, charcoal grills, and backup generators in confined spaces, and from the inability, with ice-packed roads, to get to hospitals or even to a warming center.

Others will die because they crowded together for warmth and inadvertently spread or got the COVID-19 virus.

The situation for livestock is one of suffering and death. Horses, pigs, cattle, and chickens aren’t getting fed or watered. Death abounds as farmers despair.

The sad response to tragedy has been to blame. Blame the wind turbines, blame the individual power companies, blame the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) which manages the Texas grid, and blame the Texas grid itself.

Texas prides itself on having a self-contained grid with little major interconnection to the national grid. This is political. Texas didn’t want to be subject to the Federal Power Commission and its successor agency the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). It opted to be independent; it kept its electricity out of interstate commerce.

What that has meant in this crisis is that there is no way for other states to ship power to Texas, even if there is power to spare.

Now that the terrible price of electric failure is painted in awful detail before the nation, the Biden administration should act quickly to find out what has happened and to what extent the rest of the nation is vulnerable.

Vulnerable not only to weather that has gone wild, but also to other dangers to the grid, like the ever-present cybersecurity threat. And vulnerable to the related but separate threat to operating systems from spyware buried in Chinese bulk power systems, which make up most of the big grid installations, like transformers and turbines. Ignored voices have been sounding this alarm. They need to be heard.

The Texas crisis unfolded at a time when the U.S. electric industry has been under strain as it seeks to decarbonize and to accommodate more wind and solar energy, and as it searches for technologies to store electricity, like batteries with long drawdown times and hydrogen made when there is surplus supply.

The utilities are also being digitized, data-driven in every way, from sensors that tell second by second the condition of generating units, like an individual wind turbine, to a sophisticated use of private wireless broadband networks which can report within two seconds a line failure and de-energize it, to early warning of incipient failures in the system. Microgrids, which tie together alternative energy sources in mini-networks, also need to be data-managed as the wind changes and the sun moves.

The people of Texas and elsewhere in the South have been forced to shelter like animals without warmth, food, and water, in abject, life-threatening misery. That is a future to be avoided for other parts of the nation.

Texans deserve more than a brainless blame game.

The Biden administration should establish a nonpolitical commission to tell us what went wrong and to make sure we are secure in our electric supply.

If it were ever doubted, life without electricity for a few weeks would mean the end of life for all but survivalists here and there.

Hold the blame, get the facts, take the action.

The electric utility industry looks a bit like a man on a ladder with one foot seeking the rung below, unsure of where it is. But find it he must.

The industry is beset with technological change as well as social and political pressures. It isn’t in crisis, but it is in dramatic transition.

It has one overriding driver: the need first to reduce, then to eliminate carbon emissions.

The utilities have been heroic in turning to wind and solar – which have also turned out to be economically advantageous. However, those efforts are challenged by the need to store electricity produced when these “alternatives” aren’t available.

General Motors is switching to making only electric vehicles after 2035. It can stop and retool. Utilities can never stop pumping out electrons; they must retool on the go.

Most of us only realize the hidden fragility of the system when storms are forecast, and the local utility tells us to buy batteries.

Feb. 11 was the 174th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s birth. No one has affected the way we live as completely as Edison, neither king, conqueror, philosopher, revolutionary, nor any other inventor.

New fuels produce new ancillary needs. Every new introduction in electricity requires the supporting technologies to change — sometimes new technologies must be invented for the supporting role.

The big pressures on the utilities are to get off fossil fuels and to increase the resilience of the system, including resilience against weather and cyberattack.

These pressures spawn other pressures, particularly how to store alternative electricity which is made when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, often not when consumption is high.

Storage is a hot area in electric innovation. Batteries, which are front-and-center in storage, must get much better, so they can have longer drawdown times. Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, says batteries will get much better, but not enough to take up the slack for days of bad weather. He was speaking at the virtual winter meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

Hydrogen is a favorite to deal with days of rain, as happens in Florida and elsewhere, and wind droughts which can last more than a week in Texas, a big wind-generating center.

But hydrogen isn’t a one-for-one replacement of natural gas, the current workhorse of generating fuels. On paper, hydrogen has every virtue. In reality, it has challenges of its own: It has less than half the energy of natural gas; it is harder to handle, can explode, and can produce nitrogen oxide; and turbines have to be modified to burn it.

Even so, a plethora of utilities, including Sempra, Arizona Public Service, and NextEra Energy, are experimenting with it. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is converting a coal plant in Utah to run completely on green hydrogen (that is hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water not from natural gas).

San Antonio’s municipally owned energy utility, CPS Energy, buys a lot of wind power and is planning to install 900 megawatts of solar power on top of 4oo MW already deployed. That means storage is critical, and the utility has launched an ambitious global search for new-and-improved technologies. This has generated 300 responses worldwide. These, according to COO Cris Eugster, include hydrogen and batteries, but also far-out ideas like compressed air, flywheels, mineshafts for pumped storage, and liquefied air.

All of this restructuring, moving from big central plants to diverse generating and complex substitutions, requires recognition that data is now central in utilities — and data has to move instantly.

Morgan O’Brien, who co-founded the game-changing cellphone company, Nextel, and is now executive chairman of Anterix, a private broadband network provider, says, “The intermittent nature of renewable sources imposes particular requirements on grid management for speed and accuracy. Luckily, the global wireless technology, LTE, which powers our smartphones is perfectly adapted to this communications challenge.”

The speed of transition is accelerating. The electric utilities, often thought of as staid, are going to be anything but going forward: They are becoming innovation hubs.

Edison’s birthday marks a busy time for his follow-on inventors.

 

 

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Photo:
Thomas Edison’s Edison Botanic Research Corporation at Edison-Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, Florida

Social media has an unimagined, unequaled, uncontrollable, and unpredictable ability to mobilize groups of people for antisocial action; to take a sliver of society and turn it into a mob.

Last month this new force in society was on display, from mobilizing anti-vaxxers in Los Angeles to the U.S. Capitol riot, resulting in five deaths, to the run-up of a weak stock, GameStop, by 1,800 percent.

These events, coupled with some strains of political thought being restricted on Facebook and Twitter, along with the outright banning of tweets from Donald Trump when he was still in office, have some in Congress convinced something should be done — often the precursor to ill-conceived legislation.

Conservatives want the protections granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides Google, Facebook, and others a legal liability shield from third-party content posted on their platform, to be reformed. They believe they are disadvantaged by the liberal-leaning networks.

The hot issue of the moment in Congress is the price run-up of GameStop and other companies’ stocks. The primary platform most fingered so far is Reddit, but the active enabler was the app Robinhood which allows individuals (mostly day traders) to trade stock without commissions and in small amounts.

This Robinhood isn’t to be confused with the English folk hero, who stole from the rich to give to the poor, even though that is the intent of those who named the app. In reality, it is part of the Wall Street system and makes its money selling all those little trades to market-making firms. Its purpose is to make money, not to bring social justice to small traders.

I interviewed Sinan Aral, who studies social media at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is the author of “The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy and Our Health — and How We Must Adapt,” for “White House Chronicle,” the PBS television show which I host. He said of GameStop that it is imperative to find out what really happened. For example: When was the GameStop stock run-up taken over by big funds which stood to make huge profits, and some of which did?

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, has scheduled hearings. That is a beginning, but it certainly won’t be definitive. Congressional hearings seldom are.

Jarrod Hazelton, a Chicago-trained economist who once worked for a Connecticut hedge fund, concurred. It looks like GameStop was “the perfect storm,” he said, also on “White House Chronicle.”

Hazelton told me this never was a sudden viral event: The groundwork for the Reddit-fueled frenzy over GameStop was laid by professionals nearly a year ago.

It was social media that drove the madness, even though it was the big financial houses, like BlackRock (which reportedly made $3 billion on GameStop stock) which were the big winners. Speculation in the stock was already underway when trades took off, enabled and fed by Reddit posts and other social media shouting in essence “free lunch here.”

MIT’s Aral takes issue with the idea that crowds have a kind of folk wisdom. That idea was endorsed in a 2004 book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” by James Surowiecki. But Aral points out that was the same year that Facebook was founded. In other words, a social media crowd isn’t the same as a fairground crowd trying to guess the weight of an ox, an example in Surowiecki’s book.

Crowds, it turns out, are wise if they are polled as individuals, but once they get on social media and have subscribed to a toxic idea, they aren’t wise. They are a single-minded mob, whether opposing vaccinations, trashing the great symbol of democracy, or running up a stock.

What is to be done about social media? Probably nothing. It is here like gun ownership or pornography. This one, too, we will have to suck up and live with.

With time we may get inured to social media and get better at discounting a lot of its disingenuous outpourings. But, from time to time, it will be harnessed for evil. Crowds are healthy, mobs not so.