White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Texas Utility Exemplifies Struggle With Surging Demand

A graphic of the flag of Texas with wind turbines and other methods of electricity generation in the background.

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Electric utilities are doing something that is equivalent to a person changing clothes without ever getting naked.

They can’t shut down while they switch out old plants for new; they can’t turn off the lights while they retool. They must try to modernize without the communities they serve being affected by so much as a flicker.

What is called “the world’s largest machine” — the coordinated operation of the nation’s 3,000 electric utilities — must hum 24/7 while replacing old polluting plants with new less-polluting plants and adding tranches of renewable power, primarily wind and solar.

I have been watching this feat of changing in place at CPS Energy, the municipally owned electric and natural gas utility in San Antonio. And, I have been following its president and CEO, Rudy D. Garza.

It is a utility with all the stresses now faced by utilities: growing demand, pressure to retire fossil fuel plants and preparing for the onslaught of demand from data centers, driven by the need for more computing for artificial intelligence and other computing needs.

Underlying all of these challenges in San Antonio, as elsewhere, is the need to control the increase in consumer bills. Garza told me with pride that despite the pressures, CPS Energy still has among the lowest electricity rates in the country.

Some in the environmental community may have balked at the company’s recent announcement that the utility was buying two large gas turbine plants in Corpus Christi and one smaller unit used for peaking in Laredo from Talen Energy, which is emerging from bankruptcy. The deal is worth $785 million and will provide CPS Energy with a whopping 1,710 megawatts of power.

Garza told me that CPS Energy will spend additional money on bringing the purchased plants up to its operating standards and preparing them for continuous use. Talen Energy, a power merchant, used them intermittently.

The purchases will enable the utility to shut down so-called steam gas plants. These older gas-fired units don’t use modern, super-efficient turbines but operate like coal-fired plants with a boiler and a lot of wasted heat. Garza said this would reduce air pollution in San Antonio. CPS Energy is also planning to retire coal generation on an accelerated schedule.

Although CPS Energy may not be able to get off of gas entirely, it is a leader in clean energy. It is, Garza said, the largest solar generator in Texas and the second-largest wind user. It has added 50 MW of battery storage and is seeking up to 500 MW of new storage.

Out with the old and in with the new.

This includes the rising electricity demand, which is growing at a rate of 3 percent, and the looming need of data centers. The demand, fed by artificial intelligence, is incalculable and growing exponentially.

Garza said, “The wild card is how quickly these larger loads that are coming to the area get connected to the system. We’ve got eight of these (data centers) on the ground right now in San Antonio with 20 more waiting in the wings.”

Some data centers, Garza said, will need their own backup generation. Although outages are rare on the CPS Energy system, he said the 24/7 needs of the centers are such that the larger ones will have to have their own emergency backup.

CPS Energy isn’t alone in dealing with data centers. It is a challenge faced by utilities nationwide. Rene Haas, CEO of Arm, the UK chip development company, part of Japan’s SoftBank, has described the need for electricity by AI as “insatiable.” A former U.S. secretary of energy told me it is scary and underestimated.

CPS Energy is looking at ways of accommodating the data centers and is at the forefront of new ways of generating. It is collaborating with Joint Base San Antonio — the giant military installation that sits in the center of the CPS Energy service area — to explore the potential for carbon-free solutions. CPS Energy is also looking into geothermal, particularly efficiencies that can be attained with fracking technology, which has changed the oil and gas outlook.

This creativity, which is part of the electric evolution in San Antonio, is taking place across the country. Like changing clothes without getting naked, it is a challenge.

The Case for ‘Hotter’ Nuclear in Solving the Electricity Crunch

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The drumbeat for more nuclear power grows louder all the time.

As the demand for more electricity rises inexorably (now agreed at 2 percent a year nationally and more in specific areas), the case for a surge in nuclear power plant development becomes stronger. With their intermittency, solar and wind can’t accommodate the growth alone.

Polls show that public support for nuclear power in the United States is around 60 percent. Environmentalists who once opposed nuclear now endorse it.

Every day, in newspapers and places where opinions are heard, experts claim that the world can’t reach its climate goals without nuclear energy. For the United States, that seems clear. The prognosticators in and out of government say it is so.

There is political support in both parties, and nuclear has been on a technological march: better safety, better fuel, less steel and concrete. 

A platoon of small modular reactors (SMRs) — which generate 400 megawatts or less of electricity compared to the plants currently operating, which are primarily over 1,000 MW — is in the wings.

The argument for these SMRs has been that because they are smaller, they will be cheaper to build, with much of the fabrication done in a factory, and easier to site.

The first of the breed is from NuScale, which has been under development for more than a decade but recently lost its first U.S. customer, Utah Associated Municipal Power System, because of the rising projected cost of electricity from the plant.

A lot of interest is focused on the Natrium reactor, which is planned for a former coal-fired plant site in Wyoming and backed in part by Bill Gates and with participation from GE Hitachi.

Several utilities are looking at other designs. Of these, only NuScale uses a modified light water system, the technology on which the world’s 400-plus power-generating reactors have been based.

The case for new technologies is eloquently made in a new and extraordinarily complete but very accessible book, “New Nuclear Is Hot,” by longtime nuclear advocate Robert Hargraves, a physicist.

Hargraves’ argument is that the alternative technologies now under development are hotter: They operate at far higher temperatures than the old reactors and are better for industrial uses; more of the heat is converted to electricity, less is wasted on disposing of so-called low-grade heat, and the plants are smaller, easier to build and are inherently safer.

It is a convincing list of virtues.

Hargraves says, “New nuclear reactors exploit hotter heat in fluids such as molten salts, liquid sodium, or helium gas. The red-hot temperature heat puts 50 percent more of the reactor’s fission energy into electrical energy, not into the cooling water that condenses turbine-generator steam. Waterside new nuclear power plants use about half of the cooling water of current ones.”

Additionally, Hargraves says, “Hot heat also brings new uses. Hot heat can break hydrogen out of seawater cheaply, heat buildings, power electrochemical separators to capture (carbon dioxide), and energize new refineries to produce net zero fuels from the (carbon dioxide) and hydrogen.”

Hargraves is a promoter of thorium reactors and is one of the founders of ThorCon, a company that hopes to build a thorium reactor in Indonesia.

However, the underlying challenge to nuclear energy and providing the nation with enough electricity, as it converts to an electric economy, isn’t technology but money. First-of-its-kind reactors are expensive.

Even tried-and-true light water reactors are tricky to build. The two new units of the Vogtle plant in Georgia came in $17 billion over budget and seven years late. The story for the latest reactor built in Finland has been similar: cost overruns and delays.

New reactors are expensive, and that expense is hard to estimate. That means if the nation wants electricity, it needs to think up ways of financing the new future of nuclear power outside of the traditional avenues of finance. A nuclear plant can last for 100 years or more, but the big hurdle is the billions of dollars required upfront.

It becomes a national survival issue: Will the nation have enough electricity for the future, or will it accept electricity shortages as a limiting factor in the economy?

The nuclear establishment doesn’t need more endorsements. It needs to lay out a plan for not what should be built but how it will be paid for — and it requires that plan now.

Housing: A Capitalist Solution to a Social Crisis

A home under contruction in California.

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The housing crisis, which is spread across the United States, is most easily measured in the human cost. At the low end that is families, working families, forced to go without a roof, to live in cars, on the streets, and in tent cities or municipal shelters.

But there are other costs, mostly to young people; costs like getting married and having to live with parents or living in a group house long past the age when that is an adventure.

A big cost of the housing crisis is labor mobility.

One of the great strengths of the American workforce has been its preparedness to relocate to the work, unlike parts of Europe where the workers have  demanded that the work come to them.

It was this mobility that fed the growth of California and today is feeding the growth of Texas, although housing stress — particularly in Austin, the dynamic capital — is beginning to be a problem.

Mobility is a feature that made America America: its restlessness, its sense of seeking the frontier and moving there.

According to Dowell Myers, professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California, whom I recently interviewed on the television program,“White House Chronicle,” in 1985, 21 percent of the population relocated every year, now it is down to 8 percent.

According to Myers and other experts, the housing shortage has been building since the Great Recession of 2008 to 2009. This has been multifaceted and includes a shortage of money available for lending to builders, labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, but particularly local exclusionary laws.

To my mind, and to architects and developers I have spoken to, those laws are the biggest problem: the mostly smug, leafy suburbs don’t want new townhouses or apartments. That introduces underlying issues of class and race. In the suburbs, two of the most dreaded words are “affordable housing.”

The answer is to build “luxury” housing rather than designated low-income housing, according to Myers. It is a view I have espoused for years. Build upscale housing that caters to the middle class and as people move up, more housing will become available at the bottom. It is capitalism at its simplest: supply and demand at work. At present we have too much demand and not enough supply.

An extraordinary thing about the housing crisis which is crippling the nation and changing its social as well as its labor dynamics, is why isn’t this a prominent issue in this presidential election year.

It is an issue that could bolster candidates because there are things at the federal level which can be done. Here is a problem that affects all. Where are the political solutions coming from the top? Where are the political reporters asking the candidates, “What are you going to do about housing, a here-and-now crisis?”

Public housing comes pre-stigmatized. The answer is the market. It isn’t  a free market because it is inhibited by the fortress-suburb mentality, but there is enough room for the market to accelerate, to build more houses with just a little federal incentive.

Some of the most attractive homes in New England are in converted mills and factories. These grand structures have been turned into what realtors call “residences.”

The use of the word residences, instead of apartments, denotes something desirable. So be it: If it works, do it.

Much of the rehabilitation of the industrial properties in New England, and across the country, has gone in tandem with tax incentives. In one case, these were enough for the developers to produce 250 apartments from one mill in Rhode Island. Up and down the country there are abandoned industrial properties that require little zoning hassle to be repurposed.

USC’s Myers, who says every kind of housing is needed, points out that building for those who can afford to buy works in another way: It inhibits gentrification and the social upheaval, as the poor are pushed out of their old neighborhoods, something which, by the way, has been very apparent in Washington, D.C.

The use of urban space is changing, shopping centers are failing and office buildings are losing their luster, and that means housing opportunities. Repurposing isn’t the only answer, and a lot of new housing is needed, but there is huge evidence that repurposing works from the factories of New England to the lofts of Manhattan — desirable housing has been created from the debris of the past.

Building anything anywhere isn’t a simple matter, but once the financial incentives are gotten right, things begin to move. It will take decades to fix the housing problem, but that should be accelerated now.

 

The Dark Ahead: Crisis Building in the U.S. Electricity System

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There is a gathering storm over the nation’s electric supply.

What has been described as the world’s biggest machine, the U.S. electricity system, is stressed — and that stress will increasingly affect reliability. That means sporadic blackouts, some extensive. While the nation won’t be plunged into total darkness, regional difficulties will occur, according to the industry’s own watchdog group, the North American Electric Reliability Corp.

There are nearly 3,000 electric utilities in the United States, and what is known as the grid is, in fact, three grids: the Eastern, the Western and Texas. The first two interconnect and flow power back and forth where possible, but Texas is separate — and not subject to the regulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

There are three classifications of electric utilities: the big investor-owned companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, ConEd and the operating units of the giant Southern Co.; the 2,000 public power companies, usually municipally owned, and a  few, like TVA, federal government-owned; and the rural electric cooperatives, which can be quite large or very small. Together, they operate the grids in surprising harmony and collegial cooperation.

The price of electricity is rising faster than inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration — a sure sign of building pressure on the companies. The causes of this stress are many. First, there is more demand for electricity across the board. That demand is rising about 2 percent a year, and the increase may accelerate after 2026.

Contributing to the demand is the proliferation of data centers and their huge appetite for electricity — an appetite now fed by artificial intelligence and its increasing use everywhere.

Then there is the effect of environmentally driven demand: switching heavy industry from using fossil fuels to using electricity for high-energy uses like steel-making. This is set to grow.

In the same way, the use of electrified transportation is upping its share of electricity demand: It isn’t just Priuses and similar personal vehicles but big fleets, particularly for in-city deliveries. The Postal Service, Amazon and other fleet users are converting to electricity. Burns & McDonnell, the Kansas City-based engineering, architecture, construction, environmental and consulting solutions firm, estimates half of intracity deliveries will be with electric vehicles by the decade’s end.

Increasingly, new homes will be all-electric as the future of natural gas supplies is compromised by public policy.

Exacerbating instability in the electric sector has been the swing from fossil-fuel generation — primarily coal and natural gas — to renewables. Those simply aren’t always available. The race is on for better batteries and storage to smooth the variability of wind and solar, especially wind.

Nonetheless, the pressure is constant to close coal and gas plants, which have always available generation, known in utility parlance as “dispatchable,” and account for 19 percent and 38 percent of generation, respectively. It adds to the difficulties of keeping the lights on.

The dilemma was set out for me by Duane Highley, CEO of Tri-State Generation & Transmission, in Westminster, Colorado. It provides power to 42 rural co-ops in four states.

Highley explained the new instability in the industry this way: “The rapid rate of retirement of dispatchable generators has raised concerns among our membership about the reliability of the greater grid.”

He said the industry can and is achieving rapid rates of emissions reduction but will still need “an appropriate amount of cost-effective dispatchable generation.”  Today, Highley noted, this is provided by coal and natural gas. This power will be needed to ensure a reliable and resilient grid as the demand for electricity increases.

“The traditional metrics utilities have used to model reliability can no longer demonstrate grid resilience as we rely more on intermittent weather-dependent resources.”

Tri-State, Highley said, is “working with its members on new reliability methodology to assure we have sufficient capacity, even with high levels of renewable generation.”

Electricity loss is a lethal matter.

In Texas, 254 people, by official count, died when some of the grid went down during the blackout caused by Ice Storm Uri in 2021. And in last year’s heat dome over Arizona, the state estimates 654 people died of heat-related causes in Maricopa County.

Clearly, job one is to keep the lights on before we retire the tried-and-true generating plant of yesterday. Life depends on it.

How Ireland Gifted America in Music, Politics and Literature

St. Patrick's Day revelry

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Ready for craic on Sunday?

Craic, pronounced crack, is an Irish word that has seeped into English and means party or revelry.

Try as you may, you won’t avoid Sunday’s craic because on Sunday, March 17, hundreds of millions of people around the world will be wearing the green. In short, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, the national day of the Irish, by putting on something green and taking a drink.

No other nation, let alone a tiny country with a troubled history, can have such a claim on the heartstrings of the planet. For one day, we are all Irish — many of us will go to a place where drink is sold to celebrate it. There isn’t a lot of preamble to St. Paddy’s Day — except for the arrival in the pubs of green-colored beer. Ugh!

The Irish diaspora, which reached its apogee during the Potato Famine of the 19th century, sent the Irish to the far corners of the earth, especially to America, where they endured poverty and eventually prospered.

They brought with them their music, which influenced American Roots Music, like Bluegrass, Folk and Country; their towering literary talent, which gave us generations of writers.

And they got into politics, big time.

A documentary in production and scheduled to be released in 12 episodes at the end of the year, “From Ireland to the White House,” traces the Irish ancestry of 24 U.S. presidents from Andrew Jackson (of Scots-Irish lineage) to Joe Biden.

Tony Culley-Foster, the U.S. representative of Tamber Media, the Dublin company producing the series, tells me the scholarship has been exacting in tracing the ancestry of the presidents. He said the 24 presidents on the list have been certified by the same independent historians and genealogists used by Clinton and Biden. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 31.5 million Americans who claim Irish heritage. So it has become essential for presidents to make pilgrimages to Ireland — to wrap themselves in green.

From my experience in Ireland, the two mainly taken to heart as being of their own were John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and of those, Kennedy was the greater heartthrob for the Irish.

My late friend Grant Stockdale’s father was Kennedy’s ambassador to Ireland. Grant spent his mid-teen years in Dublin at the U.S. embassy in Phoenix Park. “I knew what it must be like to be royalty,” Grant told me.

But it isn’t just the presidency shaped by Irish heritage. Irish names are to be found on every public service list, from the U.S. Congress to the local school board. There have been great senators, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and great speakers of the House, like the towering Boston-Irish Tip O’Neill. If it’s politics, it’s Irish.

In Britain, some of the greatest statesmen and orators in the House of Commons have been Irish, think Edmund Burke and Charles Parnell.

Ireland’s gift to the world has been its contribution to English literature. Hundreds of great names come to mind. Try Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Samuel Beckett and Edna O’Brien.

And the books keep coming, tumbling out of the most literary fertile minds on earth.

Two contemporary writers dominate my thinking: John Banville and Sally Rooney. Banville is prolific, profound and a joy to read, a master craftsman at the top of his form. Rooney is a kind of literary Taylor Swift, who writes about the sex, love and isolation of young adults of her generation. I am keen to see how she evolves and if she will give joy for generations, as great writers do.

Literacy is part of the fabric of Irish life. An Irish person, far from literary circles, will ask you conversationally, “What is your book?” Translation: “What are you reading?” Ireland treasures books, and reading is a national pastime.

Ireland’s literacy may have saved its economy. At a bleak period when, just 40 years ago, I heard many Irish leaders talk about “structural unemployment” of 22 percent, American scientific publishers found that highly literate women were a resource. That led to a boom in footnoting in Ireland, followed by American Express looking for accurate inputting, and, suddenly, Ireland was transformed from one of the poorest countries of Europe to a boom nation and the Silicon Valley of Europe, as the computer giants moved in. 

Galway, a town known for its bookstores and fishing, became ground zero for computing in Ireland.

Craic has no discernible economic value except for the brewers and distillers, but it is such fun. As the Irish say, Slainte (cheers)!

Hey, Travelers, Summer Isn’t the Only Great Time to Visit Europe

A view of the Acropolis and the Parthenon.

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The people of the world are planning to descend on Europe this summer. Not, I hasten to say, as migrants but as tourists.

They will jam the sidewalks of Paris, their buses will be bumper-to-bumper in England’s Lake District, and it will be nigh impossible to get into Venice.

It isn’t that Europe is too small to accommodate the surge of tourists but that a few sights are too popular with tourists from the West and now tourists from China. The history and culture of Europe are a magnet, drawing and delivering for tourists, whether they are first-timers or bucket-listers.

Greece is a jewel in this crown, a place of sparkling wonder of human endeavor and natural formations. The country is ground zero for Western civilization, where visitors can trace the origins of Western arts and sciences, as well as democracy. Visitors can also experience the natural beauty of its coasts, mountains and islands.

I met with the Greek minister of tourism, Olga Kefalogianni, in Athens last month, and we discussed the blessings and challenges of tourism, including the problem of what some call “overtourism.” Not only has Greece attracted tourists for millennia, but it also has a huge capacity to absorb visitors. It would just like to spread them out over the year and the country.

Clearly, Kefalogianni loves her job and was, to an extent, born to it. She is the scion of a very prominent Greek family that owns hotels in Crete, the largest and one of the most inviting of the Greek islands.

The last thing Kefalogianni, who did a stint as a lawyer in New York, wants to do is to discourage tourism. It accounts for 20 percent of Greece’s economy, and the country can absorb untold hundreds of thousands more tourists than it already does.

But there are choke points. And in future planning, the minister told me, she is working to enhance the industry by promoting Greek food, wine and its wide-open spaces for safe outdoor recreation like hiking, climbing and canoeing.

The first thing, she said, is to tell the world how diverse Greece is and how much it has to offer not only in terms of its history but also natural beauty and simple things like walking in its villages.

She wants visitors to spread out and enjoy all of Greece. “Do you know you can ski in Greece?” she asked me. Indeed, the country has 25 ski resorts.

She also said Europe has much to offer year-round besides the summer. In truth, the summer in southern Europe can be extremely hot.

One challenge for the Mediterranean ports is the cruise ships, which are now to be found all over the sea: vast, floating cities with eager sightseers, keen to disembark and spend a few hours in a destination.

They are becoming a challenge for host countries. They dock and disgorge their eager passengers, but they bring problems, from pollution to stressed port infrastructure. Also, the cruisers are ashore so briefly that they spend very little money, considering how many there are: Many prefer to eat all their meals on board, and their principal expenditure is on souvenirs and bus tours.

The cruise ships need more regulation, Kefalogianni said. Recently, I observed the problem firsthand. I — yes, on a cruise — fetched up in Santorini when five other huge ships did likewise. A cable car (or foot or donkey) at the port takes people up and down from Fira, the island’s capital. Well, with thousands in line, the result was chaos. Instead of a visit to a heavenly place, it was a version of hell.

Also, Greece and other European countries’ cities want the ships to base at their ports, provision there, and embark and disembark their passengers there. The beneficial economic effect would be greater that way.

The tourism minister wants visitors to know that Greece (and I would add the rest of tourist-haven Europe) has year-round attractions. She noted that the shoulder seasons of spring and fall offer all the summer attractions with fewer people. On the mainland and on the Greek islands — there are 6,000 of them; 227 are inhabited and 100 have more developed tourism facilities — you can swim early in the year and late as well. In February, I saw people swimming at a beach near Athens. They allowed the water to be cold, but not impossibly cold.

Mediterranean Europe is a place for all seasons. As the British writer Christopher Hitchens told me once, “It’s where it all began.”

If You Speak English, You Are Lucky, Says Certification Mogul

Byron Nicolaides, PeopleCert

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If you hold a professional certificate, whether it is for information technology or language proficiency, or if you hold one for best practices in project management, you may have a Greek entrepreneur to thank.

He is Byron Nicolaides, founder and CEO of PeopleCert, the global testing company in Athens.

I sat down with him in his office in the city’s center recently to find out how a businessman in Greece could affect standards of conduct and performance around the world.

It is a tale that begins with a very poor Greek family living in Istanbul — Nicolaides uses the old name for the Turkish capital, Constantinople, where once, he said, there was a community of more than 100,000 Greeks, which has dwindled to just 2,000 today. 

His parents were English teachers and had no fixed incomes. “Sometimes,” he said, “they would be paid in kind with a chicken or some bread.”

From this poverty, their son, Byron, became one of the richest men in Greece or Turkey. The company he created in 2000 is a global leader in professional and language skills certification. In 2021, it became the first Greek unicorn, reaching a capital value of more than $1 billion.

Note that his parents were English teachers — and this is important.

As I talked to Nicolaides, he was enthusiastic about the universality of English and how it has been a unifying force in the world. No worry about how English may crush marginal but traditional languages.

Nicolaides is passionate about English. Without it, he wouldn’t be the success he is today. He sees it as a great binding force, an excellent way for peoples and nations to talk to one another and to avoid friction. He wants everyone to know English.

He asked me, “What is the second-biggest language in the world?” I look at the ceiling and start thinking about two countries with large populations, India and China. I say uncertainly, “Hindi.”

With boyish happiness, Nicolaides, a young 65 of athletic build and a full head of hair, says, “Bad English.”

His enthusiasm for the English language becomes a man whose company tests English proficiency worldwide — and he lists Fortune 500 companies (including Goldman Sachs and Citibank), NASA, the FBI, the CIA, universities and other institutions.

As Nicolaides unspools his life story, one is captivated by how a poor boy of Greek heritage made his way to Bosphorus University, where he earned a degree in business administration, and then to the University of La Verne in Southern California, where he earned a master’s.

Whereas Nicolaides’ upbringing and education in Turkey might seem to be a challenge — Turkey and Greece are seldom on the best of terms — it has been a great advantage to him.

His break was in 1986, when he went to work for Merrill Lynch in Greece, becoming its highest earner. The company sought someone to open the Turkish market, offering a $5,000 to $10,000 signing bonus. Nicolaides took the bonus, and the job made him a millionaire by age 31.

At that point, he told me he had more money than he knew what to do with it, so he did the thing all Greeks with money do: “I went into shipping.”

Nicolaides spent a year in the shipping industry and hated it. He said the only thing all the other shipping millionaires could talk about was “money, money, money.” Although he has much, much more money today, he feels he is helping humanity with the educational purpose of PeopleCert.

If he lucked out beyond expectations with Merrill Lynch, he also lucked out with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, albeit indirectly.

During the Falklands War, Nicolaides said, the Iron Lady was appalled at the lack of interoperability between the British forces. She demanded the introduction of the kind of best practices and certification which later became a pillar of PeopleCert.

Thatcher’s requirement was developed by a British company in which Nicolaides had an investment. Later, he bought that company, and PeopleCert became unstoppable: It has certified 7 million people worldwide and is growing at 36 percent a year.

Reflecting on this odyssey by a golden Greek, I realize that native English speakers start with a huge advantage in that the world is open in a way that it isn’t to those who don’t speak English.

When I first visited Athens in the 1960s, getting around depended on finding an English speaker. They were few and far between. Today, everyone seems to speak English, and well.

Cooperative Utility Lighting Way to a Carbon-Free Future

Electric power lines and pylons against a blue sky with clouds.

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A Western rural electric cooperative is shining a light on the utility industry’s future and how it will tackle climate change.

Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, in Westminster, Colo., a wholesale power supplier to 42 member co-ops in four states, has filed a visionary Electric Resource Plan as required by Colorado law. It is a document that lifts the veil on the future for Tri-State and where the entire utility industry is going.

According to the plan, Tri-State will add two advances to its system:

—It will deploy 100-hour iron-air batteries to smooth the variability of wind and solar.

—It will build natural gas capacity, adding carbon capture and storage within three years of construction in 2028.

These two actions will bring to earth dreams and schemes pursued by the electricity industry for two decades. It is the dawning of a new environmentally driven age in electricity.

Iron-air technology recasts solar and wind generation, adding resilience and balancing their intermittency. Lithium-ion batteries used by utilities are limited in their drawdown time to two to four hours. It is hoped iron-air will go a long way toward stabilizing utility systems. Predictions are that it will be cheaper.

In the same way, carbon capture and storage has been a long-term goal. If it can be demonstrated to be mature enough to be added to a utility system, the nation’s abundant natural gas — favored by utilities — can remain part of the fuel mix.

Under the plan, Tri-State envisions closing coal facilities and switching to more renewables, including its continued advancement of solar, with plans for installing 240 megawatts of new solar, for a total of 920 megawatts of solar by 2031, and buying more wind power.

Tri-State says it is committed to emissions reductions, with modest, new natural gas resources to support reliability.

Some environmentalists oppose natural gas — to its production, transportation, domestic use and export. Without it, coal will be burned in the United States and abroad.

The anti-natural gas forces represent a challenge for the Biden administration as they would like to get the nation out of the gas business altogether.

Just before Christmas, Sunrise Movement invited me to join them in urging President Biden to veto a big Louisiana liquified natural gas (LNG) export project. The project, called CP2, would make the United States an even more fearsome player in the world LNG market. It would allow the nation to offset Russian gas dominance in many countries. It would also counter the power of gas exporters like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, increasing their gas exploration. 

At some point, gas will flow from fields off Israel and Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean.

It also may help countries switch from burning coal to natural gas, a far cleaner fuel.

Yet Sunrise, an association of young people promoting the Green New Deal, said,“It would poison communities and be a disaster for the climate: experts say that it is the equivalent of building 52 new coal-fired power plants.”

We have seen this kind of one-factor analysis from pressure-group environmentalists before.

Take the environmental communities’ universal and pathological opposition to nuclear power. It began in the late 1960s and accelerated until global warming began, slowly, to change minds.

Sixties environmentalists, who had a determination to destroy the nuclear fuel option, favored coal. Now that coal has been identified as a climate change culprit, the alternatives are wind and solar.

Natural gas — which, according to the Energy Information Administration, emits slightly less than half the pollutants of coal for a kilowatt-hour of electricity production — is in the environmentalists’ sights.

Unfortunately, the rigidity of their approach doesn’t allow for the huge changes that are taking place in the electric utility industry, as seen at Tri-State with its commitment to renewables, emissions reductions and a resilient system.

The Political Class Is Hiding Behind Two Old Men

Side by side portraits of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

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Even political junkies are feeling short of adrenaline. Two old men are stumbling toward November, spewing gaffes, garbled messages and misinformation as the political class cowers behind banners they don’t have the courage not to carry.

If you aren’t committed to Joe Biden or Donald Trump in a very fundamental way, it is a kind of torture — like being trapped in the bleachers during a long tennis match. The ball goes back and forth over the net, your head turns right, your head turns left. You watch CNN, turn to Fox, turn to MSNBC, turn back to CNN. You read The Washington Post, try The New York Times, then pick up The Wall Street Journal.

Over all hangs the terrible knowledge that this will end in a player winning who many think is unfit.

These two codgers are batting old ideas back and forth across the news. We know them too well. There is no magic here; nothing good is expected of either victory. Less bad is the goal, a hollow victory at best.

This is a replay. We can’t take comfort in the idea that the office will make the man. Rather, we feel this time, in either case, the office will unmake the man.

Both are too old to be expected to deliver in the toughest job in the world. Much of the attention about age has focused on Biden, but Trump is only three years his junior and doesn’t appear to be in good health, and he delivers incomprehensible messages on social media and in public speeches.

We know what we would get from a Biden administration: more of the same but more liberal. His administration will lean toward the issues he has fought for — climate, abortion, equality, continuity.

From Trump, we know what we would get: upheaval, international dealignment, authoritarian inclinations at home, and a new era of chaotic America First. The courts will get more conservative judges, and political enemies will be punished. Trump has made it clear that vengeance is on his to-do list.

One candidate or the other, we are facing agendas that say “back to the future.”

But that isn’t the world that is unfolding. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late, great Democratic senator from New York, said “the world is a dangerous place.”

Doubly so now, when engulfing war is a possibility, when there is an acute housing crisis at home, and when the next presidency will have to deal with the huge changes that will be brought about by artificial intelligence. These will be across the board, from education to defense, from automobiles to medicine, from the electric power supply to the upending of the arts.

How have we come to such a pass when two old men dodder to the finish line? The fact is few expect Biden to finish out his term in good physical health, and few expect Trump to finish his term in good mental health.

How did we get here? How has it happened that democracy has come to a point where it seems inadequate to the times?

The short answer is the primary system, or too much democracy at the wrong level.

The primary system isn’t working. It is throwing up the extreme and the incompetent; it is a way of supporting a label, not a candidate. If a candidate faces a primary, the issue will be narrowed to a single accusation bestowed by the opposition.

What makes for a strong democracy is representative government — deliberation, compromise, knowledge and national purpose.

The U.S. House of Representatives is an example of the evil the primary system has wrought. Or, to be exact, the fear that the primary system has engendered in members.

The specter of former Rep. Liz Cheney, a conservative with lineage who had the temerity to buck the House leadership, was cast out and then got “primaried” out of office altogether, haunts Congress.

No wonder the political class shelters behind the leaders of yesterday, men unprepared for tomorrow, as a new and very different era unfolds.

There is a sense in the nation that things will have to get worse before they get better. A troubled future awaits.

AI Will Boost Productivity, Even Make Movies With the Dead

Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson in "Casablanca."

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Advanced countries can expect a huge boost in productivity from artificial intelligence. In my view, it will set the stage for a new period of prosperity in the developed world — especially in the United States.

Medicine will take off as never before. Life expectancy will rise by a third.

The obverse may be that jobs will be severely affected by AI, especially in the service industries, ushering in a time of huge labor adjustment.

The danger is that we will take it as the next step in automation. It won’t. Automation increased productivity. But, creating new goods dictates new labor needs.

So far, it appears that with AI, more goods will be made by fewer people, telephones answered by ghosts and orders taken by unseen digits.

Another serious downside will be the effect on truth, knowledge and information; on what we know and what we think we know.

In the early years of the wide availability of artificial intelligence, truth will be struggling against a sea of disinformation, propaganda and lies — lies buttressed with believable fake evidence.

As Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the  University of California, Berkeley, told me when I interviewed him on the television program “White House Chronicle,” the danger is with “language in, language out.”

That succinctly sums up the threat to our well-being and stability posed by the ability to use AI to create information chaos.

At present, two ugly wars are raging and, as is the way with wars, both sides are claiming huge excesses from the other. No doubt there is truth to both claims.

But what happens when you add the ability of AI to produce fake evidence, say, huge piles of bodies that never existed? Or of children under torture?

AI, I am assured, can produce a believable image of Winston Churchill secretly meeting with Hitler, laughing together.

Establishing veracity is the central purpose of criminal justice. But with AI, a concocted video of a suspect committing a crime can be created or a home movie of a suspect far away on a beach when, in fact, the perpetrator was elsewhere, choking a victim to death.

Divorce is going to be a big arena for AI dishonesty. It is quite easy to make a film of a spouse in an adulterous situation when that never happened.

Intellectual property is about to find itself under the wheels of the AI bus. How do you trace its filching? Where do you seek redress?

Is there any safe place for creative people? How about a highly readable novel with Stephen King’s characters and a new plot? Where would King find justice? How would the reader know he or she was reading a counterfeit work?

Within a few months or years or right now, a new movie could be made featuring Marilyn Monroe and, say, George Clooney.

Taylor Swift is the hottest ticket of the time, maybe all time, but AI crooks could use her innumerable public images and voice to issue a new video or album in which she took no part and doesn’t know exists.

Here is the question: If you think it is an AI-created work, should you enjoy it? I am fond of the Judy Garland recording of “The Man That Got Away.” What if I find on the internet what purports to be Taylor Swift singing it? I know it is a forgery by AI, but I love that rendering. Should I enjoy it, and if I do, will I be party to a crime? Will I be an enabler of criminal conduct?

AI will facilitate plagiarism on an industrial scale, pervasive and uncontrollable. You might, in a few short years, be enjoying a new movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. The AI technology is there to make such a movie and it might be as enjoyable as “Casablanca.” But it will be faked, deeply faked.

Already, truth in politics is fragile, if not broken. A plethora of commentators spews out half-truths and lies that distort the political debate and take in the gullible or just those who want to believe.

If you want to believe something, AI will oblige, whether it is about a candidate or a divinity. You can already dial up Jesus and speak to an AI-generated voice purporting to be him.

Overall, AI will be of incalculable benefit to humans. While it will stimulate dreaming as never before, it will also trigger nightmares.