White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Father’s Day Challenge — Neckties Are Out

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I admire Ben Mankiewicz, the host of Turner Classic Movies. He is the man we all think we are in our dreams: handsome, urbane, authoritative, and oh-so-charming — a member of one of the great families of film, an aristocrat of that realm.

I would like to look like Ben; his job is appealing, too.

But wait, Ben has suffered a savage downfall. He isn’t the man he used to be to me. I nearly fell off the couch when I saw Ben, an inspiration to men, introducing a movie without his necktie.

Yes, Ben was open-collared in a suit, looking a little like an unmade bed, which is what most men look like when pursuing the current fashion of no necktie.

Shock Horror! Another bastion of masculinity has fallen.

The problem — and I aver this to be an unassailable truth — is men wearing dress shirts without ties look less than their best. If they have a bit of age on them, a lot less than their best.

The dress shirt, which hasn’t been replaced, is designed for a necktie, long or in a bow. Without the tie, men look diminished, incomplete, as though they had to leave the house without time to finish dressing.

Let me state that the necktie is indeed a useless piece of clothing, like other dress items of the past: spats, watch chains and detached collars. The passing of none of these do I regret — but ties? Cry, the lost masculine adornment of yesteryear.

The necktie was something a man could glory in. Tying a long tie and throwing the long end over the short end always gave me the same feeling as mounting my horse; when my right leg cleared the saddle, I knew something good was going to happen. A great day in the Virginia countryside, usually.

Ties were something to treasure; fine silk, splendid patterns, elegance written with restraint. Just long enough, just obvious enough, conveying refinement and masculine savoir-faire. Now, men are running around open-necked in shirts that weren’t designed to be worn that way.

Have a care for the great names in ties. Those who saved us on Father’s Day, Christmas and birthdays are losing money or gone to other pursuits. 

Have a care for Hermes, Liberty, Tyrwhitt, Brioni, Fumagalli, Brooks Brothers and all those who created lovely things for the neck out of silk, finely woven wool or linen.

Just the sight of the box lit up the male face, ensuring the giver some future preferment or an extra helping at the table. The power of the tie was formidable — as Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet, might have said, it could transmute life’s leaden metal into gold.

At least it kept Dad smiling through some de rigueur family events. Ever noticed how he slipped off to the bathroom not to engage the porcelain but to admire himself in the mirror with the new gift around his neck?

Not so long ago, great restaurants had spare ties for guests who showed up without them. Now that is over.

The last holdout I know of is the Metropolitan Club in Washington. I have been to two events there recently, and the hosts thought it wise to advise their guests on dress etiquette: ties and no white-soled shoes. But no cravats or ascots as well. Strange.

I hope the cravat or its cousin, the ascot, will come back vigorously. It will save those master craftspeople who dyed silk, wove wool and shaped their handiwork over canvas to adorn men’s necks of no practical value but so dressy, so uplifting, so defining.

Give a cravat, and tell the man in your life or your father, “You look like David Niven.”

Come to think of it, I bet Ben Mankiewicz looks stupendous wearing a cravat.

Three Environmental Organizations That Are Out-of-Step

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Greedy men and women are conspiring to wreck the environment just to enrich themselves.

That has been an unshakable left-wing belief for a long time. It has gained new vigor since The Washington Post revealed that former President Donald Trump has been trawling Big Oil for big money.

At a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is reported to have promised oil industry executives a free hand to drill willy-nilly across the country and up and down the coasts and to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental policies. All this for $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign, according to The Post article.

Trump may believe that there is a vast constituency of energy company executives yearning to push pollution up the smokestack, disturb the permafrost, and drain the wetlands. But he has gotten it wrong.

Someone should tell Trump that times have changed and very few American energy executives believe — as he has said he does — that global warming is a hoax.

Trump has set himself not only against a plethora of laws but also against an ethic, an American ethic: the environmental ethic.

This ethic slowly entered the consciousness of the nation after the seminal publication of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson in 1962.

Over time, concern for the environment has become an 11th Commandment. The cornerstone of a vast edifice of environmental law and regulation was the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. It was promoted and signed by President Richard Nixon, hardly a wild-eyed lefty.

Some 30 years ago, Barry Worthington, the late executive director of the United States Energy Association, told me the important thing to know about the energy versus environment debate was that a new generation of executives in oil companies and electric utilities were environmentalists, that the world had changed and the old arguments were losing their advocates.

“Not only are they very concerned about the environment, but they also have children who are very concerned,” Worthington told me.

Quite so then, more so now. The aberrant weather alone keeps the environment front and center.

This doesn’t mean that old-fashioned profit-lust has been replaced in corporate accommodation with the Green New Deal or that the milk of human kindness is seeping from C-suites. But it does mean that the environment is an important part of corporate thinking and planning today. There is pressure both outside and within companies for that.

The days when oil companies played hardball by lavishing money on climate deniers on Capitol Hill and utilities employed consultants to find data that proved coal use didn’t affect the environment are over. I was witness to the energy versus climate and environment struggle going back half a century. Things are absolutely different now.

Trump has promised to slash regulation, but industry doesn’t necessarily favor wholesale repeal of many laws. Often, the very shape of the industries Trump would seek to help has been determined by those regulations. For example, because of the fracking boom, the gas industry could reverse the flow of liquified natural gas at terminals, making us a net exporter, not an importer.

The United States is now, with or without regulation, the world’s largest oil producer. The electricity industry is well along in moving to renewables and making inroads on new storage technologies like advanced batteries. Electric utilities don’t want to be lured back to coal. Carbon capture and storage draws nearer.

Similarly, automakers are gearing up to produce more electric vehicles. They don’t want to exhume past business models. Laws and taxes favoring EVs are now assets to Detroit, building blocks to a new future.

As the climate crisis has evolved, so have corporate attitudes. Yet there are those who either don’t or don’t want to believe that there has been a change of heart in energy industries. But there has.

Three organizations stand out as pushing old arguments, shibboleths from when coal was king and oil was emperor.

These groups are:

The Sunrise Movement, a dedicated organization of young people that believes the old myths about big, bad oil and that American production is evil, drilling should stop, and the industry should be shut down. It fully embraces the Green New Deal — an impractical environmental agenda — and calls for a social utopia.

The 350 Organization is similar to the Sunrise Movement and has made much of what it sees as the Biden administration’s environmental failures—particularly, it feels the administration has been soft on natural gas.

Finally, there is a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s: an anti-nuclear organization called Beyond Nuclear. It opposes everything to do with nuclear power even in the midst of the environmental crisis, highlighted by Sunrise Movement and the 350 Organization.

Beyond Nuclear is at war with Holtec International for its work in interim waste storage and in bringing the Palisades plant along Lake Michigan back to life. Its arguments are those of another time, hysterical and alarmist. The group doesn’t get that most old-time environmentalists are endorsing nuclear power.

As Barry Worthington told me: “We all wake up under the same sky.”

A Commencement Address — Get Used to Rejections, We All Get Them Sometimes

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As so many commencement addresses haven’t been delivered this year, I thought I would share what I would have said to graduates if I had been invited by a college or university to be a speaker.

“The first thing to know is that you are graduating at a propitious time in human history — for example, think of how artificial intelligence is enabling medical breakthroughs.

“A vast world of possibilities awaits you because you are lucky enough to be living in a liberal democracy. It happens to be America, but the same could be true of any of the democratic countries.

“Look at the world, and you will see that the countries with democracy are also prosperous places where individuals can follow their passion. Doubly or triply so in America.

“Despite all the disputes, unfairness and politics, the United States is foremost among places to live and work — where the future is especially tempting. I say this having lived and worked on three continents and traveled to more than 180 countries. Just think of the tens of millions who would live here if they could.

“In a society that is politically and commercially free, as it is in the United States, the limits we encounter are the limits we place on ourselves.

“That is what I want to tell you: Don’t fence yourself in.

“But do work always to keep that freedom, your freedom, especially now.

“Seldom mentioned, but the greatest perverters of careers, stunters of ambition and all-around enfeeblers you will contend with aren’t the government, a foreign power, shortages or market conditions, but how you manage rejection.

“Fear of rejection is, I believe, the great inhibitor. It shapes lives, hinders careers and is ever-present, from young love to scientific creation.

“The creative is always vulnerable to the forces of no, to rejection.

“No matter what you do, at some point you will face rejection — in love, in business, in work or in your own family.

“But if you want to break out of the pack and leave a mark, you must face rejection over and over again.

“Those in the fine and performing arts and writers know rejection; it is an expected but nonetheless painful part of the tradition of their craft. If you plan to be an artist of some sort or a writer, prepare to face the dragon of rejection and fight it all the days of your career.

“All other creative people face rejection. Architects, engineers and scientists face it frequently. Many great entrepreneurial ideas have faced early rejection and near defeat.

“If you want to do something better, differently or disruptively, you will face rejection.

“To deal with this world where so many are ready to say no, you must know who you are. Remember that: Know who you are.

“But you can’t know who you are until you have found out who you are.

“Your view of yourself may change over time, but I adjure you always to judge yourself by your bests, your zeniths. That is who you are. Make past success your default setting in assessing your worth when you go forth to slay the dragons of rejection.

“There are two classes of people you will encounter again and again in your lives. The yes people and the no people.

“Seek out and cherish those who say yes. Anyone can say no. The people who have changed the world, who have made it a better place, are the people who have said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Let’s try.’

“Those are people you need in life, and that is what you should aim to be: a yes person. Think of it historically: Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Steve Jobs were all yes people, undaunted by frequent rejection.

“Try to be open to ideas, to different voices and to contrarian voices. That way, you will not only prosper in what you seek to do, but you will also become someone who, in turn, will help others succeed.

“You enter a world of great opportunities in the arts, sciences and technology but with attendant challenges. The obvious ones are climate, injustice, war and peace.

“Think of yourselves as engineers, working around those who reject you, building for others, and having a lot of fun doing it.

“Avoid being a no person. No is neither a building block for you nor for those who may look to you. Good luck!”

The Trials of Celebrity Love, from Taylor-Burton to Swift-Kelce

Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift wearing Kansas City Chiefs red tee shirt, rooting for Travis Kelce, the football team's tight end and her boyfriend.

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I wouldn’t know Taylor Swift if she sat beside me on an airplane, which is unlikely because she travels by private jet. If she were to take a commercial flight, she wouldn’t be sitting in the economy seats, which the airlines politely call coach.

Swift needs to go by private jet these days: She is dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, which is a problem. Love needs candle lighting, not floodlighting.

Being in love when you are famous is tough, especially if both lovers are famous. The normal, simple joys of that happy state are a problem: There is no privacy and precious few places outside of gated homes where the lovers can be themselves.

They can’t do any of the things unfamous lovers take for granted, like catching a movie, holding hands or stealing a kiss in public without it being caught on video and transmitted on social media to billions of fans. Dinner for two in a cozy restaurant and what each orders is flashed around the world. “Oysters for you, sir?”

Worse, if the lovers are caught in public not doing any of those things and, say, staring into the middle distance, looking glum, the same social media will erupt with speculation about the end of the affair.

If you are a single celebrity, you are gossip-bait, catnip for the paparazzi. If a couple, the speculation is whether it will be wedding bells or splitsville.

The world at large is convinced that celebrity lovers are somehow in a different place from the rest of us. It isn’t true, of course, but there we are: We think their highs are higher and lows are lower.

That is doubtful, but it is why we yearn to hear about the ups and downs of their romances; Swift’s more than most because they are the raw material of her lyrics. Break up with Swift and wait for the album.

When I was a young reporter in London in the 1960s, I did my share of celebrity chasing. Mostly, I found the hunters were encouraged by their prey. But not when Cupid was afoot. Celebrity is narcotic except when the addiction is inconvenient because of a significant other.

In those days, the most famous woman in the world, and the most beautiful, was Elizabeth Taylor. I was employed by a London newspaper to follow her and her lover, Richard Burton, around London. They were engaged in what was then, and maybe still is, the most famous love affair in the world.

The great beauty and the great Shakespearian actor were the stuff of legends. It also was a scandal because when they met in Rome, on the set of “Cleopatra,” they were both married to other people. She to the singer Eddie Fisher, and he to his first wife, the Welsh actress and theater director Sybil Williams.

Social rules were tighter then, and scandal had a real impact. This scandal, like most scandals of a sexual nature, raised consternation along with prurient curiosity.

My role at The Daily Sketch was to stake out the lovers where they were staying at the luxury Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane.

I never saw Taylor and Burton. Day after day, I would be sidetracked by the hotel’s public relations officer with champagne and tidbits of gossip while they escaped by a back entrance.

Then, one Sunday in East Dulwich, a leafy part of South London where I lived with my first wife, Doreen, one of the great London newspaper writers, I happened upon them.

Every Sunday, we had lunch at a local pub that served traditional English roast beef or lamb. It was a good pub — which today might be called a gastropub, but back then, it was just a pub with a dining room. An enticing place.

One Sunday, we went as usual to the pub and were seated right next to my targets: the most famous lovers in the world, Taylor and Burton. The elusive lovers, the scandalous stars were there next to me: a gift to a celebrity reporter.

I had never seen before, nor in the many years since, two people so in love, so aglow, so entranced with each other, so oblivious to the rest of the room. No movie they were to star in ever captured love as palpable as the aura that enwrapped Taylor and Burton. You could warm your hands on it. Doreen whispered from behind her hand, “Are you going to call the office?”

I looked at the lovers and shook my head. They were so happy, so beautiful, so in love I didn’t have the heart to break the spell.

I wasn’t sorry I didn’t call in a story then, and I haven’t changed my mind.

Love in a gilded cage is tough. If Swift and Kelce are at the next table — unlikely — in a restaurant, I will keep mum. Love conquers all.

National Labs — the Powerful Muscle in America’s Arm

Map of the U.S. with the locations of all the DOE National Laboratories

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On May 1, the stars came out to play. The stars I’m referring to are the directors of five of the Department of Energy’s 17 national laboratories, who shone at a virtual press briefing presented by the U.S. Energy Association.

The virtual press briefing (full disclosure: I was the organizer) was, in a sense, historic. While they work closely together, the directors of the national laboratories don’t usually appear together, as there is typically no forum for them to do so.

“The labs,” as they are known collectively, are unique: a powerful muscle in America’s arm, little known outside their communities, and whose work is generally not well-publicized or understood.

I have been starstruck by the labs since I first encountered them in the 1970s, covering the energy crisis that erupted in the fall of 1973. Earlier that year, I had created The Energy Daily, so I was in the throes of writing about the crisis.

It is forgotten now, but the crisis was a tremendous threat to the nation and the world order. The energy shortage was as big a challenge as anything posed by the Soviet Union. It shook the country as nothing else had since the end of World War II. A shrinking economy was in prospect. In 1974 alone, 23 heads of state lost their jobs because of the economic chaos the crisis had unleashed.

The great weapons laboratories (controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission, a predecessor of the DOE), Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia sprung into action with a new mission: Solve the energy problem.

I visited all those labs frequently; for me, they were where science, engineering and poetry came together. Yes, poetry. Scientists can dream of a better world with some hope of bringing it about. The numerate dreamer has the edge over the purely literate dreamer.

The labs produced across the board. They were instrumental in the oil and gas fracking boom, making solar efficient and wind turbines competitive. They did pioneering work in geothermal and some technologies that weren’t ultimately needed, like coal gasification.

They were also instrumental in spheres as diverse as mapping the human genome and creating an artificial human protein.

Aside from their permanent role in nuclear weapons readiness and technological development, the labs, according to their leaders, are hard at facilitating the transition of electricity generation from fossil fuels to carbon-free fuels — the green future.

Here is a sampling of passions from the lab leaders at the May 1 briefing:

Martin Keller, director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was enthusiastic about the future and a new energy regime, which includes hydrogen, benefiting rural America in a “more resilient and dependable way.” He also warned that the labs face a continuing challenge in getting discoveries out of the labs and into the marketplace.

Kimberly Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is an enthusiast for fusion power. She believes it is within 25 years of commercialization. Her lab has had outstanding successes with inertial fusion.

Steven Ashby, director of the Pacific Northwest Laboratory, looks at using artificial intelligence to integrate the increasingly complex electric grid. He pointed out otherwise that his lab was “particularly well-known for our expertise in chemistry.”

Stephen Streiffer, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, spoke enthusiastically about small modular reactors and the future need for nuclear power. He said, “What is needed now is public-private partnerships to (financially) de-risk them.”

Claus Daniel, associate director for advanced energy technologies at the Argonne National Laboratory, said that to meaningfully impact the effects of carbon in the atmosphere, “we have to have life-cycle analysis.”

Another common theme was the importance of the labs’ work in electricity storage and finding substitutes for lithium, cobalt, copper and rare earths that come from troubled sources.

All of the directors emphasized the critical work the labs are doing in cybersecurity as a priority. Ruefully, PNNL’s Ashby said, “Hopefully, it won’t get a lot of press because we’ve succeeded.”

That might say much of what the labs do. When they succeed, it can be because they have found answers and exerted a silent hand.

New Iron Age of Electricity Storage Is at Hand

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Since electricity was first deployed, there has been a missing link: storage.

The lead-acid battery was first developed in 1859 and has been refined to the effective, utilitarian box we have in cars today. Gone are the days when you sometimes had to top up the car battery with sulfuric acid and, often, distilled water.

These batteries, these workhorses, never made it far beyond their essential role in automobiles. Although early car manufacturers thought the future of the automobile would belong to electricity, it was the internal combustion engine that took over.

While battery research continues unabated – especially after the energy crisis which unfolded after the fall of 1973 — it wasn’t until the lithium-ion battery arrived in the 1980s that batteries became a transformative technology. From cell phones to Teslas, they have upended the world of stored electricity.

Lithium-ion was the clear winner. It is light and suitable for transportation. It has also been the primary battery for utilities which have been installing them at breakneck speed. But they are costly, and lithium is at the end of a troubled supply chain.

Batteries are essential to realizing the full potential of electricity generated from wind and solar. They provide power when the sun has set or the wind isn’t blowing. They can capture surplus production in the middle of the day when states like California and Arizona already have overproduction of solar power and it becomes negative energy, wasted.

Enter iron-air batteries. That is right: Iron with an “r,” which is the basic material in steel and one of the most plentiful elements on Earth.

Iron-air batteries use rusting as their central technology. In an iron-air battery, iron, water and air are the components. The iron rusts to discharge power and the rusting is reversed to charge the battery.

Form Energy, headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, will be shipping these revolutionary batteries to utilities late this year or early next from their manufacturing plant at the site of the old steel mill on the Ohio River in Weirton, West Virginia. This means transportation infrastructure for heavy loads is already in place.

Form Energy got started with two battery experts talking: Mateo Jaramillo, the head of energy storage development at Tesla, and Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor at MIT who devoted his career to the study of batteries, primarily lithium. Indeed, he told me when I met with him in Somerville, that he fathered two successful battery companies using lithium.

But clearly, iron-air is Chiang’s passion now — a palpable passion. He is the chief scientific officer at Form Energy and remains Kyocera professor of ceramics at MIT.

Chiang, Jaramillo and three others founded Form Energy in 2017. Now it has contracts with five utilities to provide batteries and appears to be fulfilling the dearest wish of the utilities: a battery that can provide electricity over long periods of time, like 100 hours. Lithium-ion batteries draw down quickly — usually in two or four hours, before they must be recharged.

An iron-air battery is capable of slow discharge over days, not hours. Therefore, it can capture electricity when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing — which tends to drop in the afternoon just when utilities are beginning to experience their peak load, which is early evening.

Iron is very heavy so the use of iron-air technology would appear to be limited to utilities where weight isn’t a problem and where the need for long, long drawdown times are needed; for example, when the wind doesn’t blow for several days.

Jaramillo told me the company is well-set financially. It has raised $860 million and was given $290 million by the state of West Virginia,

The smart money has noticed: Early funders include Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Is a new Iron Age at hand?

The Dark Clouds on America’s Housing and Electricity Horizon

Storm clouds gather on Seattle street horizon.

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Not as dark as an eclipse, but two dark clouds, under-mentioned by politicians, are forming on America’s horizon. They are the housing crisis and the growing threat of electricity shortages.

The housing crisis hasn’t caught fire as the issue one would have expected it to be among politicians. Electricity shortages are awkward for President Biden because he has staked his reputation on electrifying the country with alternative energy.

Neither the housing crisis nor the electricity challenge has garnered high recognition in the presidential election. Biden has touched on the housing crisis, and former president Donald Trump has denigrated alternative energy. Both are complex issues and need urgent attention. And both defy simple, declarative political statements, which may be why they are lying there, untouched but with lethality.

Housing hurts in obvious ways, including homelessness, a reduction in the birthrate and a freeze on the mobility of labor, once one of the great economic strengths of the United States. Where there was work, workers went.

Less so during the current housing crunch: When Americans cannot find housing where the work is, they won’t move. The consequence: European-type labor immobility.

Another consequence is that if the free movement of workers and their families stops, it contributes to the splintering of America: The New South goes back to being the Old South, and the rigidity of elitism in the North hardens. The East Coast and the West Coast start to think differently: the East Coast looking to Europe and the West Coast looking to Asia. Those developments aren’t good for the body politic. Intra-nationalism is a challenge to a country of continental dimension.

For those lucky enough to have shelter, nothing delivered to it is more important than electricity. We can do without pizza delivery, mail delivery and telephone service, but we can’t survive without electricity.

If it is extremely hot for months, as it was last summer in some regions, people die. Around Phoenix, according to Arizona data, more than 500 people died of heat-related causes.

In Texas, during Ice Storm Uri in 2021, 246 people froze to death by official count. Try to imagine those people, including children, freezing to death in their homes in America!

The homeless die all the time from exposure.

A chorus of voices, led by the American Public Power Association and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, has been sounding the electricity alarm for several years. However, the crisis continues to form because there is no quick fix for electricity generation and transmission any more than for housing development.

Demand is rising because of a national movement to electrify everything, especially transportation, and the growth of data centers. Rudy Garza, president of CPS Energy, the municipally owned natural gas and electric utility in San Antonio, said eight data centers are planned there and “20 more waiting in the wings.”

Utilities don’t say no. They have a history of planning for demand, but the end of that may be in sight if the data center demand, fed by artificial intelligence, continues to grow. While national electricity growth is about 2 percent annually, it is 3 percent in high-growth areas like San Antonio and around Dallas.

David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric Cooperative, northeast of Dallas, said his area is experiencing explosive growth in demand of 3 percent or more yearly without yet accommodating data-center growth, although that is coming.

Technology will help solve the future of housing with better construction techniques. Also, while national standards would give new housing a boost, the core of the problem remains local ordinances and resistance in the suburbs and other “desirable” areas.

Some of the same not-where-we-live attitude frustrates utilities in moving renewable energy from the sunny and windy areas — mainly in the West — to where it is needed.

The not-where-we-live syndrome is stunting America’s future growth. In housing, the crunch is here. In electricity, it is coming.

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.