Outstanding overview of electric grid realities by T Nemeth
Tom KirkmanIndependent Project Manager
Outstanding overview of electric grid *realities* by T Nemeth
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“… For most of the twentieth century, America’s electric grid operated on straightforward engineering principles.
Utilities were vertically integrated, regulated monopolies with a clear mandate:
deliver reliable power at reasonable cost.
They built excess capacity, maintained spinning reserves, and kept dispatchable plants
– coal, hydro, nuclear, and later natural gas –
ready to ramp when demand spiked.
The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) showed what deliberate public investment could achieve when the goal was abundance rather than austerity.
… *The grid served people* ; it did not demand that people serve the grid by constantly adjusting their behaviour or persuading citizens to accept blackouts as the price of (climate) virtue.
That model delivered extraordinary reliability because it respected physics.
Supply had to match demand in real time.
Planners overbuilt for peaks and treated reliability as a non-negotiable engineering requirement, not a political bargaining chip.
● Today’s trajectory inverts those priorities.
Aggressive net-zero timelines in states like New York accelerate the retirement of firm, dispatchable generation while mandating rapid additions of unreliable wind, solar, and battery storage whose output cannot be scheduled.
At the same time, policies drive electrification of transportation and heating.
The result is a system asked to absorb enormous new loads precisely when the most reliable resources are being removed.
… The historical lesson is clear.
● Grids that prioritized engineering reliability and treated electricity as a foundation for human flourishing delivered broad prosperity.
● Grids subordinated to rigid emissions timelines and market designs that undervalue firmness deliver higher costs, periodic shortages, and a quiet transfer of burden from producers to consumers. … “