Introduction
When we flip the switch, the lights come on without anyone thinking about it. This has only been true for the last hundred years in metropolitan areas, and for only approximately eighty years in rural areas with the enactment of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
In 1935, only 25 percent of rural homes in the United States had electricity, and there are people alive today who grew up without electricity. Today, few people are even aware of the monolithic system that generates, distributes, and controls the electricity that flows with seeming effortlessness across the United States. This system is referred to as the grid, which is actually three grids covering the entire lower forty-eight states.
Over the past one hundred years, there have been only two area-wide blackouts affecting over 30 million people caused by a failure of the transmission system. There have been other blackouts—mostly caused by storms—affecting smaller groups, perhaps as many as several million people. Overall, the grid has worked remarkably well. Reliability can still be improved upon, but this is primarily a question of placing transmission and distribution lines underground to minimize weather-induced outages.
Suddenly, we are faced with a threat to the grid we haven’t seen before. It is a threat that can dramatically increase blackouts and the suffering that accompanies them. Some in leadership positions have viewed climate change as an existential threat to mankind and have implemented actions to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity. Some have claimed that wind and solar and other renew- ables can replace all the coal-fired, natural gas, and nuclear power plants in the United States. It can be argued that the actions these people are taking are making electricity more costly and less reliable, and placing Americans at risk for little or no reason. They are willing to gamble the safety and lives of Americans, as well as the American economy, on an ideology.
Our nation has suffered through a medical war fighting COVID-19 in which thousands died. As my neighbor said,
“The inability of our country to anticipate the corona- virus pandemic and put in place adequate reserves of all of the things we needed—PPE, ventilators, masks, tests, hospital beds, etc.—speaks loudly and directly to the need for reliable on-demand electricity and the need to plan for it right now.”
Imagine if Americans had to suffer through rolling blackouts while quarantined at home during a future pandemic. How would newly erected emergency hospitals operate without electricity, let alone our existing hospitals without diesel fuel or natural gas to power emergency generators?
This was brought home by an oped in the Washington Post. Quoting from the op-ed:
Residential use is up as workers and school children stay home.
[Demand is down] in locked up restaurants, offices and factories.
Hospitals are a different story: They consume twice as much per square foot as hotels . . . lead schools and office buildings by an even greater margin. And their work couldn’t be more vital as they confront the novel coronavirus.
A grid operator, sequestered in his dispatch center in East Greenbush, New York, said it all, “Keeping the lights on. . . . It’s so critical.”3
There is little doubt there will be another pandemic. The only question is when. We must do what is needed to guarantee adequate and reliable supplies of electricity in preparation for the next pandemic.
President Trump recognized the vital importance of the grid when he issued an executive order on May 1, 2020, to protect the grid from foreign adversaries. He said the grid, “provides the electricity that sup- ports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastruc- ture, economy, and way of life.”
There is also an ideology that threatens the grid. This book will examine how federal regulators, state governments, utility companies, and the operators of the grid themselves are imposing their beliefs about climate change on all Americans and placing the grid in great jeopardy. Unelected bureaucrats and self-imposed intelligentsia are making decisions that place all Americans in danger.
Looming Energy Crisis will show you why we must continue to use fossil fuels and why we must protect the grid from the actions of those who are imposing their personal beliefs on the rest of us. Our objective should be low-cost reliable electricity available for everyone.
Reliability is a national security issue.
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Great report. Thank you for summarizing the facts and separating it from fiction.
Thanks for taking the time to read the report.
If possible, please forward to others.
H2 will not only make some metals brittle, it also diffuses easily through some metals, especially some alloys commonly used — e.g., walls of pipes. It is difficult to reliably contain H2.
Thanks for your comments.
I wasn’t sure which alloys would be permeable to hydrogen, so I didn’t list them. The fact that so much of the natural gas distribution system uses plastics, shows how vulnerable the system is to leakage of hydrogen.
Donn,
It depends on the temperature and I believe the pressure.
The petroleum industry has H2 attack curves for various materials and temperatures. I am pretty sure those curves are in the public domain and they are comprehensive including a number of materials
This has been around for years and widely used because many Petroleum applications using H2 at temperatures up to around 900 F.
Technology may have changer but our fixed bed ,Desulfurization reactors were normally 1-1/4 Cr or 2-1/4 Cr clad internally with
SS weld overlay.
In my career I spent a lot of time designing and troubleshooting mechanical piping etc on the Steam Reformer type units. The furnace outlet then ran about 1600 F and the outlet headers were refractory ID lined pipe with Incoloy 800 H at the transitions.
Given all the challenges I saw with handling H2, and the cost, I have difficulty believing H2 has a big future.
Your article on the subject is comprehensive and an excellent summary.
The document is
API RP 941, Steels for Hydrogen Service at Elevated Temperatures and Pressures in Petroleum Refineries and Petrochemical Plants, Eighth Edition, is a recommended practice developed and published by the American Petroleum Institute (API).
They are called Nelson curves and it covers welds and PWHT
Thanks for your comments. Thanks also for the references in your second comment. I agree that H2 should not have a future in our energy strategy, but people with a climate agenda are pushing the idea no matter how absurd. I’m not intimately familiar with the data you are referencing, but I am familiar with the basic relationships of temperature & pressure and the type of material used. Knowledge of metallurgy was, of course, essential for manufacturing and repairing turbines and nuclear power plants. Hydrogen embrittlement was well known.
Great report. Like the Hindenburg, it won’t work in pipelines either. More importantly, the war on CO2 is not about climate change or CO2. Ottmar Edenhofer (Director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, and former IPCC official), said in 2010: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
Thanks. Hydrogen is dangerous if it is transported in existing natural gas pipelines. The report provides the facts in this regard.
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Thanks. It’s my hope the report provides an honest picture of the futility of hydrogen.