One of the things that I enjoy about my particular career choice is a lot of travel and working with my hands and mind. I have transitioned away from a majority of air travel due to the reduced reliability that you will arrive at your destination on time, and the flexibility of heading on to the next adventure early or late depending on what is required. Of course, the fun of tackling each problem to a successful conclusion is reliant on that flexibility – and you get to meet quite a few similar tradespeople, consultants and so many others when you are in a hotel lobby or restaurant. Besides, I get to physically see the systems that I analyze and write about.
Recently on one of my trips to West Texas wind sites I made my usual half-way stop at a hotel in Joplin, Missouri. Before heading out early the next morning, I started chatting with an older gentleman over breakfast. I asked what he did for a living and it turns out he was a traveling lineman for a utility construction company working on bulk grid distribution (the very high voltage stuff). The conversation quickly hit upon two key points, workforce and the distribution system. To put the discussion into context: although Bill was in his early 60s, he is a team leader (the title was different, but would identify his company, as is the name I used for ‘Bill’) for a team that is working on transmission systems in Kansas. As the jobsite was in the middle of nowhere, he dropped down to Joplin for his day off. At 6am in the lobby for breakfast, he had slept in compared to a day on the jobsite.
I noted that most industries were having problems hiring a new and younger workforce. He agreed saying that they had limited people applying for line work, including local maintainers following construction, and even more challenges keeping new employees on the job. With the country calling for electrification of everything, they cannot find the workers to do the work necessary to rebuild old lines let alone any new construction of new lines such as for the future national grid project. He also noted that for all the people talking about what needed to be done, most of them do not want to do the work, and are scared off when they discover the weather and living conditions. As a result, the teams he works with tend to be a majority of linemen who are closing in on, or past, retirement age with only a few younger workers.
We discussed our families a little. He noted that his son thinks he is battling the problems of the world such as climate change through software development. I noted the energy consumption by software in datacenters which people perceive are somewhere in space due to the name ‘cloud.’ Bill laughed and noted that was the same observation he had. He said: ”Everyone is discussing the need for electric cars, yet we cannot get the power to where its needed from where it’s generated. Every priority project that [company] and our competitors are working on are repairs and upgrades. Very few new lines are going in and the old ones are not sized for the amount and quality of power they are carrying already. I don’t know what they are thinking.” While there are delays in materials due to logistics and transportation, the primary area they are lacking in is the workforce necessary to install new systems, let alone repair the old. This assumes they can get through the red tape to put up towers and lines in new areas.
The conversation then swung towards an interesting topic as I noted that bulk power and local grids do not appear to have been improved since the 1910s. He agreed and noted that many of the towers they are stringing lines on in Kansas still have ‘Carnegie Steel’ nameplates and stamps. I checked my phone and noted that Carnegie was bought by JP Morgan in 1901 creating US Steel. The Carnegie name continued in a subsidiary until 1936. In either case, Bill noted that many of the towers where they replace lines are in poor shape, having a direct impact on the reliability (Bill used different terms) of the lines they were installing.
I noted that the National Grid Project (US Department of Energy) was finally underway with the passing of the infrastructure bill. However, they weren’t expecting to have any true findings within the next decade. He found that interesting as he noted that the sections of the grid that he has been working on are literally falling apart, with worse conditions in and around major cities where the power is needed most. We did discuss some of the concerns about ERCOT (Texas power grid) and a recent challenge by FEMA that had the possible impact of ending wind and solar (to be discussed in a later post) through the International Building Code.
From Bill’s perspective, not only were there issues with bulk power not being available, due to problems transporting natural gas and the lack of winterization, the transmission lines to move power from plants that were still operational, including remote windpower locations, were heavily overloaded. The response was to reduce the loads on the lines by performing rolling blackouts as the interconnections between ERCOT and surrounding power supplies were quickly overloaded, as well. Overloads cause lines to sag and the resulting damage and limited workforce for repair and replacement for the damaged and rapidly aged lines were most likely a consideration. He noted, in the end, that the complaints about wind and solar having an impact (they actually produced more than planned during the outages) distracted everyone away from the fact that one of the more serious issues was transportation of power, not power generation. They simply couldn’t get the power where it was needed when generation plants went down due to a lack of weatherization.
This quickly took us back to August of 2003 when the Northeast blackout that hit most of the Northeast United States and Eastern Canada had resulted from an overloaded 500kV transmission line that came into contact with improperly maintained trees. The subsequent issues due to NIMBY (Not-In-My-Back-Yard) resulted in transmission projects being mothballed as people quickly forgot the pain caused by the outage and environmental groups fought additional lines for any number of theoretical reasons. The result is a grid in the Northeast which is ripe for a repeat of the same conditions.
On that pleasant note, I headed out for the remaining 7 hours of travel to the windpower site in Texas.
TAKEAWAYS: The discussion by someone with boots on the ground reinforced a few things that I have written about in the past and of some concern in the engineering and Federal organizations where I volunteer. While automation and playing with software and data is considered ‘cool,’ far too many people think that they are somehow solving problems with everything from climate change to infrastructure by playing with data. Automation is not always the answer and writing on social media about such environmental concerns are not solutions to the problem. The true heroes of the new age of electrification that was proposed and promoted by Nikola Tesla in the late 1800s and early 1900s, right up to his death on January 7, 1943, are those folks who are doing the work to bring about the ability to generate, transport, and provide power. However, the work is challenging and does not bring on the dopamine shot of playing on a computer or laptop with data. While the use of software and data can provide a tool and social media provides an echo chamber for thoughts, the ability to put together the infrastructure to meet society’s goals for an improved environment still requires boots on the ground working with materials that are often demonized due to a simple naivete that somehow others are going to do the work and that we have a decade to wait.
