Meredith Angwin's Blog, page 2

Electricity is the Mother Network

A reliable electric grid

What kind of grid do we want? That can be a huge question. Nuclear energy: yes or no? Renewables: yes or no? In considering the grid we want, there are many areas for disagreement. In contrast, most people will agree that the lights should go on when you flick the switch. Reliability is important to everyone.  I am an older woman in snow country, and my furnace has electric controls. Clearly, reliability is important to me.

A reliable grid will be even more important in the future. If we stop using fossil fuels, electricity won’t just control our heating systems, electricity will be our heating system.  Almost all of us will use heat pumps. (The entire United States cannot heat itself by burning wood, though some fraction of the population can use wood products for home heating. Without fossil fuels, most of us will use some form of electric heating.)

My recent book is Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid. This book describes the causes of our grid’s increasing fragility: lack of planning, five-minute auctions, over-dependence on renewables and natural gas.  However, grid fragility also has consequences.  In my book, I don’t describe the consequences very much. It’s just one book, and it can’t cover everything. Reading Shorting, you will understand why our grid is becoming more fragile and how you can hope to change this in the future. In contrast, in this post, I want to follow the consequences of the fragile grid.

The fragile grid

Without being scary about it, Robert Bryce makes it very clear why we need a reliable grid, both in his book A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, and his movie Juice, How Electricity Explains the World. I recommend them both, very highly. He gives memorable illustrations of how people’s lives are changed by access to electricity (for example, in India), and the lengths that people will go to obtain reliabile electricity (for example, in Beirut).

Robert Bryce recently interviewed me on the Power Hungry podcast. In the interview, Bryce kept the focus on the punchline of Shorting the Grid: Why our grid is fragile, and what we can do about it.

If you want scary, on the other hand, there’s another book, Powering Through: Building Critical Infrastructure Resilience, by a large group of authors. This is published through Infragard, an organization concerned with threats to U.S. infrastructure. Infragard evaluates threats (and responses to threats) to our electricity supply, water supply, and hospitals. Infragard thinks about things that (frankly) I am mostly too scared to think about. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI play lead roles in Infragard.

Electricity is the Mother Network

The newly issued Infragard book, Powering Through, is organized by infrastructure type, and the book asks the same set of questions about each type of infrastructure. The first question is always: “What happens to this type of infrastructure if there is no electric power?”

Yes. That is the first question, because electricity is the Mother Network.

When I say that electricity is the “mother network,” I am quoting Robert Bryce. In his endorsement of Shorting, Bryce wrote that “all of those networks (that we depend upon) rely on the mother network: the electric grid.” Indeed, we depend on it. And we need to manage it in a manner that leads to reliability. Five minute auctions, requirements for fuel neutrality, duplicative and contentious “capacity auctions”—-these do not promote grid reliability.

We can manage the grid for reliability.  We need to do so.

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Reliable Electricity in Winter? FERC, Are You Listening?

Winter Weather

As I wrote in Shorting the Grid, the quest for reliable electricity in the winter in New England is far more difficult than it needs to be. The root of the problem is the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) rules for areas like New England. This area is organized on the RTO system   and the FERC rules for RTOs are not particularly concerned with reliable electricity.  The rules are very concerned with “fuel neutrality.” In other words, it doesn’t seem to matter if we have rolling blackouts in winter in New England, as long as the rules that led to the rolling blackouts were fair to everyone. The rules especially have to be fair to all the different types of fuels and generators.

Of course, “fair to everyone” is in the eyes of the beholder.

Local Attempts to Encourage Winter Reliability, Despite FERC

I document many of the RTO winter problems in Shorting the Grid. ISO-NE, our grid operator, set up the early Winter Reliability Programs. These programs worked well to provide reliability for the grid by making sure gas-fired plants had oil on hand when they couldn’t obtain gas on cold days. Then FERC shut down that program as not being fuel-neutral. In response, ISO-NE suggested a complex formula of fines and rewards, Pay for Performance, to substitute for the Winter Reliability Program. It was approved by FERC, but it failed, financially, within four months of being implemented.  Then came the Inventoried Energy plan.  That got implemented, on top of the Pay for Performance plans.  Next, ISO suggested three new auctions which I reviewed in my book, and I said they would not work. As it happens, these three auctions did not get formally presented to FERC.

Now we get beyond the material presented in Shorting the Grid, because books have a lag time to publication. After ISO-NE set aside the three auctions reviewed in my book, ISO-NE proposed three differerent new auctions for FERC approval.  Those auction plans were turned down by FERC on October 31 of this year. In the most recent news, ISO-NE is asking FERC for guidance in setting up a program which will meet FERC’s fuel-neutral criteria, and still provide reliable electricity in winter in the Northeast.  If such a thing can actually be done.

What Kind of Rock?

In other words, since FERC seems to turn down any ISO-NE program that might work, maybe FERC can suggest a program? A friend of mine who is retired from the Navy suggested that FERC has been giving orders that are the equivalent of “Get me a rock.” What kind of rock? How big? Round or jagged? Those issues aren’t addressed. As far as I can tell, leadership training in the Navy includes “Don’t give ‘get me a rock’ orders.” Maybe FERC needs a little training?

Despite the lag time required by book publication, Shorting is still basically up to date. This latest three-auction go-around was predictable to anyone who read my book. The RTO system can’t solve even simple problems of reliability, which is how I started the tale of Shorting, and where I will end this blog post.

The great thing about a blog post is that people can comment and start a conversation. Often, I learn important things from my readers.

If you haven’t read Shorting the Grid, let me encourage you to buy it. If you have read it, let me encourage you to leave a review on Amazon. Amazon decides which books to feature based on the number of reviews, or so I am told. Your review is a sort of gift to me. Thank you.

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Guest Post: John McClaughry Review of Shorting the Grid by

Shorting is Published!

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid is published and available.  Shorting was published on October 19. I definitely need to do a catch-up post with some links to podcasts and so forth.  I have been on some great podcasts (the latest with Robert Bryce) and the book has had some excellent reviews posted at Amazon and Goodreads.

Meanwhile, you can buy Shorting on Amazon (Kindle and softcover and hardcover), Kobo (ebook), Walmart, Books A Million and more.  In the two weeks since its release on Amazon, the book has been the  #1 New Release in Oil and Energy Industry, Energy Policy, and Electric Energy.  You can also order the  book through your local bookstore, since it is distributed by Ingram Spark.

Thinking about elections

No, I’m not going to comment on the national elections. However, I felt this was a good time to put up a guest blog. The image above is the Vermont State House, because my guest blogger today is John McClaughry.  McClaughry is  a nuclear engineer, the founder of the free-market think tank, the Ethan Allen Institute, and a former Vermont State Senator. He gives a legislator’s viewpoint on Shorting the Grid.

The  Institute was the home for the Energy Education Project, which I headed when I was trying to save Vermont Yankee. McClaughry originally published this book review in the October edition of the Ethan Allen Institute newsetter.

Review of Shorting the Grid

EA Letter review October 2020

Meredith Angwin, Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of our Electric Grid, (Wilder VT: Carnot Communications, 2020) 369 pp

Meredith Angwin, originally a University of Chicago chemist, has had a long career in the electric power industry. For years she was a project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, the industry’s cutting edge innovation center. More recently she has been much involved in the lengthy debate over the future of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. Since its closing in 2014 she has focused her work on the New England power grid, on which she has become a leading expert. Meredith also managed the Ethan Allen Institute’s Energy Education Project for four years.

In this third book from her pen Meredith explains how a power system composed of fuel production and transportation, generators, utilities, transmission companies, distribution companies, ratepayers, and regulators works to light up our homes when we flip a switch. This is an enormous undertaking, worthy of a year-long college course on that broad subject.

Meredith is thoroughly knowledgeable, immensely perceptive, and to her credit, compulsively fair minded to the various interests involved. That said, despite the clarity of her writing this is a challenging book. That’s because the subject matter is so complex, both from a physical standpoint and, more importantly, from a policy standpoint.

Some thirty years ago I served on the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, the only former nuclear engineer ever to do so. I daresay I had a better grip on energy issues than most if not all of my colleagues. Reading Shorting the Grid, I now realize how primitive our deliberations were back then, and I wonder if any of our 180 legislators today has even a tenuous grip on the many issues raised in this book. To look at their legislative output over the past decade, I seriously doubt it.

In her gentle but indefeasible way, Meredith dismantles and scraps many energy policy fetishes that prevail in Montpelier. Chief among them are the anti-nuclear baseload phobia, the passion for subsidizing wind and solar, the still-impossible dream of grid-scale battery storage, renewable portfolio standards, and net metering at retail, not wholesale, rates.

Thanks to these legislative obsessions (my term, not hers), plus a vast regulatory structure (PUCs, ISO-NE, NEPOOL, BA, FERC) that deliberately invites regulatory capture and defies accountability, plus a multiplicity of “stakeholders” constantly working to game the system, “grid meltdown is coming.”

Unlike California, where the same combination of ignorant advocacy produces summer-day rolling blackouts, New England’s blackouts will likely come in the dead of winter, for instance, when a Russian liquefied natural gas tanker can’t get into the Massachusetts terminal to deliver just-in-time fuel for the gas plants essential to back up erratic and intermittent renewables.

In her words, “To some extent, the California RTO is a poster child for how not to run a grid. California is closing down zero-emission nuclear plants, setting high requirements for widespread use of renewables, depending heavily on natural gas (no surprise there) and on imported electricity. California rates are far higher than they should be for a state with significant hydro power and in-state natural-gas supplies. But the California ISO is running out of California money.”

What can citizens do to spare us from the collapse of an increasingly fragile power grid? Meredith devotes a final chapter to mobilizing for constructive changes. Drawing on her experience influencing the Vermont Yankee debate, she lists forming citizen organizations, attending hearings, filing motions, and the like. I wish I could believe in that. My long experience tells me that the ”stakeholders” and their battalion of high priced lawyers like the Regulatory Assistance Project will always defeat a concerned citizen uprising, unless the target is something highly visible and objectionable, like wind turbines.

That said, Shorting the Grid is a very valuable –albeit challenging –book. It’s not likely to make the New York Times Best Seller List, but it will certainly prove to be the gold standard for anyone working to keep the lights on, who needs to know how electric power is produced, distributed, and priced. Hint to readers: first read the extensive Glossary.

– Reviewed by John McClaughry, VP EAI

The  image  of the State House is from  wikipedia.  

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“Could” versus reality. A podcast with Chris Keefer

In my forthcoming book, Shorting the Grid, I present the situation and the choices as they currently exist on the grid. I avoided doing too much speculation. As I have often said, “Look out for the word could.” As soon as someone begins to talk about what we “could” do, I get suspicious.

For example, many renewable groups wrote that the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant could be replaced by renewables. They wrote white papers explaining how this could be done. In actuality, when Vermont Yankee closed, its power was replaced, pretty much kWh by kWh, by gas-fired power plants. Could runs up against physics (many renewables are intermittent) and economics (most renewables need subsidies to compete with conventional plants). At that point…could loses. Indeed, we all lose, as zero-emissions plants like Vermont Yankee are closed, with great hopes for what could, perhaps, happen.

Recently, I was on interviewed on a podcast about my book. Originally, I was definitely going to stay off podcasts until my book was available. But Dr. Chris Keefer of Decouple was very persuasive about his desire to interview me and hear my opinions on the California fires. So I sent him a pdf of my book, complete with “draft” watermarks, and appeared on his podcast.

All those automobiles

I enjoyed being interviewed by Keefer. He had read the book quite carefully, and had good questions about the real situations on the grid. Near the beginning of the podcast, he mentioned that we were going to have lots of analogies to automobiles. Indeed, until he interviewed me, I had not realized how many automobile analogies I had in the book! For example: stop and go driving is low mileage compared to highway mileage. When gas plants back up intermittent renewables, the gas plants are forced into the equivalent of stop and go driving. Under these circumstances, the gas plants have lower fuel efficiency and make more pollution per kWh than if they were running steadily. In another example, I described big trucks as baseload plants (steady performers, not much acceleration) versus quick flexible sports cars. “We don’t need baseload” is the equivalent of “goods can be carried cross country in sports cars.” Keefer and I had a lot of fun.

Decouple podcast describes “technologies that decouple human well being from their ecological impacts.”

Here’s the podcast: Shorting the Grid Feat. Meredith Angwin

The book itself

And hey, what about the actual book, Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid? Do I have a release date yet? No, but the one thing that remains to be done is that the cover has to be approved. You see, covers have spines, and spines are as thick as the book is thick, so the cover is the very last thing to be settled.

Update: Release on October 19! Book is Number One in New Releases in Electric Energy!

Shorting the Grid will be released on Monday October 19. The Kindle and softcover version will be available. The Kindle can be pre-ordered now. The book is currently listed as #1 New Release in Electric Energy!

I believe the hardcover version will also be available that day, though I am not sure of that.

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A FERC ruling and its opponents

To my delight, a recent FERC ruling was fair in its treatment of nuclear power and other generating systems. (FERC is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.) Unfortunately, it’s hard to explain a FERC ruling because all FERC rulings come with a long backstory.

Sigh. Well, here goes nothing, as they say.

A fuel-neutral FERC order

In New England, on very cold days in winter, grid reliability can become an issue and rolling blackouts can become a possibility. The major problem with cold weather is that gas-fired electric generators cannot obtain gas because homes are using gas. Supposedly, FERC wants fuel-neutral, market-based outcomes for issues that arise in the Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) areas.

In the past, when FERC looked at winter problems in New England, its rulings have rewarded gas-fired generators that will store oil for use on cold days. For example, it approved the 2017-2018 New England Winter Reliability Program. In this program, the grid operator ISO-NE paid approximately $20 million for dual-fuel-capable gas plants to store oil, and paid $34,000 to demand-response bidders. Other types of generators were not paid.

In contrast, a recent FERC ruling supports all kinds of generators that can contribute to reliability. The new “Inventoried Energy” program will pay for energy to be available for use when the grid is stressed. Quoting from the recent FERC ruling , the following types of plants would be eligible for Inventoried Energy payments:(1)… oil, coal, nuclear, biomass, and refuse generators;… (2) some hydro and pumped-storage generators (i.e., those with water stored in a pond or reservoir); and (3) an electric storage facility, including those coupled with a wind or solar resource (noting that its inventory would be its charge that could be converted into electric energy).

Demand response resources and gas-fired plants that have very firm contracts for gas will also be able to participate in the Inventoried Energy payments.

We are a long way from the earlier simple payments for oil. I think that is a good thing.

Not everyone loves fuel neutrality

This is a truly fuel-neutral FERC ruling. It compensates all generation facilities that can be counted on to provide energy for Inventoried Energy Days when the grid is stressed.

FERC Commissioner Richard Glick dissented strongly from FERC’s approval of this program. Glick fears that money is “likely to be spent on resources, such as nuclear, coal, and hydro generators, that will not change their behavior.. ……. it would seem that burning that money might contribute as much to fuel security as wasting it on entities that we know will not do anything differently.”

I thought that fuel neutrality was about paying different types of plants the same amount of money for equal outcomes. You know, clearing prices and all that? Anyhow…

There are always dissents to FERC rulings, and Glick’s dissent could have been predicted. Commissioner Glick’s resume includes having been “vice president for governmental affairs for Iberdrola’s renewable energy, electric and gas utility, and natural gas storage businesses.” Iberdrola does business in many sectors of the energy markets, but it is perhaps most well-known for its wind projects.

You can read Glick’s dissent near the end of the ruling linked above. At least in this ruling, his views were outvoted and all types of generators will be rewarded for equal results,

Early praise for my book.

Robert Hargraves wrote this praise for my forthcoming book, Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid.

…”Reading Angwin’s book is like chatting with an expert who helps you understand the underlying engineering, finances, and policies creating the risks. Her narrative moves back and forth between insightful overviews and specific examples. …. This book is a must-read for anyone suggesting any improvement in our electricity supply…”

Robert Hargraves is the author of Thorium: energy cheaper than coal.

Meanwhile, Shorting the Grid makes progress toward publication!

To all my readers: Take care. Be well. More later.

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Hope, Panic, and the Grid

As the summer winds down, dangerous things are happening on the grid. As an example, nobody thinks the California rolling blackouts are over.  As a matter of fact, it might not be too far-fetched to say, “If you are hopeful about the grid right now, you aren’t paying attention.”  Is it time to panic?

Panic?

Some people quote Greta Thunberg, who apparently says that we should panic:  “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”

However, when people quote those sentences, they are taking Thunberg’s words out of context. Here’s the continuation of her statement.  “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”  In other words, she wants adults to act quickly, not to panic. If everybody panics because the house is on fire, nobody will act to put out the fire.

In the course of their lives, most people learn how to not-panic in various circumstances. We take formal and informal anti-panic training , and we learn about action. In teaching a child to swim, you usually start by teaching the child to put their head in the water and blow bubbles. Yes, your nose is under water, but no need to panic! As long as you are blowing bubbles, you will be okay. Keep blowing those bubbles, and remember that you can raise your head any time and take a breath.

Fire fighters, military people and first responders take much more elaborate anti-panic training. My husband told me about the most difficult part of his Navy training: learning damage control. “Walk into the blazing compartment, you have a hose, put out the fire.” In other words, “Don’t panic.” That was heavy-duty anti-panic training.

The Grid

Meanwhile, in California, the weather forecasts are looking bad (hot) and the grid forecasts are looking bad, too. The grid operators are pulling out all the stops to prevent more rolling blackouts. The California RTO made the classic RTO mistakes that I describe in my upcoming book:

letting intermittent renewables dominate the auctions,
not having enough fast-acting backup (natural gas), and
expecting electricity imports from neighboring areas.

In New England, this fatal trifecta happens in very cold weather in winter when our plants can’t obtain natural gas (used for heating) and Canada needs its own electricity at home. In California, it happens during hot days in summer after natural gas and nuclear plants were shut down, and when neighboring states need their own electricity at home. When an area depends on intermittent renewables, just-in-time natural gas (no storage) and the kindness of neighbors (at times when the neighbors are also stressed), that area can expect problems, including rolling blackouts. My new book Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid describes why this painful triplet is far more common in RTO areas. The book should be out next month.

Hope

So, where is the hope?

In terms of hope for the grid, I believe that citizens have to keep track of grid decision making, especially in RTO areas. This is not easy, because many of the important meetings are closed to the public. Vertically-integrated areas are more transparent. But with some attention, you can keep track and maybe even influence decisions on your grid.

We can build clean reliable low-emissions grids with existing technology, and even more technology is being developed. To learn about existing well-operated, low-emissions grids, I recommend the book A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow by Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist. This book looks back at how France, Ontario, Sweden and other countries achieved reliable, low-emissions grids, with nuclear energy and hydro power. Looking toward new technology in the future, I recommend Thorium, Electricity Cheaper than Coal, by Robert Hargraves  and the documentary The New Fire, directed by David Schumacher and available on Amazon and other services.

Hope and action go together. To have a clean grid, we have  to keep a careful watch on the distorted decision-making processes in the RTO areas. To have a clean future grid, we have to encourage new nuclear plants and keep the older ones operating.  And yes, the RTO areas are a major part of the problem.

(And yeah, buy Shorting the Grid as soon as it comes out!)

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Tips for Publishing Op-Eds

Tips for Publishing Op-Eds and Letters

Pro-nuclear op-eds and letters-to-the-editor reach a large audience.  While many newspapers do indeed  struggle with decreasing circulations, newspapers such as the Mercury News of San Jose California have daily circulation figures around 500,000, according to the latest data I can find.  Getting a pro-nuclear op-ed in such a high-circulation paper widens the positive view of nuclear energy. Hundreds of thousands of people will see the op-ed, and many will read it.

A good op-ed breaks the assumption that “everyone” is against nuclear power.

Stephen Williams  wrote an op-ed which ran in the Mercury News on July 10: 100 percent renewable energy in California by 2050 needs nuclear in the mix. His op-ed is a clear, concise argument for nuclear power, and against the false reassurances that “renewables can do it all.” I urge you to read his article and comment on it!  Meanwhile, here is Stephen’s description of writing op-eds, and getting them published.

Publishing Op-Eds.  By Stephen Williams

Op-Eds are a part of advocacy: After retiring from software engineering a few years ago, I was delighted with my newfound time to explore other interests. One interest I had was to somehow get involved in addressing climate change. Little did I know then that I’d end up advocating for nuclear power as an important part of our strategy to ameliorate climate change.

One thing I’ve discovered in the past year is that writing opinion pieces for newspapers is one effective way that I can advocate for nuclear power. At first I wasn’t sure my local paper would have any interest in what I had to say.

Getting them published: Now I’ve had two opinion pieces published in The Mercury News in one year. I’m not sure exactly what I’ve done right, but I’d like to share how I approached getting published in case my experience is useful to others.

Start with a news event: I try to use some recent news event to write about nuclear power. I email my piece to the editorial page editor respectfully requesting publication. My experience so far is that I don’t get an initial response.

Follow up: So a couple days later I respond to my own email and point the editor at some recent article that’s related to my piece. Sometimes I even do this a second time if I don’t hear back from the editor. The editor replies at this point and tells me what’s wrong with the piece.

Edit it and say thank you. I rewrite the piece making sure to address all the editor’s criticisms, then reply thanking the editor for her excellent feedback (which it really is) and attaching the new version.

This mostly works: This technique has failed for me once and worked out twice over the past year. I think the take-away for me is to be nicely persistent, at least until you get a response.

Notes from Meredith Angwin

My experience is that the first op-ed is the hardest.  Once you are established as an op-ed writer with a particular editor, getting the second op-ed published is much easier.

I have more information on getting letters and op-eds published in several chapters of my book, Campaigning for Clean Air.   Of course, I encourage you to buy it!

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Defeating the trolls

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Trolls on your website

In my book, Campaigning for Clean Air, I state my philosophy of blogging: No Trolls!

I strongly believe that you should not allow trolls onto your blog.  Your blog has your name on it.  What you allow to be posted is your own business. Joe’s freedom of speech is not impaired when Joe is banned from your blog. He can post many other places on the internet. He can start his own blog. When you are moderating comments on your blog, the “delete” choice is often your best friend.

Why should you ban trolls from commenting?  Studies show that negative comments undercut the credibility of the original blog post. That is what happens with just one negative comment.   If Joe is  a true troll, there will be more than one comment!  He will come back and keep posting.  You can waste huge amounts of your time by answering him.  He may also annoy your readers, who expect a pleasant and informative experience on your blog—but—Joe’s back!  (For more on this subject, with links,  please read the blogging chapter in my book.)

Similarly,  you can prevent people from posting negative comments on your Facebook pages and other social media. All social media platforms have “ban” and “block” types of functions. You should treat anything with your name on it the same way you treat your website: No Trolls!

Unfortunately, you don’t control everywhere you post, and you may well encounter a troll in a context where you cannot ban them easily.  So we have to talk about trolls.  Sometimes, there you are, on a newspaper comment stream, or on an email list discussing energy issues, or something like that.  And you have attracted a troll.

The definition of a troll

First of all, let’s be sure we have our definitions straight.  Not everyone who disagrees with you is a troll.  In my opinion, a troll has the following characteristics:

Repetitive posting;  Whatever you say, they will answer it.  Their answers will quickly become repetitive, and are often very long.  When you respond, they will rephrase what they said earlier.
Repetitive Links: They use a limited number of links to older or obscure articles and books. These are the articles that support their position.
Having the last word. They must have the last word, and they may well wear you down until they get it.

In terms of the last-word issue, I once tested the responses of a troll on a local newspaper website.  He had the last word in our comment exchange.  I waited for about a month, and there was no further activity on that thread. After a month, I posted something.  He  posted an answer within hours, once again regaining the final, last-word position.

Other bad behavior

There are other things that many trolls do, but not all trolls do these things. Some non-trolls also act this way.  Some people:

Bring up their favorite subject in the comment stream, and come back to it repeatedly. (They hijack the conversation.)  However, they don’t necessarily answer every comment that disagrees with them. Repetitive answers are the mark of a troll.
Are sarcastic, insulting, or condescending.

These are just standard internet discourtesy, not troll-dom.  We have to take stern measures with trolls, but there is no use getting upset about every fool on the internet.

So, we can now recognize the troll disease.  What’s the cure?

Neutralizing Trolls

Let me repeat: If you have the control, don’t let the troll post.  Not on your blog, not on your Facebook page, nowhere.  But you don’t always have the power to prevent posting.

In a public space where you are not the moderator

the main strategy for neutralizing trolls is to shift the conversation from a discussion of their claims to a discussion of their behavior.

In other words, don’t argue facts, but instead get the listeners on your side by pointing out rudeness. Unfortunately, in some cases, it  may become necessary to stop posting in places where trolls run rampant.

Here are my main suggestions for dealing with trolls on a website you don’t control.

Appeal to the moderator.   If there is a moderator, point out the rude actions and appeal to the moderator.
Brief answers. You can change the conversation with brief answers.  First, answer the troll briefly and factually. He will come back at you.  Your second answer should be something like “Looks like we will just have to agree to disagree!”  He will write a long answer to that.  Your third answer will be something like: “You are repeating yourself.  As I said, I think we must just agree to disagree.  That’s what I’m doing, anyway.”  In other words, only argue facts in the first answer.  After that, point out his rudeness and stop answering. Hopefully, this will get the audience on your side. Even if you don’t sway the audience, you won’t be spending the rest of your life on a comment thread with a troll! If  he keeps posting, he will be talking to himself.
Evaluate the time and rewards. Consider what your time is worth, if you are posting where trolls run rampant. Evaluate whether the people you are trying to reach are actually on the website, newspaper comment chain, etc.  Maybe your audience is on that website, and you have to hang in.  Maybe your audience isn’t there, and you shouldn’t be posting. Use your time wisely.

Please help

Let’s make this post into a powerful resource against trolls.  Do you have a favorite technique for dealing with trolls?  Please share it in a comment!

———

The Fremont Troll (graphic) lives under a bridge in Seattle  Fremont Troll, from Wikipedia

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Was Hamilton Pro-Nuclear? A Post for Independence Day.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hamilton

Happy Independence Day!

Was Hamilton pro-nuclear?  Well, of course he wasn’t.  Nuclear power was not available in the 1780s.  But my title isn’t just clickbait.

Many of us have renewed  interest in our founding fathers, partially due to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s inspiring musical Hamilton.  Hamilton shows the struggle of America’s founders  in all its glorious messiness, unlike too many period dramas in which everyone “sounds a little nobler than they should.”

The musical is joyous, dramatic, inventive, amazing.  It also shows, without pretentiousness, that the Founding Fathers didn’t necessarily get along.  Many were too eager for personal advancement; others chased women that they should have left alone.  Many held incompatible views of how the United States should be governed, and what life in America should be like.  Some of the founding founders truly hated each other. “I could kill that guy…and I will!”

Yes. After Burr shoots Hamilton in a duel, we have the end of the musical, but perhaps the beginning of the questions. How did such a contentious group of people manage to found a country, defeat England, and write a solid Constitution?   Maybe the answer is: because they were contentious.  Because they aired their differences.  Because they were a real “movement.” They were figuring it out as they went along.

Pro-Nuclear Disagreement

We pro-nuclear people are contentious, too.  We have pro-nuclear leaders that believe that you should be willing to get arrested for nuclear (civil disobedience) and other leaders who think that getting an arrest record is a very bad idea.  We have groups that refuse to take a penny from any nuclear corporation. In contrast,  we have groups that actively fund-raise from nuclear businesses.  (I have a whole chapter in my book about this controversy.)

Pro-nuclear people have all these disagreements because because pro-nuclear is a movement.  Astro-turf has a careful script: movements are messy.

The pro-nuclear movement has old folks like me, and young fire-brands. It has people who write position papers (think the Federalist Papers) and it has people who go door-to-door to gain adherents (Paul Revere?).  It has songs and you-tubes (the equivalent of songs and broadsides, in the old days) and letters to the editor (think Benjamin Franklin) and more.

Unity of Purpose, Divergence of Methods.

I am pleased that we no longer have high levels of contention about advanced reactors versus current reactors. As a movement, we are looking at different ways to make nuclear energy an important part of the mix.  More and more people are in favor of all kinds of reactors.

Quite a few years ago, when I wrote my Prisoner’s Dilemma post, and Rod Adams wrote his Fission versus Fire post, people in favor of advanced reactors often bashed existing reactors.  And vice versa, of course.  Now that advanced reactors are being developed and the existing nuclear fleet is threatened, I see much more unity of purpose in the movement.  The pro-nuclear movement is truly Fission Versus Fire, nowadays.

Mostly Unity of Purpose, with many Divergent Methods. Pro-nuclear activism is a true movement!

Hail to the founders, and hail to today’s pro-nuclear activists!

Our legacy

As Hamilton says, people do not know how we will be remembered. In particular, we don’t know how the pro-nuclear advocates of this generation will be remembered.

But I hope we will be remembered in clean skies and moderate climates and non-acidic seas.

Hail to the pro-nuclear advocates of this generation!

Photo by Steve Jurvetson, Wikimedia

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Three Ways to Help the Ohio Nuclear Plants

The Ohio Problem

Ohio has two nuclear plants (Davis Besse and Perry) that add up to about 2000 MW of clean power.  Ohio also has about 14,000 MW of coal fired plants. Some of the coal fired plants may close soon, to be replaced by natural gas.

The  Ohio Solution

You can help defend the nuclear plants in Ohio.  Here are three ways:

If you live in Ohio, write your legislator in support of two bills that value nuclear for its zero-emissions electricity. The Nuclear Energy Institute has a post with links to the bills.
Wherever you live, donate to Generation Atomic. They are going door-to-door in Ohio to build support for the nuclear plants.  The illustration is an open meeting they held in Sandusky.  Here’s their Donate page.
Attend the pro-nuclear rally. On June 13, there will be a rally-symposium at the Ohio Statehouse.  Pro-nuclear groups and the AFL-CIO will be there.  The president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Maria Korsnick, will speak.  Attend if you can!  Here’s the web page for the rally. 

I have a longer blog post about Ohio, with some more links. at Yes Vermont Yankee.  But the basics are right here.  The three choices are right here. Take Action!

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