Review of "Shorting the Grid"

Two realities govern modern life at any moment. One is the electrical grid, which delivers power to our homes, schools and hospitals. The other is the gaggle of bureaucrats who impose conditions on that grid, such as net metering, renewable portfolios and fuel neutrality. To an extent, this latter gaggle is needed to determine how and when producers on the grid get paid so they can continue production. Yet on the whole, with little to no input from customers, these bureaucrats ensconced in cubicles devise schemes to “fix the planet” which only drive up energy’s costs and compromise the grid’s stability.

This is the thesis of Meredith Angwin’s book, Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electrical Grid (2020). Ms Angwin – widely known as the Electric Grandma – was kind enough to autograph my copy when I attended the New York Energy Alliance’s presentation in Hurley, NY, on August 20th, 2026. Ms Angwin is a chemist who specializes in energy production and had worked for decades in the utility industry. Her lecture that day consisted of just three PowerPoint slides because she focused on electrical production’s physical realities in terms of operating a grid at scale. At the same time, there exists in effect a second grid which consists of a latticework of policy and regulations, and it is this “grid” which makes energy much more expensive than it would be unhindered.

The book is written for the lay audience, yet by necessity it delves into technical nitty-gritty. For starters, readers must understand that electricity is produced in the instant. Like the dull blue sparks which erupt from a woolen blanket as a hand stokes it in the dark, electricity surges instantaneously and can be used or captured then and only then. On an industrial scale, power plants spin turbines which emulate that friction of stroking a blanket in the dark, generating electricity which illuminates your kitchenette’s halogens when you flick their switch. The very moment the turbines stop spinning, that switch does nothing. For grid operation, this means that some power stations somewhere on the grid must be spinning turbines at any given moment for consumers to have electricity in that instant.

The around-the-clock need for electrical generation thus occasions a balancing act for grid operators. Every minute of every day, there is a minimum demand for electricity on the grid. This is called the baseload, and grid operators must ensure that enough networked power plants are producing electricity sufficient to meet the baseload. Too much or too little, and the imbalance could cause blackouts.

Beyond the baseload, there is demand which varies by season and occasion. For example, air conditioning in summertime consumes electricity in fairly predictable patterns. On the other hand, release of a popular Netflix series may induce thousands of households for a week to activate their home entertainment systems in the evening, causing an unpredictable surge in electrical consumption. In both cases, this type of demand is called load following, and grid operators may call on networked power plants to produce electricity (i.e., spin turbines) to meet this demand. As with baseload, if too much or too little load following electricity is produced, blackouts can ensue. Additionally, as in any market, production of surplus electricity – which the grid must utilize the instant it is generated – also means that the power plants’ fetching price per kilowatt hour (kWh) declines. If grid operators request too much load following production, then networked power plants will lose money to fulfill such orders, which – to the consumer’s detriment – may disincline them to honor such future requests.

The reader must absorb numerous concepts for a decent comprehension of grid operation, and Angwin introduces them one by one through short, digestible chapters. She relates technical explanations to real-world instances of regional grids in the United States, and how they handle electrical production’s dynamic challenges. Angwin includes publicly sourced graphs and tables to demonstrate the concepts at work in grid operation. All this proved especially helpful to me as someone trained in the Humanities rather than science, since more “footholds” are needed to keep pace with scientific data.

For all their loudly extolled virtues, renewables complicate grid operation. Renewables refer to inexhaustible sources of energy such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, batteries and biomass. Bureaucrats tasked with addressing “climate change” mandate greater use of renewables over consumables (e.g., gas, coal), yet such a transition can destabilize the grid if managed incorrectly. By example, wind turbines are often sited in the best “wind corridor” like a coastline, distant from the urbanization which they power. Strong winds during a storm can energetically spin wind turbines, yet in such remote areas, the transmission lines to load centers are insufficient to handle the “spiky” electricity which the wind turbines suddenly generate. This means that a grid may simply “curtail” or disconnect transmission from wind turbines since their generated electricity surges unpredictably and may imbalance the grid. (p. 28)

Batteries are another favorite of central planning bureaucrats. Given that photovoltaic panels produce no electricity at night (or under thick cloud cover, or when buried under snow), batteries are a favored renewable since repeatedly they can be filled to avail energy at a moment’s notice. Yet batteries distort the market in two ways. Firstly, when Utility A resorts to charged batteries to supply energy, it proudly declares $200,000 in savings to its customers. What the utility does not disclose is that Utility B must incur the $200,000 which Utility A saves in load-sharing fees to the grid. (p. 177) Secondly, since there are insufficient renewables to charge batteries, a utility typically charges batteries when energy is at its cheapest during the day cycle. This means that batteries are usually replenished in the evening with electricity generated by gas. All this amounts to subterfuge to make batteries seem more advantageous than they are, and such delusion contributes nothing to making our grid more reliable, efficient and affordable.

Wherever a reader falls on the issue of climate change, Ms Angwin writes strictly about what it takes to produce energy in quantity sufficient to sustain modern life. She proposes more effective integration of renewables into the grid since renewables can and do assist the grid to fulfill energy demand, but their advocates should realize that renewables underperform consumables. This is the main reason energy prices have skyrocketed in recent years. Utility ratepayers are subsidizing underperforming renewables in the hope that these can be developed to match consumables. If renewables’ advocates were candid, they would acknowledge that renewables are flush against electrophysical constraints, such that they will never achieve parity with consumables. For example, the latest generation of photovoltaic panels optimally converts around 22% of sunlight to electricity, and though future iterations may improve that percentage, it will never approach equivalency with petroleum, or better yet, Generation 4 nuclear (which is more efficient, cleaner and safer than legacy nuclear, as the pebble-bed reactor in Shidao Bay, China, demonstrates).

Rather than promote one energy type over another, the Electric Grandma declares her true north for grid operation as the following: “Reliable electricity, relatively inexpensive… made with low levels of pollution and low levels of ecosystem disruption.” (p. 15) To the extent that a utility company deviates from these three reasonable criteria, every ratepayer should closely read Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid and hold the local utility to account!