The roots of the Texas Blackouts were planted in the early 2000s during the push to deregulate the state’s electricity market. In this episode, Robert talks to J. Paul Oxer, an engineer who has 45 years of experience in the electricity sector, about his stint at Enron before it failed, how ERCOT works, why the grid should always be ready for “two black swans,” and what Texas should do next. 

The fallout from the Texas Blackouts continues to reverberate. In this episode, Robert talks to Steve Brick, a consulting engineer who has 40 years of experience in the power sector, about why renewables are the “pandas” of the electricity sector, the myriad difficulties involved in expanding America’s high-voltage transmission capacity, and why the academics and policymakers who are pushing all-renewable scenarios have “reality deficit disorder.” 

The Texas Blackouts prove that our electric grid is getting more fragile and blackouts are becoming more common. In this episode, Robert talks, for the second time, with Lee Cordner, an electrical engineer who has 50 years of experience in the power sector, about the causes of the blackouts in Texas and California, how close the Texas grid came to collapse, the importance of baseload power plants like nuclear reactors, and why schemes that aim to power our society solely with renewable energy are doomed to fail.

Meredith Angwin is a chemist and author, most recently, of Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid. In her second appearance on the podcast, Angwin explains why the blackouts in Texas and elsewhere are happening, the “fatal trifecta” (over-reliance on renewables, natural gas, and imported electricity), why economic incentives are needed to assure reliability, and why the grid needs power plants that have on-site fuel storage.

Todd Moss is the executive director of the Energy for Growth Hub, a non-profit group that aims to help “All countries achieve the high-energy future they need to become prosperous, competitive, and climate resilient.” In this episode, Robert talks to Moss about the challenges of electrification in Africa, the fuels that will likely play the biggest roles in that effort, the “modern energy minimum,” and his parallel career as a writer of spy novels.

Thomas Gryta is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and the co-author, with Ted Mann, of Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric. In this episode, Robert talks with Gryta about the book, how GE soared in value under its charismatic leader, Jack Welch, and how hubris, excessive financial leverage, and the company’s dependence on profits from GE Capital, nearly forced America’s most famous industrial company into bankruptcy.  

Bernadette Johnson is an energy economist at Austin-based Enverus, an energy-data analytics firm. In this episode, Robert talks to Johnson about the recent spike in Asian LNG prices,  the future of oil, the resource curse, and what she calls “the fundamental disconnect” between what many people like to believe about renewables and the reality of our hydrocarbon-dependent world.

Diane Fitch is a county supervisor in Madison County, Iowa, who was elected in 2019 on an anti-wind-energy platform. In this episode, Robert talks to Fitch about the ordinance that was approved by county supervisors in December 2020 that effectively bans new wind projects, why wind energy is facing increasing friction in Iowa, the famous bridges in Madison County, and the growing divide between urban Americans and their rural counterparts.

Jennifer Hernandez is a San Francisco-based partner at Holland & Knight, and a lead attorney for The 200, a coalition of California’s Latino leaders who are suing the state over its energy and housing policies. Robert talked with Hernandez about the litigation, California’s housing crisis, the importance of homeownership, and what she calls the “fundamentally racist” policies that are exacerbating poverty and inequality in her home state.

 Coilín ÓhAiseadha and Ronan Connolly are Dublin-based researchers and co-authors of a recent academic paper that found global spending on climate change projects totaled nearly $3.7 trillion between 2011 and 2018. Robert talks with them about why more than half of climate-related spending is being garnered by solar and wind, the merits – and problems -- of various energy sources, why more spending should be directed toward climate adaptation, and why there is no panacea when it comes to our energy and power needs.