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(If you’d rather listen to this post than read it, just click play above.)Welcome back to Volts, where every week is Transmission Week!In my three transmission posts so far, I have focused mostly on the challenges of building new long-distance energy transmission lines in the US — the poor planning, the inefficient financing, the permitting and siting hassles. Today I’m going to turn to a different subject: the various ways that the performance of the existing transmission system could be upgraded and improved through so-called “grid-enhancing technologies” (GETs).To be honest, I probably should have tackled this subject first. Though new lines are going to be needed regardless, it is faster and cheaper to upgrade the existing system, with fewer regulatory barriers. GETs can achieve short-term relief from grid congestion while new lines are being developed.There are three techs that are typically classified as grid-enhancing technologies, and I will focus on them in this post. In my next post, I’ll cover a couple of extra options that I haven’t found any other way to fit in. Let’s jump in. (I should note here up top that I will be drawing heavily from a 2019 report on GETs from the Brattle Group and Grid Strategies.)Closer monitoring to improve line performanceWhen electricity passes through transmission lines, they heat up. As they heat up, they sag. If too much electricity is run through a line, it can exceed its maximum operating temperature or sag to the point that it brushes up against trees or other structures, potentially sparking fires.Grid operators want to avoid that, so they do not load lines to their full rated capacity. They set an operational limit well below theoretical capacity, to create a safety margin. But how far below capacity should the limit be set? That is the question.The heat and sag of a given line are changing in subtle ways all the time. They vary with the ambient temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and wind speed. If it’s warmer, the line will heat up faster; if there’s a breeze, it will heat more slowly. Because the heat and sag are in constant flux, so too is the maximum safe capacity of the line.“The number we love to quote is, an increase in wind blowing across a power line of three feet per second results in a 44 percent increase in the capacity of that power line,” says Jonathan Marmillo, co-founder of LineVision, a company that makes equipment for monitoring lines. “That's the equivalent of a light breeze.” (Note: this means that the capacity of transmission lines increases as the production of wind energy increases. Handy!)But transmission system operators do not generally have that kind of real-time information about the heat and sag of their lines. They are forced to estimate, to use an average. In some cases, they assign a line a single “static rating,” well below full capacity. In some cases, they assign the lines seasonal ratings, adjusting for seasonal conditions. These estimates are, necessarily, conservative.As a result, “most transmission lines are loaded at 40 or even 30 percent of their rated capacity,” says Marmillo. That’s an enormous amount of usable capacity going unused, to hedge against the lack of information.That has changed with the development of “dynamic line ratings” (DLRs), whereby lines are continuously monitored and their capacity continuously updated.DLRs have been around for a couple of decades, but the first generations of devices were cumbersome. They were installed directly on the power lines (which involved taking the lines out of commission) and proved unreliable in operation.Technology marches on, though, and the latest generation of DLRs is vastly improved. LineVision’s DLR devices, for instance, have “no-contact” installation, which means no messing with the lines; they attach to the transmission tower. They are topped with LIDAR — the same technology used by autonomous vehicles — which gathers fine-grained data that is then crunched to determine the “net effective perpendicular windspeed,” the most important variable for determining line temperature. “We essentially use the conductor as a giant hot wire anemometer,” says Marmillo.Of course, if you abandon averages in favor of real-time measurement, sometimes capacity will be below what the static average would have indicated. But “we see capacity above static [ratings] about 97 percent of the time,” says Marmillo. It turns out those static ratings are extremely conservative. Allowing more power to travel through lines relieves grid congestion, which is valuable to grid operators. Marmillo says a recent installation of LineVision’s device on a PJM line paid itself back in three months.DLRs are particularly cheap if you compare them to more dramatic solutions to grid congestion. “The cost of deploying a DLR system on a transmission line,” says Marmillo, “is less than 5 percent the unit cost of reconstructing or rebuilding the line.”(Note: there’s an open FERC proposal on the subject of line ratings, in which the commission plans to require seasonal line ratings within two years, and for RTOs and ISOs to put in place systems that are prepared for DLRs within a year.)So that’s technology one: DLRs to better understand and exploit the real-time capacity of existing lines.Controlling the flow of electricity to ease congestionThe Brattle report says: “Power flow through an AC line is proportional to the sine of the difference in the phase angle of the voltage between the transmitting end and the receiving end of the line,” and I’ll just go ahead and trust them on that.Left uncontrolled, power will simply cascade through the system according to Kirchhoff's laws. But it is useful for grid operators to be able to route power away from congested areas and toward less congested areas. To do that, they need flow control devices.The first kind are special transformers called “Phase Angle Regulators” (PARs) that directly manipulate the phase angle to control the flow of power. They are well-known and accepted in the industry, but they are expensive, to the tune of millions of dollars a year, which has limited their deployment to a select few high-traffic lines. Plus, the accelerating pace of change in the electricity system has made their size and inflexibility more problematic. “These are 40-plus-year fixed assets,” says Jenny Erwin, marketing director for Smart Wires Inc., a company that makes flow control devices, and these days, “it's just much harder to plan out what you need 40 years from now.”The other family of flow control devices are Flexible Alternating Current Transmission Systems (FACTS), which are generally power-electronics devices that control the flow of power through a line or voltage on a system by, for example, increasing or decreasing reactance on a line. Older versions of FACTS were also quite large and expensive, but due to advances in electronics and control software, they have been made much smaller and more modular. “What used to be done with copper and steel,” Erwin says, “we are able to do with silicon and software.”Now, reports Brattle, FACTS “typically cost significantly less than PARs, can be manufactured and installed in a shorter time, are scalable, and in many cases, are available in mobile form that can be easily redeployed.” (Smart Wires, a California company that’s been around since 2010, is currently the only company making these modular FACTS.)Several studies have found that FACTS create value by easing grid congestion and deferring transmission system investments. For example, Brattle summarizes the results of a 2018 study from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI): “simulating the 2016 PJM system with 13 power flow control devices placed in optimal locations to reduce thermal overloads indicated annual production cost savings of $67 million. Considering the initial investment cost of $137 million, the payback period is roughly 2 years.”The possibilities opened up by modular FACTS have only just begun being explored. Most deployments and studies have focused on individual lines, but as more and more lines become dispatchable, it stands to reason that there will be emergent system effects. It’s one thing to have a dispatchable line; it’s another to have a dispatchable grid.Erwin acknowledges that this is, in fact, Smart Wires’ long-term vision. “We like to think about it as crawl, walk, and run,” she says, and implementing a fully dispatchable grid “would be running.” The company is taking small steps in that direction in the UK, installing FACTS on several lines across a wide swath of territory and linking them up so that they communicate with one another.But she stresses that the comprehensive vision “is not required to unlock value. You can extract meaningful value today, because every new FACTS adds a degree of control and efficiency.” For much more on this, see this technical report from EPRI and many other reports compiled by Smart Wires. So that’s technology two: power electronics to control the flow of power across the grid.Reconfiguring the grid to route around congestionThe flow of energy through an electricity system is determined by the level of output of the generators, the level of consumption of the loads, and the “topology” (physical configuration) of the transmission lines connecting them. There is already hardware deployed across the grid, in the form of circuit breakers and communications systems, that can, by switching open or closed, change that topology. Grid operators have long had switching procedures in place to reconfigure the grid as necessary to maintain reliability. But “finding good reconfigurations is computationally challenging,” says electrical engineer Pablo Ruiz, a consultant at Brattle, associate research professor at Boston University, and co-founder of NewGrid, Inc., a grid software company spun off from an ARPA-E project. Traditionally, reconfigurations have been implemented on a limited, ad hoc basis, guided by operator experience.Recently, however, engineers have learned to calculate reconfigurations more quickly using software. Thus the budding field of “topology optimization.” Ruiz draws an analogy with transportation. The old way of handling congestion was to raise tolls on the main roads, convincing drivers to stay home (or in the case of power, generators to curtail their output). Topology control software, Ruiz says, is like the navigation app Waze, showing drivers how they can route around congestion. That will mean less curtailment and less congestion.The software doesn’t do the reconfiguring itself — that’s still for the grid operator. “The analogy with Waze is actually pretty accurate,” Ruiz says. “It's a decision-support tool. This is not about self-driving cars; the operator is still the driver.”Naturally, though, it makes me wonder about the possibility of self-driving grids — grids that route power optimally and automatically. Ruiz thinks something like that will eventually happen, but expects a long road of incremental advances in automation before then.Anyway, in the meantime, recent deployments of topology control software in the UK have shown that “just by optimizing the configuration of the grid, you can increase grid capacity by, depending on system conditions, between 4 and 12 percent,” Ruiz says. “These are very large transfers, so if you can get 10 percent more with existing infrastructure, without any new capital investment, that's a big deal.”Studies by Brattle in the US and National Grid in the UK have confirmed that topology optimization can relieve transmission constraints and save power consumers tens of millions of dollars annually. “Broad application of the technology for real-time and day-ahead congestion management support would reduce the cost of congestion by about 50 percent,” he says.Even with the misaligned incentives of today’s utilities (software investments, unlike infrastructure investments, do not receive a guaranteed rate of return), Ruiz thinks topology control will pencil out for them. It might reduce the need for some smaller transmission-expansion projects, but it will relieve congestion on lower capacity lines by routing power to (currently underutilized) high-capacity lines — thus improving the economics of those larger, more expensive projects.Topology control will also improve the business case for a national macrogrid, since it can help ensure that every high-voltage trunk line is fully utilized.So that’s technology three: software to map out the best and most efficient configuration of the grid, from day to day and hour to hour.The extensive benefits of GETs The Brattle report I mentioned at the top of the post recounts several examples of successful deployments of GETs. It estimates that wide deployment would produce benefits that rival the value of creating regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and competitive power markets. The benefits of GETs include not only relieving grid congestion, deferring new capital investments, and saving ratepayers money, but also boosting reliability and resilience and generally improving system performance.The most interesting attempt to assess the full benefits of GETs comes in a forthcoming report prepared by Brattle for the WATT (Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies) Coalition, a group of companies developing GETs. The study won’t be released until February 24, and unfortunately, the folks at the WATT Coalition are too short-sighted to allow me to share the results in advance (grumble). I can say, though, that it is a detailed engineering analysis focused on a single (wind-rich, increasingly congested) transmission region. It examines the effects of a full deployment of GETs across the region.Long story short, GETs double the amount of new renewables the regional grid is able to accommodate through 2025. Building enough new power lines to do that would be wildly expensive and take decades; GETs do it almost immediately, with an investment that pays itself back in about six months. It also creates jobs, reduces carbon emissions, and saves the region money.In terms of the clean-energy transition, GETs are an easy win, a quick way to bring more renewables online and reduce emissions while also, helpfully, saving money. Utilities just need to do it.Making utilities want to get GETsThe core problem for GETs is the same problem I have been identifying for years: the incentive system in which US energy utilities operate. They do not make money by selling electricity or by providing superior service. They make money by receiving a guaranteed rate of return on capital investments. Naturally, they want to make more capital investments. If a technology comes along — energy efficiency, distributed energy resources (DERs), or GETs — that promises to defer or even head off the need to make new capital investments, the utility’s profits are directly threatened. All those technologies may serve the public’s social, economic, and environmental goals, but they do not serve the utilities’ financial interests. Even when utilities do not face a disincentive to improve their operational performance, they have no positive incentive, no reason to set aside money and resources. The costs of congestion and interconnection backups are simply passed along to ratepayers. Everyone in clean energy is aware of this basic incentives mismatch. “It's really an incentives issue,” says Erwin. “Clearly there is a misalignment in incentives,” says Ruiz. “There's no question about it.” Consequently, deployment of GETs remains confined to a few demonstration projects. Brattle summarizes:The slow pace of adoption of these new technology options may largely be driven by two factors. First, the technology options by themselves are not being recognized enough for their capabilities. … Second, there is insufficient incentive for either the transmission operators or owners—the two market players who are best suited to adopt these technologies—to innovate and change their operations, which requires a concerted effort.Reforming US utilities is a mountainous task, and nobody has time to wait around on it. In the meantime, the best that can be done is to create incentives where they are now lacking.FERC can do so by mandating that utilities and RTOs examine alternatives to new transmission — upgrades to the existing system — in transmission and operational planning processes. It can implement new rules that reward utilities for meeting performance metrics, so-called “performance-based regulation” (as is common in the UK and Australia). It can encourage benefit-sharing (and cost-sharing) among transmission owners and other market participants, both sharing congestion costs and spreading out the benefits of new GETs. And FERC could push utilities to subject new GETs projects to competitive bidding. A group of 13 senators recently wrote a letter to FERC asking that it take these steps to encourage GETs. Congress could help by offering tax credits or other financial incentives to utilities to improve existing transmission systems with GETs. Money is the best incentive of all.And maybe, some day, we could think about reforming utilities root and branch, to once and for all align their incentives with pro-social behavior. A fella can dream.GETs are part of the digitization of energyOne of my pet theories — which I first wrote about in 2016 — is that Vaclav Smil is wrong. Smil is a venerable energy analyst famous for throwing cold water on all the talk of a rapid transition to clean energy; he points out that previous energy transitions have taken more like a century than a decade.One reason I think the clean energy transition will move faster is that it is not merely a transition from one set of physical energy sources to another (though it is that too). It is also in part a transition from the physical to the digital. Where physical commodities generally get more expensive over time, computing power is consistently getting cheaper and cheaper. In area after area, engineers are figuring out how to substitute “intelligence for stuff” — i.e. computing power for commodities. Think, for instance, about solar trackers. Solar panel manufacturers used to experiment with a variety of shapes for panels, to try to catch more of the sun’s energy as it passes overhead; that manufacturing is expensive. Now panels can be mounted on trackers that automatically sense and follow the sun — so manufacturers mainly just make flat panels. The intelligence of the trackers has substituted for the stuff of the panels. (See also: digital circuit breakers that allow building owners to get more out of their existing electrical systems.)(I had to mention digital circuit breakers as an excuse to show this amazing video.)GETs are another great example. The same physical grid can virtually double its capacity through the combined application of GETs: better sensing, better calculating, and better control. Rather than make twice as much grid, we can make a grid twice as smart. Intelligence for stuff.Inevitably, as the costs of sensors, chips, and computing power continue to decline, we are going to infuse them into all our infrastructure: transportation, buildings, and power. We are going to get more performance out of our existing capital stock through the application of intelligence.Once progress is hitched to computing power, the clean energy transition will no longer be limited by the slow innovation and turnover cycles of physical commodities and machines. Things move much more quickly in the digital space. Consequently, the transmission grid we’ve already got may have much more potential than we’ve given it credit for. But fulfilling that potential will involve pushing utilities to value getting more out of the transmission assets they already own. It’s a fairly easy fix, for a large impact. Biden should get on it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Happy Monday! Welcome back to Transmission Fortnight here at Volts. Today’s a fun one.In my previous post, I described the many difficulties facing new high-voltage, long-distance transmission projects, from planning to financing to permitting and siting. It’s a bureaucratic slog.Today we’re going to look at a clever idea for bypassing many of those problems, namely, stitching together a national power grid by burying power lines along existing rail and road infrastructure, where rights-of-way are already established, thus eliminating the endless haggling with local governments and landowners. The idea has been gaining steam in the policy community for the last few years. FERC issued a report in June on challenges to transmission; siting along existing infrastructure was cited as a promising solution. In his Build Back Better plan, Biden promised to “take advantage of existing rights-of-way — along roads and railways — and cut red-tape to promote faster and easier [transmission] permitting.” This op-ed in The Hill sums up the benefits quite nicely, both of a national grid and of building it without siting battles. The vision is taking hold. And at least one small piece of that vision has gone beyond speculation into an actual permitting process. The SOO Green line will carry Iowa wind power to ChicagoA company called Direct Connect is currently in the development and permitting phase of a privately financed, $2.5 billion project called the SOO Green HVDC Link, a proposed 349-mile, 2.1-gigawatt (!), 525-kilovolt transmission line to run underground along existing railroad from Mason City, Iowa, to the Chicago, Illinois, area. It aims to go into operation in 2024.Going underground will allow the line to minimize environmental and visual impact. It will be much more resilient than an overhead line against weather, temperature shifts, sabotage, or squirrels. Two side-by-side cables will run through tubes of Cross-Linked Polyethylene (XLPE) and will be self-contained, lightweight, and easy to handle. They won’t get hot, interfere with signaling equipment (unlike AC lines), or affect rail operations. There are fiber-optic sensors along the lines to monitor sound and heat for any problems. (Nemo Link, the world’s first 400 kilovolt line using XLPE, runs undersea between the UK and Belgium; it began operation in January 2019.)Running alongside the railroad means SOO Green will have no need to claim land via eminent domain. Almost all of that railroad is owned by Canadian Pacific (one of seven large “class one” railroads in the US), so there are a tractable number of parties to deal with. A deal like this offers railroads a new passive revenue stream; royalty fees well exceed what they get from similarly buried fiber-optic lines, of which there are more than 100,000 miles along US railroads. And it’s also a chance for railroads to be part of a positive sustainability story. The project is privately funded, so there will be no need for any complicated cost-allocation formulas. The financiers (including Siemens, which very rarely puts direct capital in transmission projects) will make their money back from those who use the line — the suppliers that put power on it, the shippers that sell power across it, and the buyers that consume the power — through competitive bidding for capacity. SOO Green is holding an open solicitation right now to allocate its 2,100 megawatts among them. The aim is to create a more robust energy market by, for the first time, connecting the MISO and PJM territories. (MISO and PJM are regional transmission organizations; see previous post for details.) Wind power projects are backed up in MISO, waiting to connect, stymied by grid congestion. Meanwhile, nextdoor neighbor PJM is the largest liquid energy market in the world. The idea is that SOO Green will unlock renewable energy development in MISO; Direct Connect projects four to six new gigawatts. That energy will be transported to population centers in PJM, easing grid congestion, reducing the carbon intensity of the East Coast energy mix, and lowering power prices. The connection will also allow MISO and PJM to share reserves for the first time, which could reduce the need for reserve capacity, increase reliability, and save consumers money. Because the MISO side will be drawing from such a geographically broad region, it is likely to be in use almost continuously. “When the wind isn't blowing in North Dakota, it likely is in Minnesota,” Trey Ward, the CEO of Direct Connect, told me. “We anticipate upwards of 90 percent line utilization.”“It's as if we teleported a 2,100-megawatt wind turbine with a 90 percent capacity factor from Iowa into suburban Chicago,” he says. In fact, the converter station in PJM has applied to be treated as a capacity source in that market. (That will require some updating of regulations, just as power market regulations had to be updated to accommodate batteries.) The converter stations at each end of the line are worth looking at more closely. They will use the latest generation of Voltage Source Converters (VSCs) to exchange power between the HVDC line and the regional high-voltage alternating current (HVAC) systems already in place. VSC technology has been around since the late 1990s, but it has only recently gotten efficient, compact, and cheap enough to compete against the thyristors (solid-state valves) in common use today on HVDC lines. VSCs boast several important advantages. Thyristors need strong AC systems on both sides of the line, they require power filtering, and they have limited control over reactive power. (Do not ask me, or anyone else, what “reactive power” is. That way lies madness.)VSCs, on the other hand, are “self-commutated converters,” which means they can generate AC voltages (using IGBT capacitors) without relying on an AC system. They can control power independently, even with a weak AC system or no AC current at all; they can “black start” a grid from a blackout automatically, without any workers out throwing switches.VSCs allow precise and instantaneous, bi-directional control of both active and reactive power. They can provide services to the grid other than just energy — things like voltage and frequency regulation or “synthetic inertia” to support grid stability.“You can go from zero to 2,100 megawatts in 1/100 of a second, and back down again just as fast,” says Ward. “It will be the fastest, most dynamic resource on the North American grid.”Power electronics experts have been claiming for years that VSCs would eventually replace thyristors in HVDC projects. (“We’re in a race with Germany,” Ward says.) If built, SOO Green would be a big step toward making it finally happen — the first deployment of VSCs at this scale in the world. The main thing these VSC stations will do is serve as regional energy hubs, accepting gigawatts of energy from, or dispensing it to, existing HVAC grids.Energy users that require a large, reliable supply of high-quality electricity, like data centers or technology parks (perhaps ensconced in microgrids), can co-locate with the hubs to take advantage of their high-quality power control, thus spurring economic development. Direct Connect estimates that the SOO Green project will create 2,000 temporary construction jobs, unlock more than 4,000 jobs in renewable energy development, generate more than $2.7 billion in economic development in the two states, and yield more than $3.75 billion in ratepayer savings over 20 years. We shouldn’t exaggerate how easy things will be for SOO Green. It won’t be completely free of siting hassles, and there are costs outside its control. (The X factor is the cost of copper for the lines themselves — if it spikes for some reason, SOO Green will be in trouble.) But its costs will be much more predictable than a typical overhead line’s. It knows its exact route from the beginning and, because digging ditches is a pretty cheap and well-established technology, 80 percent of its construction costs will be for equipment. Things might be trickier for the next rail-transmission project. SOO Green is exploiting ideal conditions: a low-use railroad with well-characterized geology, connecting an energy-producing region with an energy-consuming one. Future projects could face more physical and economic challenges. At some point, there will be projects that don’t pencil out for private capital, but are needed to link the lines together into a national grid; then public money will have to step in.But private capital can do a lot. Ward mentions two federal policies that could help. One is a federal investment tax credit (ITC) like the one renewable energy receives, to defray the cost of investment, especially for early and pioneering projects. (More details on that in the previous post.)The other is some kind of manufacturing tax credit to spur more US companies to manufacture the XLPE line that Direct Connect is currently buying overseas. Even without those policies, though, things are more or less on track (har har) for SOO Green. If things go well for the project — no sure thing, given America’s history with transmission — it could serve as a template for new HVDC backbones along other sections of the elaborate US rail network. Ward estimates that as few as a half-dozen such lines would completely transform the US electricity system and spark billions of dollars of renewable energy development. (Direct Connect is in talks with all the class one railroads.) An aside: as long as we’re talking about electricity and railroads, you should check out Solutionary Rail, a plan to run (overhead catenary) electricity lines along the nation’s rail lines and electrify rail freight in the process.Anyway, to date there are no HVDC lines being planned along roads or highways, in part because state Departments of Transportation are always thinking about adding lanes, in which case the lines would have to be moved. But it’s also because developers still have an inflated sense of the cost of undergrounding lines. The news hasn’t widely spread that modern lines require less conducting metal, horizontal drilling has been perfected by natural gas frackers, and inverter stations are as little as 25 percent the size they used to be.Here’s what Dr. Christopher Clack, an energy modeler at Vibrant Clean Energy (VCE), told me:Data that I was provided from Tier 1 transmission vendors shows that the cost of underground HVDC transmission has a similar price point to the same overhead capacity of HVAC when the transmission line is over approximately 250 miles. This includes the cost to build inverter and rectifier stations at each end. And of course the sticker price of building overhead lines does not include the unpredictable expenses of regulatory hassles and intransigent landowners. A line can not be cheap if it never gets built. In terms of long-distance transmission, underground HVDC is now the smart choice. But there’s one other step planners and developers can take to bypass conventional transmission hassles.A national grid made of two-state piecesVCE is currently working on a detailed modeling exercise showing how the US can decarbonize by 2050. (You can see a preview here.)The modeling (like much other modeling before it) shows that a national HVDC network is desperately needed for decarbonization. But VCE is aware of the difficulty of siting lines that cross multiple states. So it came up with a way to create a national network that is comprised entirely of lines that only bridge two states — each one originates in one state and terminates in a neighboring state. And every one of the major HVDC trunk lines is underground, running along rail or road infrastructure.Here it is (a fancier map with more precise routes will be coming with the final release): The two-state pieces are like Legos from which a national grid can be built. “You can get [energy] from Colorado to Chicago,” Clack told me, “but you have to go through five rectifier stations. It is the same as having one line.”Building the system this way does come at some additional cost, since the VSC stations at the terminus of each line are expensive, and this would involve building more of them. And since each conversion of energy loses a little bit, all the additional conversions would add up to about 0.5 percent more “line loss.” But the advantage of this approach is that “each line is just a contract between two states,” Clack says. “You would never have a flyover state and you would never have a state that wouldn't get access to the market.” Each participating state would have one or more energy hubs and all the advantages — economic development, less grid congestion, lower power prices — they bring. The end result would be a functioning national energy grid. Clever! (When VCE’s modeling is officially released I’ll take a closer look at how the national grid operates and what it accomplishes.)Let’s do thisA national energy grid composed of underground HVDC lines running along existing rail and road infrastructure, with VSC stations in every state, is an absolute home run of an idea. It ticks every conceivable box: it’s economic development, jobs, clean energy, lower prices, and most of all, an ambitious national project that we can accomplish, red and blue states together, to regain some of America’s lost mojo.What’s more, transmission hasn’t yet fallen under the shadow of partisanship, unlike … everything else. There is bipartisan appetite for infrastructure spending and for unlocking the domestic renewable energy that is often concentrated in red states and needed in blue ones. An underground national HVDC network would create thousands of jobs and bring hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of new economic development to every single US state. It would save every American money on their power bills. It would bring national decarbonization within reach. It would literally do what Biden promised: bring people together. We should build it! This is a public episode. 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A deep dive into why the U.S. still lacks long-distance power lines and what stops big transmission projects. Clear explainer of federal and state roles, regulatory orders, and funding hurdles. Walks through practical levers in FERC, DOE, and Congress to speed planning, cost allocation, permitting, and financing for interregional transmission.

A deep dive into the big, high-voltage power lines that move electricity across long distances. Discussion of how new long-range lines unlock remote wind and solar for cities. Exploration of national grid ideas, HVDC links, and lessons from global and U.S. projects. Politics, regulatory hurdles, and signs of growing bipartisan momentum are highlighted.

[If you don’t feel like reading this post, just click Play above and I’ll read it to you.]Happy Inauguration Day, Voltsians! I know it’s getting somewhat tedious to keep saying this, but yes, I’m still working on that transmission post. I swore when I started my own publication that I was not going to rush anymore — that I would research and work on stuff until I was happy with it. But I never swore not to be neurotic and apologetic about it! Anyway, it’s in the works. Until then, let’s look at a few interesting news developments from this eventful past week. Biden administration pledges to come out of the gate swingingA few weeks ago, I shared some simple advice with the Biden administration: blitz. Do everything within your power, as fast as possible, and don’t get tripped up trying to finesse the media narrative or secure chimerical congressional cooperation.In what is clearly a direct response to my piece (I mean probably), the administration recently leaked plans for its first term, to be kicked off with a 10-day spree of executive actions — roughly a dozen on Day One alone. CTV News got the scoop from a memo by incoming Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain, which Politico subsequently confirmed.I really encourage you to click over and read the list — it’s the best I’ve felt in ages. So many lives will be immediately improved through health, immigration, and Covid relief measures. Elections really do matter.But we’re here to talk about climate and energy, so I went through and picked out the relevant stuff:Wednesday, after inaugurationDeclaration that the U.S. is rejoining Paris climate accord.Start of a process to restore 100 public health and environmental rules that the Obama administration created and President Donald Trump eliminated or weakened.Not included in the memo but confirmed by CNN reporting: rescind the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. By February 1Executive actions to address climate change.BeyondWin passage of a $2 trillion climate package to get the U.S. to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.Win passage of a plan to spend $700 billion boosting manufacturing and research and development.The list suggests that the administration is going to move aggressively on multiple fronts, but it doesn’t reveal much about what direction it will go on climate. The last two items are going to be pure messaging efforts — as long as the filibuster remains in place, neither has a chance of passage in Congress.The first item, getting back in the Paris agreement, is low-hanging fruit, more symbolic than impactful. Ultimately, a Paris pledge is simply a pledge to pass domestic carbon policy, so it’s the domestic carbon policy that really matters. The second item, cleaning up Trump’s regulatory mess, is extremely important, but it’s a matter of restoration, not building. The third item, Keystone XL, is a genuinely nice-to-see nod to climate activists, but not that big a deal in carbon terms.So everything rides on that vague fourth item: “Executive actions to address climate change.” Will Biden’s EPA launch work on new rules to tackle fuel economy? A new plan to decarbonize the electricity sector? More stringent rules on air pollution? Rules that encourage building electrification? My fear is that the administration will put off that work, thinking that being gentle will make legislation easier. It won’t. Just do the rules!Court strikes down Trump’s plan to (not) regulate power plantsTuesday brought a bit of good fortune that will make Biden’s work easier: a federal court struck down one of Trump’s most important climate rollbacks, and not only that, repudiated the legal argument it was based on.Some background: The Obama administration’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants — the Clean Power Plan — was stuck in legal limbo, waiting on a federal court ruling, when Trump came into power and squashed it for good. It never got the ruling or went into effect.The argument before the court was over whether the Clean Air Act grants EPA the authority to regulate air pollutants “beyond the fenceline.” The Clean Power Plan was extremely flexible, allowing states to meet their reduction targets through a portfolio of compliance strategies, many of which (like building new renewables or increasing energy efficiency) took place outside of the regulated power plants themselves — beyond the fenceline. Republican lawyers argued that EPA regulations can only mandate changes “within the fenceline,” which, when it comes to something like a coal plant, amounts to some modest efficiency improvements.When the rule and the lawsuit were scrapped, Trump’s EPA developed a replacement plan based on that legal interpretation: the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. Now, pretty much all the rules that came out of the Trump administration were shoddy and ridiculous, but ACE was something special. Studies found that the rule would lead to an increase in carbon emissions, because it would enable some coal plants to run more often. EPA’s own regulatory impact analysis found the rule would lead to as many as 1,400 additional deaths per year by 2030. Yes, you read that right: it was a pollution rule that would have led to more pollution and more deaths than passing no rule at all. It was super-dumb. Happily, a key federal court agrees: the DC Circuit Court of Appeals just struck ACE down. The ruling said that the administration “fundamentally has misconceived the law” in restricting changes to within the fenceline, effectively endorsing the Obama administration’s much more expansive interpretation. That means Biden’s EPA will not have to go through the laborious process of rolling back the ACE rule. Instead it can begin with a blank slate — “consider the question afresh,” as the court put it — and come up with a plan as flexible as Obama’s, but much more ambitious. It’s a fortuitous bit of news, fortuitously timed.And we begin our course in advanced Manchin studiesWest Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D-ish) — who incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has inexplicably made the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee — recently gave an interview to the conservative Washington Examiner in which he said a bunch of ridiculous stuff like, “you cannot eliminate your way to a cleaner environment. You can innovate your way.”Sigh. I was disheartened, and said so on Twitter.I was subsequently assured by several people I trust that this is just Manchin being Manchin, saying the kinds of things that will appeal to whatever audience he happens to be speaking to. In fact, I’m told, while Manchin is obliged by the Republican lean in his state to voice opposition to heavy-handed (read: any) regulation, he is in fact open to the kind of historic investments that would transform the energy landscape. He hasn’t ruled out DC statehood. He’s softer on the filibuster than it seems. He’ll be willing to bargain when it comes time for budget reconciliation. Congressional insiders seem weirdly optimistic about the possibilities under Manchin. So maybe I’m wrong! Maybe he is more flexible than he’s making out and will come through when circumstances demand it. I hope so.Either way, we’re all going to be studying this guy’s every word and expression for clues, for four years, so get used to it.Feline representation mattersMy dogs Forest and Mabel get most of the glory here at Volts, but I also have two cats, Anakin and Obi-Wan. They are old — my family got them when I was away attending Obama’s 2008 inauguration, ironically enough — and not particularly fond of sitting for pictures.They do like a good cuddle, though, and are willing to look at you exactly like this until you comply. Thanks for reading, everyone. This is a public episode. 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Greetings, peoples of the Volts! I’ve got a special treat for you today. It’s not my first podcast, exactly, but it’s my first Official Podcast, with music and fancy-pants guests and everything. My guests are:* Dr. Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the excellent recent book Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States; and* Sam Ricketts, former climate director for the Jay Inslee presidential campaign, cofounder of Evergreen Action, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and general climate-political man about town. Our subject? How to pass a national clean energy standard through budget reconciliation. If those words mean nothing to you, I recommend reading my previous post, about the Georgia Senate wins and what they mean for clean-energy policy. But I’ll run through some quick background.Biden may need to squeeze his signature climate plan through a budget billOne of the most important elements of Joe Biden’s climate plan — arguably the centerpiece — is a national clean energy standard (CES) that would require the electricity sector to steadily decarbonize until it reaches net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. This is important not just because the electricity sector is responsible for about a third of emissions, but because a lot of other emitting sectors like transportation and heating are going to shift to electricity in coming years, driving up demand. It’s important to have clean electricity for them to use.While Biden does have a Democratic Congress, his majority in the Senate remains slim and the filibuster is likely to remain in place, which means a big climate bill is unlikely. Any big bill at all is unlikely. Probably the only thing that will pass Congress is what’s called a budget reconciliation bill, which can not be filibustered and thus can get by with a simple majority.The only things allowed in a reconciliation bill are budget-relevant items, i.e., measures that raise or lower government revenue. Biden’s CES is a purely regulatory measure — it just changes the rules. It probably couldn’t get through reconciliation.However! Could a CES be tweaked or modified or redesigned in some way so that it is budget relevant and could pass through reconciliation? Could Biden pass his top climate priority after all?That is precisely what Leah and Sam have been working on, and that’s what we discuss, at some length, in today’s podcast. It’s way more interesting than it sounds! (That may be my new tag line.)Bonus MabelLife is a donut, y’all. Grab onto it with all your fearsome teeth. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

[If you do not feel like reading today’s post, you can listen to it. Just hit play above.]Y’all, before we get started today I have to share the funniest thing that’s ever happened. You know how I went on MSNBC a few weeks ago to talk about how Joe Biden should do everything at once? And you know how former Saturday Night Live comedienne and all-around awesome person Leslie Jones frequently tapes herself watching MSNBC and commenting on people and their rooms? Well get a load of this:Lol. It’s even funnier to read the comment thread beneath the tweet. Apparently I look like all the white bearded guys rolled into one. Anyway. Good times. On to business!I’m working on a longer post about electricity transmission (join the preliminary discussion), but the news cycle has intervened. To wit: on Tuesday, Democrats officially won both the Senate runoffs in Georgia. Joe Biden will have a Democratic Senate!This news has Forest shaking with excitement.So before we get to transmission, let’s talk about what these Senate wins mean, in general and specifically for clean-energy policy. I’ll end with a little bit of advice for the Democratic Congress, which is the same advice I gave Biden: go for it. Control over the Senate mattersDemocrats have 50 senators (well, 48 plus Independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King) and Vice President Harris casts the tie-breaking vote, so technically they have a majority in the Senate — albeit the slimmest possible majority.But in the US Senate, the one-vote difference between being in the minority and being in the majority is a chasm. Just ask incoming Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Most importantly, the Senate majority leader controls which bills come to the floor. McConnell was forever refusing to bring bills to a vote unless he had the entire GOP caucus behind him — even bills with enough bipartisan support to pass. It was an incredibly effective weapon to suppress and obscure the Democratic agenda. New Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will be able to control the tempo and focus now. Secondly, Senate committees will now be chaired by Dems, who can choose what to hold hearings on, and when. Thirdly, this is going to make it much easier for Biden to get his appointments confirmed by the Senate, which is a huge relief — those fights would have drained his attention and political capital. The day after the election, Biden announced that he would nominate Merrick Garland for attorney general. Ha ha, suck it, Mitch.Fourthly, if Dems can maintain their unity (which is never a given), they can begin populating the federal bench with competent progressive judges to offset the incompetent reactionaries McConnell has been cranking out. And if Justice Stephen Breyer should choose to retire [makes the sign of the cross] they will have an opportunity to get a solid progressive on the Supreme Court.Losing the Senate would have been a disaster for Dems. Congress would have passed nothing, leaving Biden virtually alone to accomplish everything his coalition needs to hang together in 2022 and 2024. Instead they have a narrow majority in the Senate to match their increasingly narrow majority in the House. So it is a non-disaster. That said, it’s not going to lead to progressive legislation.A 50-50 Senate will be owned & operated by Joe ManchinPre-November, Democrats were pretty high on election optimism — smoking some bad polls, as it turns out — and there was talk of a sweeping, New Deal-esque agenda, beginning with aggressive democracy reform and moving quickly into climate change. (Biden’s published plans constituted the most progressive agenda any Democratic presidential candidate has run on in decades.)That was all premised on the idea of Democrats winning 52 or 53 seats in the Senate. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, even that wouldn’t have been nearly enough of a margin for Dems to pass the kind of agenda Biden ran on.But with only 50 seats, Democrats will need unanimity for every move they make. Republicans will be united in obstructionism. It is what they know best; it is where they shine. There are only a few Republican senators who even pretend to be “moderate” any more — Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Mitt Romney (UT), basically — and even if one or two Republicans can be picked off for a given vote, that’s not enough to fully offset losing conservative Dems like Joe Manchin (WV, now chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), and Jon Tester (MT), plus Independent Angus King (ME).Basically, the rightmost handful of Dems in the Senate will be the narrow aperture through which all legislation must pass, and as such, they will have almost total veto power over every part of the agenda. They will decide what gets through.Manchin does not want to pass Medicare for All or a Green New Deal. He doesn’t even want to pass Biden’s actual climate plan. He doesn’t want to do anything big at all, which he has made very clear:Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the most conservative member of his party in the Senate, has a message for fellow Democrats hoping to capture the majority and quickly begin muscling through legislation to bring about sweeping, liberal change: not on his watch.Most importantly, Manchin doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster, and he’s not alone in that. Without 50 votes to scrap it, the filibuster stays, which means no major legislation will pass. No more Covid relief bills. No democracy reform bill. No climate bill. No health care bill. Nothing, period, full stop. (I cannot stress the point enough: there is no significant legislation in the universe for which 10 Republican senators will cross over to vote with Dems, save perhaps defense spending authorization. Keeping the filibuster means deliberately taking major legislation off the table.)That doesn’t mean there’s no hope for clean energy in the new Congress, though.Opportunities for climate progressI’ve already written about all the things Biden can do using executive authority alone. All of that is still on the table, though as we will see below, it is somewhat complicated by the Georgia development.But what about Congress? There is at least one place where Dems could get substantial clean energy legislation passed.Budget reconciliationI wrote a long piece on reconciliation last year, which I recommend. (Everyone needs to study up on this!) It’s a bit difficult to nail down, because the rules governing it are not statutory but adopted rules of the Senate, which can be changed — either at the beginning of the session or on a case-by-case basis. So reconciliation is, in many ways, whatever the Senate wants it to be.Budget reconciliation was originally conceived of in modest terms, as a way for the Senate to finalize and work out any discrepancies in the federal budget for the year. Unlike normal legislation, it cannot be filibustered, so it requires only a majority vote.As normal legislation has become more difficult, both parties have increasingly turned to reconciliation to pass their priorities. If I may quote my own story:In an age of partisan gridlock, the boundaries of [reconciliation’s] use have been pushed by both parties. “As polarization has made it harder to legislate under regular order,” says Molly Reynolds, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, “the pot of gold at the end of the reconciliation rainbow has become more and more valuable as a way to pursue party-defining achievements.”But reconciliation is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It can’t be used for just anything. Quoting myself again:The big and most obvious limitations are that a budget reconciliation bill is typically only passed once a year, cannot create or change regulations, and cannot create or direct any discretionary spending (things like research, defense, and environmental protection). It can only mess with mandatory spending or the tax code.Within that basic framework, the biggest limitations are imposed by the “Byrd Rule,” introduced by then-Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd in 1985 (and subsequently incorporated into the [Congressional Budget Act] in 1990). He wanted to prohibit “extraneous” measures in reconciliation bills. He defined as extraneous any measures that [quoting Vox’s Dylan Matthews]: “change Social Security; don’t change the overall level of spending or revenue, or where such a change is merely ‘incidental’; increase deficits outside the 10-year budget window, and/or are outside the jurisdiction of the committee recommending them.” All reconciliation bills receive a special analysis to see if they abide by these restrictions, a process known semi-affectionately as a “Byrd bath.”This set of restrictions creates a kind of conceptual puzzle into which reconciliation policies must fit. They must materially affect spending or revenue, but they must balance out over the budget window (typically 10 years). Any new spending or tax expenditure must be paid for within that window.So what kind of clean energy policy can fit through this reconciliation process? The most obvious place to look is at measures that directly affect the budget: a refunded carbon fee, clean-energy tax credits and RD&D investments, infrastructure investments, and the like. Anything that spends money or charges fees.A variety of mandatory spending programs — think Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment benefits — could be tweaked to support a just transition away from fossil fuels. A Green Bank (or an infrastructure bank with a green focus) could be established to make ongoing clean-energy investments.There’s also some thinking underway about how to tweak regulatory programs so that they work via the budget and thus could pass reconciliation. For instance, there are several ways that a national clean-energy standard to decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035 could be adapted to reconciliation. (More on that in a post coming soon.) But it’s a lot of work, translating regulations to budget measures, and there are a lot of regulations needed.In theory, the Dem majority could vote to suspend or change reconciliation rules for particular measures like democracy reform. If challenged by the Senate parliamentarian who rules on these matters, they could simply vote to override. But it’s not clear why that bit of procedural radicalism would be any more congenial to Manchin than ditching the filibuster. Total Democratic unity is almost certainly going to be required to get any ambitious reconciliation bill passed (remember, other Dem interest groups also want their priorities included; Republicans are going to hate these bills), so once again, Manchin will be the gatekeeper. That will mean, among other things, that carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) gets lots of money, along with a bunch of other stuff greens don’t like.Nonetheless, budget reconciliation is likely the biggest bite Dems will get at the apple, and they’ll get at least two before the 2022 elections.The Congressional Review ActTrump did an enormous amount of regulatory damage in his four years and Biden’s administration could easily spend four years cleaning it all up. It could use some help.Helpfully, there’s a law called the Congressional Review Act. I wrote a piece about it in (good lord) 2011 that has some background. Quoting myself yet again:The CRA is a law Newt Gingrich got passed back in 1996. It says that within 60 days of a regulation being passed by the executive branch, a majority in both houses of Congress can vote to nullify it. (It can’t be filibustered, so you only need a majority in the Senate, not the usual 60.)At the time, the law was rarely used, because the circumstances in which it could possibly work are narrow. Any bill has to be signed into law by a president, and presidents don’t want to nullify their own administration’s regulations, so a president is only likely to sign a CRA that nullifies what the previous president did in the last 60 days of their term in office. And that new president needs both houses of Congress to be controlled their party as well. It doesn’t seem like it ought to happen much, and hadn’t until Hillary Clinton lost to Trump and Republicans took both houses in 2016. Republicans went on an immediate deregulatory bender, nixing 16 rules Obama passed in his last 60 days.Now it’s happened again: Trump lost to Biden and Democrats took both houses. So Dems can use the CRA to nullify everything Trump did in his last 60 days, with the stroke of a pen. And Trump has done a lot in his last 60 days. ProPublica has a special project devoted to tracking all the last-minute regulatory changes Trump’s administration has pushed (and is pushing) through. There’s a short article in The National Law Review about how best to use the CRA. Over at Morning Consult, Lisa Martine Jenkins has a nice chart covering the various ways that Dems might overturn Trump regulations, including by using the CRA.Among the CRA’s top targets: the EPA’s odious “secret science” rule, which would prohibit the agency from considering a huge and pivotal body of studies on public health; the EPA’s twisting of cost-benefit analysis to ignore most of the benefits of air pollution rules; DOI’s recent leasing of Alaskan Arctic land for oil and gas drilling; the recent assault on the Migratory Bird Treaty; and many more. Democratic wonks have been tracking the Trump administration closely and stand ready to write a comprehensive CRA bill. It should (and likely will) be a top priority for the new Congress.Uncertainties aboundRoughly 100% of my political prognostications in the last five years have proven laughably wrong, so I’m not even going to pretend to predict what course the next few years will take. As the last few days have demonstrated yet again, anything can happen.But there are a few particular strands I’ll be keeping my eye on.There’s at least some chance that Manchin is just positioning himself on the filibuster. Other filibuster supporters like Ron Wyden (OR) have recently said that, while they don’t want to get rid of it, they aren’t simply going to let Republicans block everything again. There’s some chance that, if Democrats lead with a democracy reform bill and Republicans block it, Wyden, Manchin, and other Dems could be persuaded to suspend the filibuster on a one-time basis, or reform it — say, so that senators once again have to conduct “talking filibusters,” appearing on the floor rather than simply vowing to filibuster through a press release.Another wrinkle is that having a Democratic Congress might weaken Biden’s drive to maximize executive action. He might think that if he acts too aggressively, he’ll lose the cooperation of key Democratic moderates. I think that would be a huge mistake — executive action is something he knows he can do, while congressional cooperation, as Biden should have learned under Obama, can be a maddening ephemera.There’s also the question of the 2022 elections. A president’s first midterms are typically a disaster in which their party loses Congressional seats. (Think, if you can stand it, about 2010.) And in 2020, Republicans won the key state houses that will allow them to gerrymander themselves more seats, so there’s a very real chance Dems could lose the House in 2022. The Senate landscape will be more congenial to Dems; Republicans are defending 20 seats, Dems only 13. But Senate races are devilishly difficult to handicap.So 2022 could see Dems keeping both houses, which would strengthen their mandate; losing the House and keeping the Senate, which would put a freeze on new legislation and open up the possibility of impeachment (Republicans will make up some reason); or losing both houses, which opens up the possibility of impeachment and removal from office. And then there’s the question of Biden’s health and the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, which is even more opaque and unpredictable.We are cursed to live in interesting times. The Republican Party could implode. US democracy could crumble in the face of authoritarianism. A meteor could strike America. These are all open possibilities.So in the end, my advice to the Democratic Congress is the same as it is to Biden: blitz. Only two years are guaranteed. The only hope Democrats have of surviving the waves of white grievance and authoritarianism that are crashing against DC — strengthened by deep structural deficiencies in the US constitutional system — is to rapidly and visibly improve the lives of ordinary people. Get the pandemic under control. Give Americans money to get through the recession. Give them access to affordable health care. Make it easier for them to vote. And invest in the clean-energy growth that will employ them and clean their air. Do it proudly and loudly and make sure everyone hears about it.If you have to write a check to every citizen of West Virginia to get it done, well then, all hail our new overlord Joe Manchin, blessed be His beneficence. This is a public episode. 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Hey, Volts readers, guess what? Now you can be Volts listeners! If you would prefer to hear the post below read aloud, by me, just click play above. And if you like having the posts read like this, let me know. If enough people are into it, I might see about getting some better equipment and actually learning how to edit a sound file.Before we jump in, some housekeeping:* Remember, as of Jan. 1, free subscribers will receive one post a week. The other posts, and the ability to comment on posts and discussion threads, will be reserved for members (paid subscribers). I’m somewhat loath to do this — in my perfect world, it would all be free — but I need to, like, live. And buy dog food. So please join! We’re gonna have fun. * There are 20% subscription discounts for groups of four or more and students and educators. If you’re an educator who wants Volts access for your class or group, let me know and we’ll figure something out. * If you want to subscribe but can’t afford it right now, let me know and I’ll set you up. You can reply to this email and I’ll get it. * The Covid-relief/omnibus megabill, containing an enormous energy bill that I discussed last week? Trump signed it. It’s law! (I also discussed it with Matt Yglesias on the first Volts podcast.)Anyway, on to business.Today I’m going to do something a little different. It might seem like an odd digression into philosophy and ethics, but it comes back around to politics. In fact, it explains my core political orientation about as well as anything can.I’m going to explain why I hate the Trolley Problem.The Trolley Problem and its variantsThe Trolley Problem is a famous “thought experiment” in ethics. It traces back to philosopher Philippa Foot, who first wrote about it in 1967, but in the years since there have been dozens upon dozens of variations, in both the philosophical literature and the popular press.You’ve probably heard some version. The most basic goes like this: There’s an out-of-control railcar hurtling toward five people who are tied to the track. You’re next to a switch that could divert the car to another track, but on that track is a single worker who would be killed if you do. What do you do?Variations are endless. What if the person on track two is your son? What if the choice is between five people you know to be murderers and one good person? What if the choice were made from a switch house where you couldn’t see any of the people? The point of these thought experiments is to probe your intuitions and principles. Is it better to do nothing and allow five deaths or to take affirmative action that leads to one death? Does the difference between acting and refraining from acting matter? Does the number of lives matter? Etc. The recent development of autonomous vehicles has brought the Trolly Problem back into popular consciousness yet again. If robots are going to be driving, how will they make these decisions? Will they be utilitarians, maximizing the number of lives saved at every juncture, or Kantians, refusing to knowingly sacrifice one life for another? Presumably however we program them. So maybe we have to decide after all.The Trolley Problem served as the basis for a fan-favorite sequence on the show The Good Place:And of course, times being what they are, it has inspired all manner of memes.Despite its enduring appeal, the Trolley Problem is Bad. It is misleading about moral decision making and, more importantly, misleading about how to improve moral decision making.It’s not moral principles but moral agents that matter mostSome of you know that I spent several years in the late 1990s getting an MA in philosophy and then starting on (but not finishing) a PhD. Anyone who studied analytic philosophy — as I did, at least at first — has spent lots of time with thought experiments. I spent a semester reading the pinnacle of pure intellectual gymnastics, Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which is full of thought experiments moral, epistemic, metaphysical, and otherwise. The book is revered in the field, considered one of the great philosophical works of the 20th century, and it completely turned me off. It’s one of many things that led me away from philosophy entirely. As the Trolley Problem is structured, you, the moral agent, have an utter paucity of knowledge about the situation. You don’t know why you’re there, any of the people involved, any history, any detail. All you know is, one life or five lives. The problem is designed to make the agent (the decider) invisible, to isolate the decision itself away from embedded, embodied experience. Which is fine, if you’re just having a think. But discussing the ideal ranking of moral principles is like discussing Kant’s noumena, the thing-in-itself. No human can directly perceive it and wouldn’t know if they had, so there’s an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin aspect to it. All we have are the perceptual and analytic tools available to us, so we should focus on improving them. If you want trolley-style decisions made better in the real world, in real societies, you’re much better off focusing on agents than on any set of final principles.How to be a good trolley deciderConsider if you ended up in the Trolley Problem in real life. How would you make a good decision in that situation? Ideally, you would be coming to it with a history; you’d know how you got there and something about how situation developed, who the other people are, why they hell they’re tied to the track, etc. You’d have a good sense of how fast the railcar is traveling and the force necessary to stop it. You’d have a good sense of the chances of success of various options: flagging down the car or the man working on the tracks, finding something to throw on the tracks, jumping on the track yourself. You’d know whether the people tied to the track are real or dummies, whether you’re being tricked.You’d also need the ability to make a quick decision in extremely difficult circumstances. You couldn’t let your fear or over-analysis paralyze you (as happens to Chidi in Good Place). You’d need the ability to keep your cool, to maintain some emotional distance from the situation, to rapidly consider the options from different perspectives, to notice if there are other non-obvious alternatives. You’d need to be alert, well-rested, well-fed, not distracted, attuned to circumstances — what the man on the tracks is doing, how securely the other people are attached to the tracks, whether the ground and tracks are wet and slippery, the speed of the railcar, the age of the equipment, etc. And finally, you would need to be motivated to do the right thing.To make the best possible decision, you would need to be perfectly informed, acting based on prosocial motivations and a perfect temperament, in control of yourself and thinking with perfect clarity. In other words, what we’d want operating in a real-world case of the Trolley Problem is not the perfect set of principles, but the perfect moral agent — the best possible decision-maker.That’s my answer to the Trolley Problem and all similar thought experiments: the right decision is whatever decision the best possible moral decision-maker would make in the situation. Of course, there is no such moral superagent. No one in this world, making real decisions in real circumstances, has a perfect temperament or is ever perfectly informed or thinking with perfect clarity. The default, in fact, is harried people making thoughtless decisions based on crude heuristics and mental models. But the crucial point is that we can be better or worse decision-makers, closer or farther away from the ideal described above, and we have a pretty good idea what it takes to help people get closer. (More on that below.) One thing that doesn’t seem to help is a well-developed set of ethical principles. A 2014 research paper surveyed the empirical evidence collected by studies of various moral behaviors and found “no statistically detectable difference between the behavior of ethicists and non-ethicists.” In any real-world situation, good decision-making is enabled less by abstract principles than by temperament and discernment, i.e., self-possession and wisdom. The person who takes in the most information, can see the situation through the appropriate lens, and can act on priorities amidst pressure and uncertainty will likely make the best decision. Whether we’re seeking better real-world outcomes (as I am) or seeking better answers to longstanding moral questions (as the Trolley Problem is), the right strategy is the same: get help. Try to make society fertile for the development of better moral agents. They will have better answers than we do.How to encourage the growth of better moral agentsIn his seminal 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman made a distinction between system 1 (S1) thinking and system 2 (S2) thinking.Kahneman describes S1 as “fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, and unconscious” — what are more colloquially known as “gut reactions.”S2 is “slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, and conscious,” closer to what we tend to conceive of as thinking — taking a step back, slowing down, consciously assessing and reasoning.Very crudely speaking, you can think of S1 engaging the amygdala, the brain’s basic pleasure/pain, attraction/revulsion centers, and S2 engaging the frontal cortex, the centers of symbol manipulation, self-reflection, and conscious calculation. The amygdala is prior to the frontal cortex, both evolutionarily speaking and in biological priority. Long-term thinking requires a basic level of safety, an S1 system quiet enough to let S2 work. The more threat looms, the more we, like all biological creatures, prioritize the immediate security of our bodies, our families, our tribes, our borders. We know that stress and privation make S2 thinking more difficult. For a superb introduction to this work, listen to Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neuroscientist and primatologist who has studied the intersection of stress and poverty. (Seriously, take an hour, it will change how you think.)Sapolsky’s work is varied and fascinating, but the recurring theme is that, in modern human societies, it’s expensive to be poor — cognitively, emotionally, and physically. Poverty, hunger, and social marginalization lead to stress, exhaustion, anxiety, and ill health. Stress is a biological emergency reaction, an elevated heart rate and flood of hormones designed for short-term anticipatory threat response. But it is now experienced as a constant background state in response to chronic threats that have no immediate solutions, to corrosive long-term effect. Sapolsky calls being on the lower end of America’s social and economic totem pole a “psychic sledgehammer.” Under those blows, it is difficult to undertake the “slow, effortful” cognitive processes necessary for long-term plans or Olympian moral decision-making.And our vulnerability to circumstance traces all the way back to before our birth. Stress hormones and nutrition in pregnant mothers shape the neural pathways of the fetus in the womb. The crucial weeks, months, and years after birth shape basic neural and hormonal response patterns that persist for life.(I once wrote a long article on the centrality of luck to human life. It’s a good one!)From the womb on, everywhere is the same basic pattern: insofar as a person feels safe and nurtured, they can more easily develop higher order and longer term thinking. Conversely, hunger, stress, and privation cause heightened threat response and a shrinking of horizons. That’s true whether it’s a fetus bathed in stress hormones or an adult marginalized in a society with low trust. Life is composed of dozens of small decisions every day, decisions in which conflicting interests and principles must be resolved, long-term benefits, personal and social, weighed against short-term desires. To maximize the net welfare of society, which ought to be our goal, we need to improve those decisions, incrementally, at the margins, bit by bit.We do that by creating better moral agents, which we know how to do. We make sure that everyone has their basic needs cared for; that every family expecting a baby receives prenatal care and basic childcare training; that every family with a new child receives time off from work and regular nurse visits; that every child has access to quality public education, from pre-school through college; and that every adult receives adequate health care and housing. We create a compassionate, law-bound society that incentivizes prosocial behaviors. These are the kinds of things that create the necessary foundation for widespread S2 thinking. Progressivism is about bringing more of humanity into serviceAnd this, at a fundamental level, is why I’m a progressive. It’s not that I think I’ve figured out the perfect society or the correct way to live. It’s that I believe we can get better at it — better at living, better at society, better at peace and equitable, sustainable prosperity. The best way to improve is to recruit as much help as possible, to get the maximum number of minds and hearts involved. The more we lift people up out of poverty, precarity, discrimination, and stress, the more we unleash their minds on longer term problems and non-zero-sum, cooperative solutions. The more minds we have applying themselves to our collective trolley problems, the more likely we are to get good answers. The Trolley Problem attempts to isolate moral intuitions from the messiness of human experience, but integrating those intuitions and principles into human practice is the whole ballgame. It’s what matters. Being good, acting for the greatest good of humanity and the biosphere, is a practical skill, not a fixed body of knowledge or set of rules. It’s something we do together, not as isolated moral agents next to rail switches. And it’s difficult. It involves building and defending a complex social and economic infrastructure. We accomplish it, if at all, by paying closer attention to human experience, not abstracting away from it.Thinking about philosophy led me out of philosophyOver the course of his career, one of my favorite philosophers, Richard Rorty, basically thought his way out of philosophy. He started in analytic philosophy, moved to American pragmatism, and ended up doing something like social and political commentary. I won’t try to summarize or speak for Rorty, who is a towering and complicated figure, but my intellectual arc was, in its own modest way, more or less the same.What philosophical pragmatism captures is that, whether it’s ethics, metaphysics, consciousness, or personal identity, Ultimate Truth doesn’t and can’t matter to us. We can’t experience it directly. We wouldn’t know for certain if we had. All we can experience is one another and our endlessly varying, conflicting ideas about the right perspectives and frames through which to view evidence and events. Our only real metric for comparison is which perspectives and frames work better to navigate the world (“work better” being the heart of pragmatism). No god or revelation is going to come along and settle those endless arguments. The real work is just figuring out how we can live together in something approximating peace and harmony, how we can improve our collective circumstances even in light of our inescapable differences. Abstract thought experiments can’t answer those questions; they are questions of practice, of incremental improvement, the strong and slow boring of hard boards. I like to think that what I’m doing today is, in some small way, engaging with those real-world problems, helping to bore the boards. It is immeasurably more satisfying than sitting in a room contemplating imaginary dilemmas. The only trolleys I care about these days are the ones that serve transit-oriented development.Thanks for reading this far, y’all! That was long and nerdy. You deserve some dogs.Here’s Forest, majestically/goofily surveying his grandfather’s back yard.And here is Mabel engaged in her new favorite activity: staring contemplatively into the fire. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Happy Christmas Eve, everyone. I hope you are somewhere safe and warm.Here’s a little holiday treat for you: I recorded my first Voltscast.Matt Yglesias runs a newsletter called Slow Boring. He is interested in the energy bill that Congress passed this week. I just wrote a long post about that energy bill.We wanted to chat about it. Starting a whole official podcast with professional editing and music and a name and all the rest sounded a bit daunting, so as an experiment, we decided, in the immortal words of Bill O’Reilly …We talked, we recorded it, and we’re sending it to you, unedited. Fast and loose. Let me know what you think and if you’d like to see (er, hear) more like this. I’d like to get into doing more audio in the future. Apparently some people don’t have time to read 3,000-word pieces, but they can listen to me read pieces while they wash the dishes or walk the dog, so I might try a bit of narration. And I’ve had a few early talks with people about doing something more professional and produced.I’ll be honest: I don’t really want to launch an Actual Podcast and get tied to a particular format and schedule. I’m terrible at satisficing and I know if I did it I would obsess over it and it would eat up all my time, and I’d rather spend my time writing. I’d like to do it on a less formal basis, though, at least if y’all are into it, so let me know.In the meantime, stay cozy like Mabel and Forest. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe