Most of what you think is like firm and sturdy in modern life is a lot shallower than you think it is and a lot easier to poke through than you think it is and we all need to get this in our heads because it's like that's the dominant fact of life in the 21st century is like more fragility than you think.

Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me your host Chris Hayes.

I'm sitting here in the podcast closet looking at the beautiful snow gently falling out the window we've got about probably about a foot and a half accumulated up here in the remote with pod location and of course we've been covering this week what's going on in Texas with the sort of total grid meltdown.

So you know covering Texas it's not the first time that we've covered a natural disaster on the show in fact we end up covering the fair amount particularly in an era of extreme weather and every time that we cover it is aster I keep having the same thought which is wow there's all this infrastructure that produces modern civilization that I that runs around in the background that I just don't think about that much the electricity system the water system which is now been an issue in Texas.

When I was down in hurricane in the aftermath of hurricane Irma in the Gulf Coast of Florida in 2017 in a place where you can't get anywhere unless by car the infrastructure for the delivery of gasoline.

Quickly became a problem in fact it was super stressful because we would be driving around with half a tank of gas watching the meter go down and there's normally it's like well stop at gas station or I'll put on the lights or I'll grab some water all those things get to you through a set of very complex systems in the background and when emergency and disaster strike suddenly the cascade by which they fail becomes kind of terrifying and a fair amount of gas.

A few days of that you start to think wow we are actually not that far from you know core Mac McCarthy's the road to be like you know but we're actually not that far from like very serious dystopic conditions and I think that's what's been hitting home in Texas.

And I think the central part of that more than any is the electricity grid just because it's there not a lot of us know a lot about it there's lots of complicated technical things about how grid works doesn't work sometimes you talk about modernizing the grid or smart grids or you know the fact that Texas has its own grid.

But you know the grid is we talk about the grid it's like that is the platform for modern life basically everything runs on that and there's just this tiny group of people that know a lot about it often entrenched utility interests that don't necessarily have the public's interest in mind and it would be good for all of us to be no more about the grid and how it works and so it just so happens that over the last few weeks.

Right or I really admire David Roberts who's actually been on the program before we had a episode with him about sort of epistemic breakdown disinformation crisis but his beat is climate and energy and he recently started his own newsletter it's called volts volts that WTF and he actually just wrote a series about the grid.

And so I thought today would be a great day to have a grids how do they work conversation with the one and only Dr. volts David Roberts David's great to have you on.

Great to be here Chris.

All right let's let's just start super basic okay I'm serious what is an energy grid.

Well it's a it's a frustrating thing to to talk about Chris because almost anything you say any generalization you tried to make is like covering up for a giant basket full of confounding specifics.

You know whenever I write about this I feel like I want to be like David Foster Wallace you know with this cascade of sort of like footnotes coming off my text like chaff footnotes within footnotes but anyway I think that the one thing to understand is there's sort of two kinds of grid there's the transmission grid which is long distance the big the big lines on the big metal towers that carry power over high voltage lines over long distances.

And those are kind of like interstates and then branching off those you have you know you lower the voltage and then the power goes into local what are called distribution systems so transmission is the big trunk lines and distribution systems are sort of the little nests of local lines the brown power poles you're

familiar with outside your house that carry the power from the transmission system to the end users so there's sort of two grids and they each have their own kind of you know issues and problems and the series I wrote on volts this past couple of weeks was about

transmission specifically the long distance stuff and I did not expect it to be quite so intensely topical when I started it well that you know I find the road metaphor useful there if you think you know transmission lines are like interstates and when you say high voltage you think you know that's kind of like high speed right you can you can drive you know 70 miles an hour

and then you get to the interstate and those interstates can carry you long distances but you don't go point to point using interstates first there's like there streets and roads and then you get to the interstate you go along wide and you get off the interstate and you go on streets if that that metaphor kind of works here right like transmission lines you hire voltage longer distance then you got to get off those transmission lines to get into the cul-de-sac that you know the Jones is houses in right you think of sort of power is generated by a power generator they amp up the voltage when they put it on to the trans

mission system carries it to your local area then they lower the voltage and deliver it to you through a distribution system that's the easiest way to think about it okay so where does the power come from well are you laughing because my questions are so basic but no honestly if someone if someone put me in a room and say your life depends on explaining how how power gets generated and then put into your house I would be in trouble my life would be in danger

you're not alone you're not alone in that when I when I wrote a whole series about grids but way back when I wrote for grist you know almost a decade ago and in my intro I said this whole area of of kind of study this whole phenomenon is protected by a force field of tedium like unless you have to unless you have to know about it it will repel you with acronyms and you know technical terms and so simplifying it and it's not going to be a good thing to do it

so simplifying it and explaining it to ordinary people is no is no small feat and no one wants to take that on and what they have to so you have power generators right power plants you know 50 years ago they were basically all fossil fuel and nuclear power plants either using natural gas is the most common today coal used to be more common in the nuclear power plants and then now we have also renewable power plants wind turbine

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