Systems beat tools
New microgrid research shows the potential for thinking about the entire energy system, not labeling sources reliable or unreliable
In 2019, my wife and I bought our home. It came with this fire extinguisher.
The home inspection report notes a fire extinguisher is in the home but suggests checking that the sellers don’t take it with them. Maybe I should ask for a refund. It turns out that removing this fire extinguisher was not the problem the inspector should have cared about. Here’s the fire extinguisher’s tag.
July 1, 1985. This fire extinguisher hung on the wall of my house for about 35 years–presumably empty and useless for most of that time.
There’s not a lot of good that this extinguisher could have done for us in the event of a fire. In fact, its presence was worse than nothing for the sense of carnal security it blanketed us in. It seems as if, whatever else happens, we’ve got that fire extinguisher problem handled.
This is a long-winded way to explain that systems beat tools. We thought we had a reliable solution on the wall ready to be dispatched in the event of a fire
The moral of the story is that a focus on tools is often misleading—especially in energy policy. One of the core sins is a focus on specific sources or technologies rather than the full picture. They manifest as certain slogans and interest groups:
Nuclear bros.
Solar boosters.
Coal communities.
No transition without transmission.
The unreliables.
We can move to 100% renewables today.
The key to better policy is realizing that reliability is an attribute of energy systems, not any single energy source. Your lights come on due to a complex and essentially unfathomable system of energy technologies and human efforts.1 Yet advocates, at their most excited and least grounded, ignore this reality. Instead of facing tradeoffs, they substitute a world where their preferred source fixes everything.
Energy scouts needed
Advocates in every sector often behave like soldiers, not scouts, to draw from Julia Galef’s book, The Scout Mindset. For a single quip to understand scout mindsets, Galef quotes the late physicist, Richard Feynman, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Soldier mindset defends a piece of territory, a belief, against change. In contrast, scouts look at the world and adjust their maps as new information comes into view.
Commentary on the causes of Winter Storm Uri illustrates the soldier mindset. For too many in the chattering class, the Texas freeze is blamed on intermittent renewables like wind and solar. The refrain is sometimes a flippant, “Why didn’t they turn the wind up?”
For energy scouts, this question is cringe-inducing. Why? Because the problems in Winter Storm Uri that ultimately resulted in the deaths of 246 people are a case of being unable to turn the gas up. To be clear, there is enough failure to go around for everyone here–regulators and industry alike. Nuclear generation fell off the grid. Gas generators and wells froze. They were not winterized. Gas distribution was not designated as critical infrastructure, so the electric pumps moving gas to homes and generators were turned off.
Energy scouts see those system failures along with underperforming wind and gas. Every source failed–as one team of researchers concluded after Winter Storm Uri that “All major fuel sources underperformed against expectations save for solar.”
Winter Storm Uri is a case study for why you should think about the entire energy system. In conversations with politicians, you’ll come away thinking that renewables and gas are enemies. It will seem as if neither can live while the other survives. Renewable and fossil sources play together just fine in the actual energy system. Gas’s faster reaction time enables the system to incorporate more wind and solar. Batteries are doing the same as they emerge as real players in the market.
At a system level, the argument for wind, solar, and gas is the same: diversification. Crusades against gas mistakenly see gas capacity as an adversary of other low-carbon sources rather than a prudent way of spreading risks. This mistake is the inverse of the mistake that those tilting the playing field in favor of fossil fuels make. Solar and wind hedge against gas price spikes. Gas against the night and calm, windless days.
Policymakers must acknowledge that all energy sources have downsides and limits. This makes diversification valuable in extreme weather and as we march into an inherently unknowable future. Remember, as Galef and Feynman advise, the goal is not to fool yourself. Sweeping designations of energy sources as reliable or unreliable and outsized claims of what wind and solar can do alone both mislead.
Microgrids and energy scouts
In this vein of soldier mindset and scout mindset, energy soldiers have been on display in response to new research from a team of engineers and energy wonks. Their project shows how you could build “fast, scalable, clean, and cheap” microgrids to power data centers. Their key question:
Could off-grid solar microgrids in the US be big enough, fast enough, and cheap enough to be a compelling near-term alternative to building more natural gas power plants to meet near-term AI energy needs?
Their answer is yes. A microgrid combining batteries, solar, and natural gas backups could address concerns about load growth. According to Grid Strategies, about 90 GW of potential data centers are on their way. The new research project finds at least 1,200 GW of potential microgrid development in the United States.
The microgrid research project illustrates a scout mindset. The assumptions are clear and stated. They provide the workbook used in the analysis for you to tweak. A few footnotes detail limits and what they exclude to make the problem tractable. It’s new research, so don’t be surprised if future work refines and tweaks its findings. That said, in his replication and review, Casey Handmer suggested that the analysis understates the potential because deployment costs are lower than assumed in the off-grid paper.
As Galef’s book details, a major downside of the soldier mindset is that it’s prone to motivated reasoning. Soldiers see what they want to see, not the full picture. This leads intelligent people to speak thoughtlessly and misinterpret evidence.
In the case of the microgrid evaluation, soldiers judged the report by its title. Because the project described its microgrid as a “solar microgrid,” critics alleged that the project ignored the costs of backup or misrepresented its analysis since its proposed solar microgrid includes gas backup.
Judging the report by only its title led to three buckets of confused soldier responses:
First, that the authors ignored or hid the costs of backup.
Second, that the report buried its reliance on gas.
Third, that the report showed we don’t need gas.
The first critique holds no water. A central finding is that gas backup is valuable because there are quickly rising costs to powering data centers with 100% solar and storage. The researchers show these rising costs in the chart below. A system with 95% of its lifetime energy needs met with renewables costs about the same as the Three Mile Island restart that Microsoft and Constellation are working on.
To some extent, the second critique holds a nugget of truth since the report could just have been titled, “How off-grid microgrids can power the AI race,” instead of mentioning solar. Yet a fair reading of the project is that a microgrid is a useful energy system for powering data centers because it relies on a diverse set of energy technologies, not a single type. Solar gets a title mention since it’s the main generation source feeding the data center and the battery storage. They also run some versions where they don’t add gas backup until later since some data center uses may not require the five nines of uptime. Finally, on this point, it’s one-sided to complain about the title missing a mention of natural gas but not also complain about the missing storage mention.
The third bucket is the least excusable misreading of the report. At least one prominent climate advocate took too rosy a picture of the climate benefits of the microgrids by ignoring the gas backup. This is another clear example of sloppy soldier thinking.
There are more mentions of gas in the paper than of solar. Check—it’s 60 gas mentions to 55 solar mentions. On top of that, there’s an entire discussion of their need for land within 10 miles of an interstate gas pipeline! That’s one of the ways that they filter down and designate areas of the country suited for data center development.
How can someone read a report and miss the inclusion of 125% gas backup costs for the data centers, the pipeline requirement, and the 60 mentions of gas? Instead trumpeting that the report demonstrates that we don’t need natural gas at all? It’s a demonstration of Galef and Feynman’s point that we are easier to fool than we think.
These kinds of responses are characteristic of soldiers, not of any particular belief. Folks in the second bucket are (rightly) frustrated that climate-minded soldiers in the third bucket ignore the role of gas in the energy system. Natural gas remains the unappreciated middle child of energy policy.2
Policymakers who ignore natural gas’s complementary role within the evolving energy system heap those quickly rising costs onto consumers. This will likely deny the US as a whole the ability to lead on AI development or at least require that developing AI costs much, much more than it otherwise would.
Reliability is an attribute of energy systems, not of energy sources
The policy-relevant takeaway from my broken fire extinguisher, Winter Strom Uri, and reactions to the microgrid report is that policymakers should focus on systems, not tools. Reliability is an attribute of energy systems, not of energy sources. Any approach that places a single energy technology as the solution creates the same false sense of security as my useless fire extinguisher.
Approaching energy policy with a scout mindset will be far more productive than accusing well-meaning and serious engineers of handing weapons to soldiers in opposing camps. Policymakers have a choice: cling to ideological battles over tools or embrace the full complexity of systems. Choosing the latter sets us toward a more reliable and resilient grid.
Reliability isn’t found in a single tool or generator. It’s built into the systems we design, the tradeoffs we acknowledge, and the adaptability we foster.
There is no I, Pencil for the electricity grid. But there should be!
Said with full acknowledgment that I am approaching the sloganeering I complain about!