Heartland Daily Podcast

This is the Heartland Daily Podcast. Hello, and welcome to the Heartland Suss daily podcast. I'm Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and managing editor of Environment and Climate News. I'm pleased to have as a guest today a friend, former colleague, and one of the finest laborers in the field of liberty and energy sanity that I know, Isaac Orr. Isaac Orr is a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, where he writes about energy and environmental issues, including mining and electricity policy, which is a lot like what he used to do as a research fellow at the Heartland Institute early in my tenure here.

He's been a featured guest on Heartland's weekly Thursday in the tank livestream multiple times. His research rarely exposes green energy boondoggles to the light of day, and that's what he's here to discuss today. Isaac, thanks for joining us.

Hey. Thanks for having me, Sterling. Good to be back.

Yeah. Yeah. Wish we, wish we worked together more often.

Well, you know, you have my number. I can be on the show whenever you need me to be.

Well, I didn't mean just for the show. I just wish that we did, some more, you know, more research to go.

Well, talk to the higher ups at Heartland, and maybe we can

make it work. How's that sound? Okay. So, Isaac, before we jump into your current work, for our listeners who may not be familiar with you or the center of the American experiment, I mean, not everyone who listens today used to listen when when you run before. Please give us a little bit about your background, your previous work, and how you came to work on energy and mining issues.

Yeah. I mean, I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and that's kind of my my formative experience. Right? So when I was a kid, and it'd be hot, there'd be, you know, days where the cows would be drinking so much water that it would draw down the pressure in the well. So I'd get done doing chores, like cleaning pig pens or something, and we wouldn't have any water pressure in the house.

So I couldn't take a shower, couldn't wash clothes or anything like that. So when I was in college, I was in my environmental geology class, and we were talking about groundwater pressure, wells, and, hydrology and stuff like that where I'm like, okay. This is really interesting. So I always knew I was gonna go to school for political science, but then that's the point where I realized I liked the geology and kind of natural science aspect of it too. And there's tons of overlap in that.

Right? So I knew that there was gonna be a a good niche for me to carve out in kind of environmental policy moving forward. So, then, you know, I worked for a state senator for a little bit. Listeners might be familiar with him. And, then I worked at the Heartland Institute for a good number of years, and I've been at American Experiment since 2018.

So, yeah, kind of a a long strange trip. Can't believe I've been doing energy policy for, like, 11 years now. It just doesn't seem real.

Yeah. So, and and what about the American experiment? Tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. It is a think tank in Minnesota. So it is a lot like, it's it's part of the state policy network.

So, Illinois Policy Institute for some of the folks at home that are familiar with, those state level think tanks. We, you know, we cover a lot of different issues. We have a couple economists on staff that talk about regulation and taxes. We've got, an education fellow. We've got, public safety.

So basically, like, crime dealing with crime and, health care. So in addition to the energy and environmental policy work that we do there.

And just like Heartland, you don't just deal with Minnesota issues or regional issues. You look at some broader issues as well.

Yeah. Yep. Especially in the energy and environment section, we've been doing a lot of modeling on the impact EPA regulations in different parts of the country, and we've been modeling different, renewable energy mandates all over the country as well. So it's been it's been really great. It's kept us very busy, though.

Yeah. You know, even if you were a state think tank, you you purely wanted to work on state issues, the federal government impinges so much on state, authority and policies. It's it's hard to separate the 2 sometimes.

Yeah. Absolutely.

So before jumping into your recent publications, and I do wanna get there, but recently, there were some pretty big happenings. You might say things are booming at the American Experiment, with very little media attention, as far as I've been able to ascertain. The American Experiments offices were firebombed. What do you know about it? Why do you think it's not getting more coverage even in the local media than it's gotten so far?

I mean, I'm I'm I'm convinced myself that if this had been a liberal think tank that were buyer firebombed, say the Center For American Progress or something like that, it would be front page news on The New York Times and Washington Post. I see nothing like that.

Yo. In fairness, I I do think that there would be a lot more pearl clutching if, this had been a liberal think tank. I think it would have been bigger news. But in fairness to the local media, almost all of them covered it, some. And the Star Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is kind of the big newspaper in town, wrote an op ed saying, like, hey.

Maybe we shouldn't firebomb our political or our ideological opponents. Right? So Maybe. The governor threw I mean, they they were more upfront about it than that. So I was being a little bit flippant.

The governor tweeted out, hey. You shouldn't do this, which I appreciated. Right? So, so there has been a lot of that. But essentially, we had some arsonists come through and try to burn down our offices.

And there are 3 conservative organizations in our building. There's the Upper Midwest Law Center, which is a public interest law firm. Up on the 3rd floor. There's a, put I guess, there's a group called Take Charge across the hall, which is, you know, primarily focused at African Americans and getting them back into the conservative fold. And then our office, Center of the American Experiment.

So they broke into Upper Midwest Law Center on the 3rd floor, poured gasoline on the floor there, lit it on fire, ran downstairs, poured a bunch of gasoline in the hallway of in between our office and take charge, and then they bolted out the side door. So, this was at, like, 2 AM on Sunday, January 31st or whatever that weekend was, whatever the the Sunday was. And, you know, I got a text from my friend, James, who works at the Upper Midwest Law Center, and he said the buildings the building got set on fire last night. And I just thought he was pulling my leg, basically trying to trying to get a rise out of me. And then we got an email from from the building saying, hey.

Yeah. There was a fire. And, you know, at first, we thought maybe it was, like, somebody had a space heater plugged in or something like that, but then, you know, the FBI in the ATF got involved. So they're looking for the perps. Thankfully, the the fire was largely contained to the hallway and the damage to our personal stuff in there is mostly smoke damage with some water damage from the firefighters needing to use water to put the flames out, obviously.

But, you know, that building is gonna be, totaled for the next year and a half probably. They're probably gonna have to gut it down to the studs and and totally rebuild it. So Wow. You know, thankfully, the stuff that I cared most about in there is probably gonna be okay. It's going through, like, the insurance companies, like, putting everything through an ozone machine to try to get the smoke smell out.

So, you know, it could have been worse, but it definitely kinda surreal to know that, like, maybe we triggered someone so hard that they set our building on fire.

Well, so there were multiple conservative organizations involved. I didn't see, I didn't know that. So Yeah. It's it's not getting the coverage I think it merits or would have merited if the if the media was more, as I say, fair and balanced.

Yeah. I think that's

fair. But, did did were there any cameras? Did y'all have cameras in the hall, or at the entrance, or anything? Is there is there, you know, I I know it's a it's an ongoing case. Maybe you are in on the inside.

I'm just wondering if there's any feeling that, maybe the FBI and the ATF might be on to something.

Yeah. I think they will. There's a there's a camera in our office that, points towards the door, and it's just one of those little side you know, those little windows that are next to doors frequently.

Yep.

We see them setting down like something. We assume it's a couple cans of gas, and then they go upstairs to light the law center on fire. So I don't know if there's great surveillance or was great surveillance in the hallways themselves, but we had some cameras and, you know, they were the only, car that was going down that road at the time that the the arson happened. Right? The alleged arson or suspected arson.

Whatever you wanna do. Whatever, like, types of qualifiers you wanna put on

this credit card. It was arson. They were arsonists.

Yeah. Yeah. So to our knowledge, they have the the FBI and the ATF have not caught them yet. Wow. We haven't had that that kinda update yet, but, we we put feel pretty confident because they were the only there was only one car on that road, and there's cameras on the road.

Like, there's a gas station down the the street and stuff like that. So, we think it'll we think, you know, justice will hopefully be served, but it hasn't yet.

Well, big new you know, we had a little bit of, of that ourselves at Heartland, but not nearly nearly as extensive, as what you've done. So it's it's it's it's really sad to hear it. I'm glad that, nobody there was, you know it's right time of night, no one was injured.

Yeah. I mean, this is kind of an off the wall theory, but it might have been my dog because I think she's really enjoyed having me work from home for the last month or so.

How did how does she look in a hoodie and a face mask? Does she does she resemble those you saw in the camera? Yeah.

I mean, I I haven't seen the footage, but, you know, like, where were you, Maple, on the evening

3, quote, 3 energy realities that renewable advocates can't answer, unquote. What are the realities, and why can't they answer them?

Yeah. We we noticed that if you put a number that's in a title, you get more clicks. So we definitely did a little bit of that. So, the the first one is, you know, renewables, wind and solar. I don't really like to call them renewables, but, you know, it it gets it also, like, it's Reliable.

You should call them Reliable. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, they're they're totally dependent on subsidies. And when you bring that up to people, they, the supporters of these unreliable energy sources, they always say, oh, what about the subsidies for fossil fuels? And, you know, the the subsidies that they talk about are never actually subsidies.

They're pretending that their own kind of made up externality costs for, you know, traditional air pollutants or c o two are somehow a subsidy when that's not what a definition of a subsidy is. Right? A subsidy is a direct payment made by the government. And, you know, in, in many respects by, you know, your account you do your accounting and oil and gas or net or taxpayers, not net tax receivers. So we we debunk that myth.

The second myth is that wind and solar are cheaper than conventional sources of electricity generation, like, coal, nuclear, and natural gas. And we kinda get into all of the hidden costs that, levelized cost of energy estimates put out by Lazard don't take into account. Like, they don't take into the fact that you need more than just wind or solar in order to run a grid. You need batteries or you need natural gas backup, and you should attribute that cost to the unreliable source that requires that backup. Right?

So once you do that, wind and solar are it's way more expensive to run a grid using wind and solar than it is any other type of dispatchable power plant. But what they wanna do is when they do their LCOE analysis and levelized of energy for the the folks at home who might not be familiar with that is basically they try to figure out the cost of a certain type of power generator divided by the number of units of electricity it's gonna produce over the its lifetime. It's like the cost of driving a car on a per mile basis. Right? So it's just kinda easy to think about it like that.

And, they're always using kind of cherry picked assumptions to get really low costs for wind and solar, and then really high costs, for coal, natural gas, or nuclear. So we we go into that in the post a little bit, and then we also talk about how, you know Wait.

Wait. Wait. Before you move on from that

Yeah.

You know, one of the cherry picked cost or the numbers is they say things like these last, so solar panels. Oh, they they last 25 years. Well, not any real solar panel I've ever experienced. You know, if they get hit by hailstorms, they're gone. I don't know a coal plant that goes because it got hit by hail.

Right.

If, they get dirty and you don't clean them regularly, they lose efficiency. If, you know, after 20 years, they lose efficiency regardless of whether they're cleaned or not. Wind turbines break apart, not infrequently. They shed plastic. And so their operational lives are just quite frankly less than are often estimated, and their operation efficiencies are less than often, you know, estimated.

I remember I went to a wind farm. I went to a a society for environmental drones conference in Pittsburgh, and they had a field trip. We went out to a big wind farm there. Miles around, as far as the eye can see, you can see wind turbines on top of mountain tops. And I had flown with the PR people from the wind company.

They didn't know who I was. We introduced I introduced myself. We were talking. They were PR pump company for Reliant Energy. They had holdings up there in Pennsylvania, and they were saying, oh, yeah.

We we, we reached efficiencies of 32% this year. We're very proud. 32%. And so we get out there, not a turbine is turning. All the power in Pennsylvania then is coming from, it turns out, nuclear in that region.

And we asked the guy who actually managed the farm, the on-site guy, and he says, oh, we were very proud this year to reach 20% efficiency. 12% less than the than the PR people said. Right?

Yeah. Yep. And, you know, that's all that's all kinda cooked into the books. So when Lazard does their numbers, they're generally looking at, like, a a 45% capacity factor, which happens in some places. Right?

I mean, if you're talking about North Dakota, South Dakota, parts of Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, now there's like 1 or 2 in Minnesota that does it. Like, it's not impossible, but it's also inappropriate to apply that generally to use cases in Ohio or Pennsylvania. Right? So, there's a lot of details that are devilish, and, the the least scrupulous, renewable energy promoters never really look at those types of those thorny issues. So we we like that.

We like to dig into the weeds there and kind of expose people who are blowing smoke up your skirt. And, the last the last issue that we looked at for this was reliability. Right? As you add more wind and solar, you have less reliable capacity online, and then that ends in a blackout. So that happened in California.

There, it was largely because the state is mandating the closure of reliable power plants and essentially, you know, requiring a an increased dependency on things that may or may not show up to work when you need them to. In Texas, it's because ERCOT is probably the worst regulatory, structure. An energy only market just doesn't work if you have all of these wind and solar, facilities that are highly subsidized by the federal government. It's just never gonna work, and they need to change course over there. And then in Hawaii, you know, they they passed legislation forcing the shutdown of a coal plant.

And one of their state senators, I forget what her name was, but she was a Democrat from Hawaii, basically taking a victory lap saying, oh, we closed this coal plant and we didn't have blackouts. And then, like, 3 months later, there was a blackout. So, so, yeah, I mean, as you as you increase your focus on adding wind and solar, it becomes very expensive because it's like building a whole new system that only works if it feels like it. And at some point, there is a cost pressure. Right?

The prices increase because of that unreliability, and, people don't like paying more for their electricity. So companies

More paying more for less reliable power.

That's correct. Yep. Yep. So and then companies start to cut corners. Right?

Maybe they don't do the the maintenance on their peaker plants that they need to in order to keep the lights on, even though they're more important than they've ever been. Or maybe the utility commission says you can't build this new natural gas peaking station because it is an anathema to our climate objectives or something like that. You know?

So let me ask you this. Can you imagine, a power company succeeding if they were sort of honest about this, if they said, you know, here at Sterling's Power Company, we care about the environment. So you'll be paying more for less reliable energy. You know? How do you think Sterling's power company is gonna do in that situation?

I well, you know, I guess quite well in states where they, you know, give me a monopoly. There's not much, right? You know, I can say whatever I want. We're burning down the planet, here at Sterling's Power Company. By the way, we just went for a a rate increase to do so.

Yep. Yep. We're shoveling puppies and kittens into the furnace as quickly as possible.

Yeah. Well, you know, there was there was a great there was a great, Dilbert cartoon Okay. About a decade ago. I don't know if you know the characters of Dilbert, but he's got a dog called Dogbert.

Yeah.

And, Dogbert is, he's always got a scheme. And Dogbert says, here at the Dogbert Power Company, we run we run only green power. We it's a renewable resource. And then, they go to the the a big furnace, and they show this guy throwing a blanket with a body in there. He says, we're running out of hippies.

He says, we're running out of hippies. He said, just go go get some more homeless people off the street.

Yikes.

So in addition, you testified in Ohio about grid reliability. Now now Ohio, like Texas, is a Republican state. You'd think they'd figure this out. So what are the problems? I suspect they're the same that you identified above in the 3, three problems, three questions.

But what are the issues in Ohio, and how do they reflect problems nationwide?

Yeah. I mean, Ohio is actually really smart. I mean, they're they're one of the few states that said, we are going to classify natural gas as clean. Right? So There you go.

So, yeah, Ohio's big problem is New Jersey and Maryland because, you know, we're all in this together when it comes to our electricity system. Because, you know, in our part of the country, when I say our part, I mean the Eastern Interconnect, the US electric grid is basically segmented into 3 different grids. It's the Eastern Interconnect, which is everything east of the Rockies, the Western Interconnect, everything west of the Rockies, and then you have ERCOT, which is, you know, Electric Reliability Council of Texas. So, the eastern interconnect is split up into multiple regional transmission organizations or independent systems operators. There are 2 terms for basically the same thing that they're often used those terms interchangeably.

So I'm just gonna call them RTOs. Right? So

Okay.

You've got Southwest Power Pool, which goes from North Dakota to New Mexico. You've got MINISO or MISO, Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator, which is 15 states stretching from Minnesota to Mississippi. You've got PJM, which is what I or Ohio was part of, and that's, like, Ohio, Pennsylvania, parts of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and probably Delaware. I forget what all all the states in PJM. It's probably the one I'm the least familiar with.

And then you have ISO New England, which is the 6 New England states. So, in Ohio's case, their biggest threat to grid reliability is the fact that, blue states are shutting down their coal plants and possibly their natural gas plants, prematurely and not replacing them with reliable stuff in their wake. Right? So, and the thing is, if New Jersey decides to shut down all of their reliable plants and Maryland does too, they're gonna be taking power from Ohio and Pennsylvania, which are, you know, 2 of the bigger states in terms of electricity generation. And they're gonna try and use that in order to keep their own lights on.

And because they're all part of this power pool, which is PJM, Ohio's problem will be or New Jersey's problem will quickly become Ohio's problem. And we see that same phenomena in MISO, which includes Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota, 3 states that have said we're gonna be 100% carbon free. I think Michigan's was as crazy as 2035. Like, all of these states are trying to outdo each other in their arrival date even though it's all baloney. None of it's gonna actually work out.

So ultimately, that's what's gonna happen. Ohio's either gonna have to build enough reliable power plant capacity within its borders to shoulder the load for PJM or figure out a way to, I don't know, segregate itself off from the rest of the market. And I don't even know if that's possible.

I was about to say, why you know? Look. They they you do have all these regional transmission, organizations. I don't think, however, they're they're they are a fairly recent vintage. There was a time not too long ago where every state ran its own power grid, and, you may think there are inefficiencies in that, and, of course, you've already said that ERCOT has some problems.

But the problem we don't have is that if Oklahoma were to go green tomorrow and Arkansas and Louisiana and New Mexico as well, every state surrounding us, it wouldn't affect our power grid at all. We run our power grid, and so we're not dragged down. I I don't see why Ohio maybe it's illegal for them to extricate themselves from this, But, it seems to me that a state would be smart not to, to only align itself with other states of similar political and power profiles. You know, you want a reliable partner in your power system. And if if if there are states that are reliable partners, like New Jersey for Ohio or Michigan for of and others for a variety of places, you wouldn't wanna be part of their regional transmission organization.

Maybe it's time to form a new one.

I mean, I don't know what the feasibility of that is. I don't know how these things form and dissolve, but, yeah, I think that you're gonna see more demand for that moving forward if reliability suffers as a result of state mandates for bad energy policy in other states.

Absolutely. Out of state mandates for bad energy policies affecting your state. That that's what I'm saying. It's like Texas did it. Texas has done it from from the inception, and I don't think the RTOs are as old as ERCOT.

The the I I I can't see legally why you couldn't why Ohio couldn't and wouldn't wanna extricate itself from a system where your partners are gonna undermine you and and impose cost on your residence. You're not beholden to New Jersey. You know, your your politicians, the Ohio politicians aren't beholden to the to the residents of New Jersey, and they shouldn't be, held hostage by them.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just that all the interregional transmission lines are already built. So I don't know how easy or hard it would be to actually limit the electrons from flowing outside the border of your state. I've never really thought about it before.

But, yeah, it's it's something to think about, I guess.

Oh, well, yeah. But our our transmission lines the Texas transmission lines don't stop at the border. What it is is where the the electricity sales are, because it's not just that the electricity goes. It's where you can or do sell sell your power to on the wholesale market. Those that's what they really were created to do to to operate the wholesale market for power.

So it seems to me you could just say, sorry. We generate this much power, and it's from these sources, and we're not selling it into your market unless you pay us a lot more.

Sure. Sure. For a price, we'll sell it. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting concept.

I don't I don't know the the specifics of it, so I don't feel like I should Yeah. Speculate.

And I'm not the an engineer, so I don't know either. It's just I'm I'm just I'm just trying to think outside of the box how, you know, because people say, oh, well, Texas has its problems because they're not connected to other states. Well

Well, thank thank goodness they're not because you were to drug us down with you during Yuri. I mean, MISO had very close to blackout conditions in 2021 in MISO South, but say Texas was connected to MISO North during Yuri

Mhmm.

We would've had blackouts. You would've taken more power from Southwest Power Pool. You would've taken power from MISO, and your blackouts would have been less bad, but we would have had to help short share the the burden. Right?

Is Oklahoma part of MISO?

Oklahoma's part of Southwest Power Pool.

Well, we probably would have got ours from Southwest. It probably wouldn't have affected you.

Well, the problem is Southwest Power Pool also had blackouts during that time period. So

So what you're saying is no system operator really managed things well during Yuri?

I mean, PJM and MISO did well. I'm just saying that

PJM, though, wasn't affected really by Yuri.

Sure. Sure. All I'm saying is Texas is in its own special kind of mess. And Yep. The policy makers there are kinda nibbling around the edges, and they're not getting to the hardest stuff.

Oh, I agree. I've I've I've written about it multiple occasions. I you know, they've got the same problems in Texas created a completely weird and different way.

Yeah. They just love California energy policy, but they put a cowboy hat on it.

Well, it wasn't that, you know, we we went to well, it's a longer story. We made a deal with the devil when we got, when we got power electricity competition. We brought in electricity competition. It worked well for the 1st few years when we weren't reliant on renewables, but then we subsidized. We mandated a certain amount of renewables, and we helped subsidize the rest of it.

And it's Yeah. It screwed us up to no end.

Yep.

So, Isaac, I had another question, but you really answered that question. Yeah.

I saw that.

So, it's been good to speak with you again today. I wish we were in contact more often. Until we talk again, I wanna thank you for coming on the show on behalf of myself and our listeners.

Hey. Thanks for having me, Sterling. Appreciate it.

Listeners, thanks for checking in on us today. Please check Heartland's website as we continue to follow the work of Isaac Orr and the other great researchers at the center of the American experiment. And let's hope that they and, other organizations like them aren't attacked by terrorists again in the future. Also, continue to follow us as we track progress of energy and environmental laws and regulations that affect you. And if you're not already receiving these podcasts daily on your favorite device, go to iTunes and subscribe.

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It's gonna be on the same bat channel, same bat time. Every Friday on your favorite social media streaming device where Anthony Watts, Linnea, Lucan, and myself, and almost weekly guest discuss the climate topics of the week, complete with taking questions from viewers. Thanks. Take care. Bye.