Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Here is the overall generation mix from February 11–17. The upper light brown line is gas-fired generation. The brown line starting at about 10,000 is coal. Green is wind, the yellow is solar, as is apparent from the daily pattern, and the almost-straight line starting at about 5,000 is nuclear.
Source is EIA…they have a lot of useful data, but you have to poke around a bit to find it.
Texas is suffering severe power outages as the windmills are frozen and natural gas is having trouble with supply.
T Boone Pickens did not live quite long enough to see what his wind farms wrought.
Pickens focused his advocacy on alternative energy such as solar and wind. The Washington Post says that “perhaps the strangest role” Pickens “has fashioned for himself is his current one: the billionaire speculator as energy-wise man, an oil-and-gas magnate as the champion of wind power, and a lifetime Republican who has become a fellow traveler among environmentally-minded Democrats even though he helped finance the ‘Swift boat’ ads that savaged” Sen. John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign. In an editorial, The New York Times reported Pickens “has decided that drilling for more oil is not the whole answer to the nation’s energy problems.
Pickens’ “Wind Farms” resemble the Tax farmers of Louis XVI in 1789.
The government of France contracted with private citizens to collect taxes and duties.
In early 2020, Joe Biden advised coal miners facing unemployment to learn to code, saying:
Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!
I critiqued this ridiculousness in my post Shovel That Code. (Does Biden think that coal miners stoke furnaces?…That stoking furnaces is a big factor in today’s job market?)
Comes now Obama associate Rahm Emmanuel, with precisely the same advice to unemployed retail workers.
There’s going to be people, like at J.C. Penney and other retail [outlets]. Those jobs are not coming back. Give them the tools, six months, you’re going to become a computer coder. We’ll pay for it, and you’ll get millions of people to sign up for that.
There is not an infinite demand in the US for entry-level programmers. Much offshoring of programming work is taking place…see my post about telemigration…and automation of programming work, which has been happening since the introduction of assemblers and compilers in the mid-1950s, is ongoing.
In my post about Biden’s learn to code comment, I said:
Can you imagine what these people would do to the economy if they ever achieved the degree of power that they so avidly seek?
We may find out, although hopefully the Senate will provide some degree of sanity check.
Overload by Arthur Hailey
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Heat! Heat in stifling blanket layers. Heat that enveloped all of California from the arid Mexican border in the south to majestic Klamath Forest, elbowing northward into Oregon. Heat, oppressive and enervating…Throughout cities and suburbs, in factories, offices, stores and homes, six million electric air-conditioners hummed. On thousands of farms in the fertile Central Valley–the richest agricultural complex in the world–armies of electric pumps gulped water from deep wells, directing it to thirsty cattle and parched crops…California had known other heat waves and survived their consequences. But in none had the demands for electrical power been so great.
“That’s it, then,” the chief electric dispatcher said unnecessarily. “There goes the last of our spinning reserve.”
I was reminded of this book by the current electrical crisis in California. It is quite likely the only novel ever written in which an electrical power utility and its executives and employees are the good guys of the story.
The protagonist, Nim Goldman, is VP of Planning for Golden State Power & Light, which in the book is the predominant electrical supplier in California. The company is wrestling with the problems of accommodating growing electrical demand while facing more and more restrictions from regulators. To which difficulties are added the impact of an unprecedented heat wave and the threat of terrorist attacks.
GSP&L’s opponents fall into three overlapping circles. First, there is a mainstream and rather staid environmental organization called the Sequoia club. Then, there is an activist organization called Power and Light for People. run by an Australian named Davy Birdsong, which wants to replace for-profit utilities with some sort of government entity or collective. Finally, there is a small but deadly terrorist group which seeks maximum social disruption and sees an attack of GSP&L as the best way to achieve that goal.
The book, published in 1979, is kind of a period piece…the fuels in use are coal and oil, no mention of solar or wind; while there is concern about pollution–especially from coal–no one is talking about climate change; and while there are complaints about high electricity bills and corporate greed, no one is suggesting that Americans be weaned from most of their electricity use and forced to shut down their air conditioners. The story is well-told, although it is kind of a pot-boiler..for one thing, Nim has so much sex, and some of it under such unusual circumstances, that the actual effect is (unintentionally, I’m sure) comic. The technologies of power generation and distribution are portrayed reasonably accurately within the limitations of a popular novel. The fundamental issue of matching supply and demand continuously, in real time, comes across clearly. One character, Karen Sloan, is a quadriplegic whose very life depends upon electricity–the battery both for her assisted-breathing device and for her powered wheelchair must be periodically recharged, or else…a neat way of illustrating what a serious matter the continuity of electrical service actually is.
Overload would make a great movie, but probably could not be made in the current environment without some switching-around of good guys and villains.
The general attitude toward working from home has certainly changed over the last several years. In 2013, the then-CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer, banned work-from-home at her company. And in 2017, IBM established a similar ban. Both of these actions were based on perceived needs to improve productivity and collaboration at those companies
But in 2020, a lot of companies that moved to work-from home in the Covid-19 environment…because they had no choice if they wanted to continue operating at all…have apparently found it to be working to their satisfaction, and many though not all employees like it, too. And there is starting to be significant impact on where people choose to live…see these comments from the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu. The term ‘zoomtowns’ has been applied to locations where people choose to live and work remotely, based on a locality’s attractive characteristics and good Internet connectivity.
I do think that a comprehensive work-from-home environment can result in losing something in terms of unplanned interactions…I’ve personally observed several significant product and business initiatives that resulted from such interactions, and there are also interesting historical cases. But such things are difficult to measure, and financial benefits and convenience of work-from-home are likely to prevail, perhaps excessively so in some cases. In any event, the Yahoo! and IBM approach of broad-scale top-down corporate edicts is unlikely to be a good one.
Another kind of remote work involves the use of people at remote locations…though not necessarily at home…to perform machine-control tasks that would previously have had to be done on-site. The robots being used by Federal Express at its Memphis facility sometimes encounter problems that they can’t solve…they can be ‘advised’ by humans located in San Antonio. There are projects underway to make municipal water treatment plants remotely operable, either for emergency backup (as in a pandemic) or for normal operations, and there are also initiatives focused on remote operation of other kinds of infrastructure, utility, and industrial facilities.
If something can be done by people who are remotely located within the United States, then in most cases it will also be doable by people who are remotely located in other parts of the world. In my 2019 post telemigration, I wrote about the increasing feasibility of offshoring services work, not only manufacturing. A lot of this has been going on for software development as well as for customer service.
It may turn out that, in many cases, remote work in the US turns out to be just a waystation on the road to remote work somewhere else.