Alex Epstein
speaker
366 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 28 Apr
Alex Epstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
generation, but the way FERC oversees a set of institutions called RTOs and ISS. RTO stands for regional transmission. I think it's operator organization and then independent system operators. And they are these interstate entities. So you'll sometimes hear about like PJM or ERCOT is not quite one of these, or like CalISO, that's what we have here in California.
But most of them, like MISO is a big one that'll cut across, say, Indiana and Iowa and multiple states like that. And what's happening is these are electricity organizations that are supervising all the electricity among all these states, but they're imposing no reliability requirements on the states.
And so this is allowing certain states like Iowa can just build a whole bunch of unreliable generation and then parasite off Indiana's coal plants. And what's happening, because there's no real oversight on reliability, is we're getting a nationwide decline in reliability. And I used to dig deep into these things.
And what happened is someone will put forward what's called an IRP, an integrated resource plan for their electricity. And their plan will be, we're just going to build all this intermittent stuff, and we're going to get the excess from the grid. Right. but nobody's responsible for the grid being reliable.
So everyone's making these plans to do unreliable stuff and saying, we're going to get the rest of it from the grid, but nobody's responsible.
But there is no grid. Yes, exactly. So that's a key thing is they need to have some sort, if they're going to, if we have this system, like this regional system that we have, they need real reliability standards there. And that relates to the concept I mentioned earlier of like technology neutral, like dispatchability standards. Right.
And that means you don't prohibit solar and wind, but you require them to be firm or reliable. And then generators can meet that however they want. If they think they can do a solar plus storage, if they think they can do a solar plus gas or solar wind, let them experiment. But don't allow people to sell unreliable electricity onto the grid and then have everyone else pay for it.
Of course, yeah, pay for it in the financial sense, but ultimately in the reliability sense. And the cost that we pay for electricity in dollars is nothing compared to the cost of unreliability. I mean, the cost of unreliability is, I mean, you can see it's literally death in a case like the Texas freeze. I mean, just imagine the grid goes out for a week. Mm-hmm. You don't pay that electricity.
I mean, yeah. I mean, in any kind of cold, like where we are today is, you know, Hollywood Hills. Yeah, maybe. But even there, right, your whole system gets, the way to think about it is electricity, like in the way I think about environment, as in like our environment is everything that affects our well-being, like there's no more important aspect of the human environment than electricity. Right.
Like that is, I mean, that and maybe the roads and transportation system, like those two things, without those, your environment is destroyed, you regress, the world cannot support 8 billion people. So like any threat to reliability is just such a catastrophic cost in terms of lives and then in terms of industry, right? Because if you start to have... any kind of frequency of blackout.
Which is why these tech companies, guess what they're doing? They're starting to not build things on the grid. They're starting to build things off the grid because they can't. So what's going to start to happen, and this is going to lead to outrage, is they're going to be partially on the grid. They're going to be sucking up a lot of electricity. Consumers are going to have outages.
And then they're going to learn that these companies are both taking reliable electricity from their grid while promoting solar and wind, and that they're building their own natural gas while touting 100% renewable. So to avoid this PR nightmare, they should join me and pro-freedom people and be pro-electricity and pro-fossil fuel. So that's on the electricity side.
It's the focus on reliability, including federal reliability standards over the RTOs and ISS.
I mean, this is such an interesting one. The core thing is you need to do you need to calculate very carefully the benefit. So let's just start with the benefit. So the cost people can probably guess you need to look at the full cost of a given policy.
So if you're talking about let's lower what's called PM2.5, like let's lower it from 10 to eight or whatever kind of level of microns they're talking about, you have to look at what is the cost of doing this throughout the economy. And they totally fail to do this for a number of reasons.
But let's talk about the benefit side, because this is often something that trips people up where they think like, oh my gosh, I want clean air. I don't want to die, right? I don't want to choke. So people are very, very sympathetic to incremental reductions in air quality standards. But what you have to realize is those, at certain thresholds, those have little or no benefit.
I mean, with any kind of... And they take resources away from other things that might be useful. Massive. So that's the cost. But just to give you a sense of how skewed the benefit calculations are, the EPA calculates that the Clean Air Act gives us $15,000 per household per year in value. Like where the hell, think about how much a household makes. But it's like a quarter of their income.
Like how do they calculate this? Well, they have this whole system of dramatically inflating the benefits of things. And some of this is just using speculation, like very loose correlation as causation, engaging in all sorts of speculation.
But the most obvious one, which I think people are afraid to address, is what they call the value of the statistical life, which is an absolute scandal the way we do it. So the way they do it is they'll say, every life, like we're going to assign $10 million per statistical life. And people feel like, oh, wow, that's a lot of money. You must really value life.
Like the higher the value you accord to life, you must be a really nice person. But what does it mean to give higher value to that? That just means you're willing to pay $10 million of cost per life. But that means you're willing to take away $10 million from everyone else to prevent one life from being saved.
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