The heat of summer isn't letting up and while a lot of us have escaped rolling blackouts this summer the threat to the nationwide power grid is very real.
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00:00 The heat of summer isn't letting up,
00:02 and while a lot of us have escaped
00:04 rolling blackouts this summer,
00:06 the threat is very real.
00:07 This is Buddy Haston and he is the CEO of
00:10 Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation.
00:13 I interviewed him to understand the power
00:15 grid and why these blackouts happen.
00:17 The reason we've been seeing outages is
00:20 because we've been running out of supply.
00:23 Now he says we can't just rely on wind and solar.
00:27 We still need energy from nuclear,
00:29 natural gas and coal.
00:30 But see,
00:31 this doesn't seem like a long term solution
00:33 in the battle against climate change.
00:35 So I'm about to reach out to Project
00:38 Drawdown, which calls itself the world's
00:40 leading resource for climate solutions.
00:42 The challenges are new,
00:44 but we face challenges continuing
00:46 with what we've done before as well.
00:49 So let's choose the challenge that gives
00:51 us clean energy in the long term.
00:53 Amanda Smith is a scientist who
00:55 studies energy infrastructure at
00:56 nonprofit project Drawdown.
00:57 She agrees with Haston that we need
01:00 diversity in the power system,
01:01 not just in the fuel source,
01:03 but in the type of power plant
01:05 and the infrastructure.
01:06 It doesn't happen overnight,
01:08 but she says there are solutions that are
01:10 making wind and solar more reliable.
01:12 We're getting better and better at
01:14 predicting when and where wind and solar
01:16 energy is going to be available and when
01:19 it's not. So we're pooling resources,
01:20 right? So that if the sun goes down
01:23 in one place or is shaded by a cloud,
01:26 we're connected to other parts of the grid.
01:28 The other big part of reliability
01:30 is the ability to store energy.
01:32 We don't have control over the speed of the
01:35 wind, but we can kind of gain that control
01:37 back right if we're able to store energy.
01:40 We can store energy in water right?
01:42 And then run the water through a
01:44 turbine when we need to extract that
01:46 energy. There are other innovative
01:48 energy solutions that are climate
01:49 friendly like geothermal heat recovery.
01:51 When you use the super hot water in
01:53 the ground to drive turbines that
01:55 are going to be able to generate
01:57 energy, it's also possible to
01:59 generate energy from waves or methane
02:01 digesters. Smith says the answer
02:03 moving forward is having a grid that
02:05 is more interactive and distributed
02:07 instead of us relying on centralized
02:09 power plants that contribute to carbon