Politicians, pundits, and the public at large have voiced deep concern that electricity was tragically unavailable to many Texans during the recent period of extreme cold. Claims that lax ERCOT planning caused the problem are exaggerated. “Grid independence” from federal regulation is manageable. The problem lies in the supervisory structure that regulates the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) - Texas’ Public Utility Commission (PUC), a three-member panel appointed by the state legislature, and our elected officials, ultimate guardians of the public interest.
To start, claims that ERCOT’s planning process is undisciplined are misleading. Published documents (December 2020, January 2021) evidence well-structured scenario planning of capacity, demand, and reserve margin, including grid requirements and fuel types. True, evolving events brought conditions not premised in these studies but laxness is an unwarranted criticism.
The next layer of electric power management: Oversight of ERCOT by the PUC. Here, critical commentary by knowledgeable observers is valid. To begin with, independent management of Texas’ power grid – that is, independent of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) – rests on reasonable logic, not merely the fabled secessionist tendencies of Texans.
Jim Crump is an energy and chemical industry leader with a depth of industry experience gained with Shell, Accenture Consulting, DuPont, and ExxonMobil, who focuses on energy transition and sustainability.
For years I’ve been writing about how the project to build two new bridge across the Ohio River at Louisville, Kentucky was an enormous boondoggle.
Years after they opened, the bad financial news continues to roll in. WDRB-TV in Louisville recently reported on a new revenue study conducted by the state of Kentucky in advance of refinancing its bonds.
The study found that due to COVID disruptions, the projected rise of remote work, and other factors, toll revenue is estimated to be $373 million less that previously projected over the next 30 years. This is a 6% decline.
Spread over three decades, this is a manageable amount, but it’s money that’s going to have to come out of the transportation budgets of the states of Indiana and Kentucky. Kentucky used traditional bonding for the project whereas Indiana used a public-private partnership. But Indiana’s P3 structure is a so-called “availability payments” model, which means the private vendor gets their money no matter what. Unlike with the Indiana Toll Road deal, the state of Indiana has all the revenue risk on this project.
Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America’s cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
As COVID-19’s lasting impacts on where we prefer to live and work become more and more apparent, the importance of suburban and regional renewal becomes more and more important.
With that in mind, The Suburban Alliance has released a 2021 call for action on suburban renewal, summarised in a 3½ minute social media video. It contains some compelling figures on where our capital works priorities have been in the past, and makes the case for ‘flattening the curve” so that high growth but economically disadvantaged suburbs receive at least equal attention to privileged inner city areas in the future.
Click or tap to watch the video below:
The Suburban Alliance is a not-for-profit collaboration of people and businesses who believe that opportunities for greater suburban quality of life, business opportunity and economic expansion could get more attention and support than they currently do. Visit website: suburbanalliance.com.au.
On today's episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Austin Williams. Austin Rhys Williams is course leader/senior lecturer in PG Dip Professional Practice in Architecture at Kingston School of Art; and honorary research fellow at XJTLU University in China.
He is the director of the Future Cities Project, China correspondent for the Architectural Review and has written for a range of publications; from the Times Literary Supplement to Top Gear; from Dezeen to The Economist.
His latest books are "China's Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-cities" (Bloomsbury, 2017) and "New Chinese Architecture: Twenty Women Building the Future" (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming, 2019). His previous books include: "The Enemies of Progress", "The Future of Community" and "The Lure of the City". He co-founded the mantownhuman manifesto (featured in Penguin Classics "100 Artists' Manifestos") and the New Narratives initiative. (Kingston)
[2:30] Austin and Joel discuss the differences in urbanism between the West and China.
[13:30] Austin explains China’s vision for the future with artificial intelligence.
[15:30] Marshall, Austin and Joel discuss Jack Ma and independent thought.
[27:04] The episode ends with a discussion of economics, population control and China’s demographics.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
Hope you emerged from this crazy winter storm + power/water outage week relatively unscathed. I certainly learned the value of stockpiling water and draining water pipes (esp. with a power outage), and ERCOT learned that it's a bad idea to cut off power to natural gas pumps across the state during a winter storm. I hope they spend a bit of time doing analysis before jumping to expensive solutions like full winterization of all facilities. It's possible that if they had simply mapped natural gas pumps and compressors across the state and treated them as critical non-blackout facilities like hospitals, we might have gotten away with short-duration rolling blackouts that would have been far more manageable (like 2011).
"Solutions will have to be nuanced and incremental. Winterizing all power plants would be unnecessarily expensive, and so would a complete overhaul of Texas' market design, which is partly responsible for consistently low power prices compared with the rest of the country."
And an excellent idea: "One option could be rewarding liquefied natural-gas processing facilities in Texas to both curtail electricity usage and to redirect the feedstock natural gas for electricity rather than for exports."
"to equal the 80 Bcf/d of gas delivered during cold snaps, the U.S. would need an electric grid as large as all existing generation in the country, which is currently about 1.2 terawatts."
Unpopular observation: gas-powered cars, trucks, and SUVs were a critical source of resilience during this never-ending mass power-outage disaster by providing heat and recharging. If we all had electric vehicles, this disaster would have been epically worse. A hard truth.
Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Center for Opportunity Urbanism and co-authored the original study with noted urbanist Joel Kotkin and others, creating a city philosophy around upward social mobility for all citizens as an alternative to the popular smart growth, new urbanism, and creative class movements. He is also an editor of the Houston Strategies blog.
Housing Industry Organization Chief Economist Tim Reardon has predicted that detached housing production will set an all time record in 2021 in Australia. The demographic shifts resulting from the Covid-19 Pandemic are the root cause. According to Reardon: ““Regional locations in many states are showing a larger increase in activity than capital cities as the population moves away from inner city living.” This mirrors a trend reported in other nations.
On today's episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Charles Blain, Brian Calle, and Cullum Clark to discuss the future of the GOP.
Charles Blain is the president of Urban Reform Institute. Urban Reform Institute (URI, formerly Center for Opportunity Urbanism) is a stand-alone think tank, based in Houston.
Brian Calle is the CEO and publisher of LA weekly. Since 1978, LA Weekly has been decoding Los Angeles for its readers, infiltrating its subcultures, observing and analyzing its shifting rhythms, digging up its unreported stories and confronting the city's political leaders.
Dr. J.H. Cullum Clark is the Director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative where he is responsible for managing various aspects of the new partnership between the Department of Economics and the Bush Institute and leads the Initiative's work on domestic economic policy and economic growth.
[3:42] Joel compares the GOP to France’s right, saying how the GOP is on its way to becoming a voiceless, minority party.
[6:17] Charles dissects the party, explaining how the party has no unifying voice, member accountability, or adherence to principles.
[26:00] Joel speaks about the GOP's racial insensitivity, lack of positive programming, and opposition of big tech.
[29:48] The episode ends with the hosts and speaker’s optimism on rational bipartisan debates in both the Senate and the House.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
A Thursday morning (February 11, 2021) announcement from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (USDOT) shows that US air passenger volumes have fallen behind China for the first time. This is also the first time that the US has not been the world leader, based on available data.
From January through November, US airlines carried 354 million domestic passengers, according to data from the United States Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics. By comparison, the China domestic airline volume was 363 million domestic passengers, based on data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), reported through CEIC Data.
China had achieved a virtual tie with the United States in the October data, when both nations reached a 2020 volume of 324 million, with the US retaining a small lead.
Obviously, these are not normal times, due to the COVID pandemic, which has been far more destructive to US air volumes than those of China. By comparison, in the pre-COVID year of 2019, US air passenger volume was 927 million. China, which has occupied second place internationally for 15 years, carried 587 million passengers, 37% below that of the United States.
Before the pandemic, China had assumed world leadership in high speed rail, having opened 37,900 kilometers (23,500 miles) in just the last 12 years. This is about two-thirds of all the world’s high speed rail mileage, and China carries two-thirds of the passengers.
As normality returns, it seems likely that the United States will resume its air passenger volume.
If one were to explore the most blessed places on earth, California, my home for a half century, would surely be up there. The state, with its salubrious climate, spectacular scenery, vast natural resources, and entrepreneurial heritage is home to the world’s fifth-largest economy and its still-dominant technological centre. It is also — as some progressives see it — the incubator of “a capitalism we can believe in”.
Perhaps channelling such hyperbole, President Biden recently suggested that he wants to “make America California again”. Yet before leaping on this particular train, he should consider whether the California model may be better seen as a cautionary tale than a roadmap to a better future in the digital age.
The on-the-ground reality — as opposed to that portrayed in the media or popular culture — is more Dickensian than utopian. Rather than the state where dreams are made, in reality California increasingly presents the prototype of a new feudalism fused oddly with a supposedly progressive model in which inequality is growing, not falling.
California now suffers the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate in the country, and the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. It also has one of the nation’s highest Gini ratios, which measures the inequality of wealth distribution from the richest to poorest residents — and the disparity is growing. Incredibly, California’s level of inequality is greater than that of neighboring Mexico, and closer to Central American countries like Guatemala and Honduras than developed nations like Canada and Norway.
It is true that California’s GDP per capita is far higher than these Central American countries, but the state has slowly morphed into a low wage economy. Over the past decade, 80% of the state’s jobs have paid under the median wage — half of which are paid less than $40,000 — and most are in poorly paid personal services or hospitality jobs. Even at some of the state’s most prestigious companies like Google, many lower (and even mid-level) workers live in mobile home parks. Others sleep in their cars.
The state’s dependence on low-wage service workers has been critical in the pandemic, but it now suffers among the highest unemployment rates in the nation, outdone only by tourism-dominated states like Hawaii, Nevada and New Jersey. Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, now has the highest unemployment rate of the nation’s top ten metropolitan areas, higher even than New York.
But that hasn’t stopped California from portraying itself as a progressive’s paradise, publicly advocating racial and social justice. The state just passed a Racial Justice Act to monitor law enforcement, endorsing reparations (although California was never a slave state) and is working to address “systemic” racism in its classrooms. This “woke” agenda was taken to a new extreme this week when the San Francisco School Board decided to rename 44 schools because they were named after people connected to racism or slavery. The district’s Arts Department, originally known as “VAPA”, also decided to re-brand because “acronyms are a symptom of white supremacy culture”.
Bruce Springsteen’s name may be on the marquee of the Jeep Super Bowl ad featuring The Boss, which is titled “The Middle.” But Lebanon, Kansas -- the real middle -- is the star.
And while the message of the rock-and-roll icon from New Jersey is an appeal for national healing, using a chapel in the geographic center of the nation as a backdrop, out here in Flyover Country we may experience the two-minute commercial differently than other Americans. That’s not just because many in the heartland dislike The Boss’s politics.
It’s really because we know that if the true healing of America ever is going to begin, on a universally edifying basis, it’s going to begin in The Middle. Our middle.
Springsteen knew that. So did Olivier Francois, the chief marketing officer for Jeep and the other brands owned by what used to be Fiat Chrysler and now part of Stellantis. Springsteen has been legendarily shy about making commercial endorsements, but Francois finally was able to draw him into a Big Game ad with an invitation to apply some salve to the national wound.
And the way that Francois – a Frenchman who worked for an Italian company but a very shrewd reader of American moods and culture – drew in The Boss was with a script for an ad that focused on the U.S. Center Chapel in the middle.
“It’s no secret,” Springsteen begins the spot. “The middle has been a hard place to get to lately, between red and blue, between servant and citizen, between our freedom and our fear,” The Boss intones, in a script he helped pen himself, over a new musical score he also assisted in writing.
“Now, fear has never been the best of who we are. And as for freedom, it’s not just the property of the fortunate few; it belongs to us all. Whoever you are, wherever you’re from. It’s what connects us. We need that connection. We need the middle. We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground.”
Springsteen finishes by urging Americans to come together to “cross this divide,” before Jeep ends the ad by putting on screen, “The ReUnited States of America.” A star on a U.S. map where Lebanon is located sits between “ReUnited” and “States.”
The images carrying the narrative are a virtual paean to the raw simplicity of the Great Plains in the winter, to its rolling hills, rolling stock on the rails, rugged rock outcroppings, icy sunsets and slush-strewn city streets.
There’s even a baldly spiritual statement encompassed by the cross on top of the chapel, and the three crosses stuck in a field outside – all of which are embraced by the ad. Springsteen sits in the tiny chapel and lights a votive candle toward the end.
Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Find out more.
Authored by Aaron Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism.
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