What I Did To The New York City Electricity Grid Last Friday

Greetings,

I suppose I should have said “Warm” Greetings not because I am warm while extending the greetings - I am damn cold - but because I am hoping that you are warm as you receive them. :)

That Half-Time Show was electric in more ways that one …

I hope you noticed the part of the show where Bad Bunny and other Linemen danced on then dangled from the utility poles. If you didn’t know, that was to commemorate the impact that Hurricane Maria had on Puerto Rico in 2017 and the years after. It was significant - 80 % of the island’s transmission and distribution system was damaged. Some areas went without power for many, many months. Absent sufficient help from the Federal Government, the situation became such that regular workers in the cane fields began climbing the poles themselves in attempts to restore power. There were electrocutions and bodies dangling from the wires. as depicted on Sunday.

The outages and subsequent problems with the island’s electricity system are obviously a deep issue for the people of Puerto Rico, reflected in in its inclusion in the show and by the fact that the song Bad Bunny’s did during that segment is one of his past hits named “El Apagon” (The Outage). If you want to know more about the Hurricane and the grid, look here.

Regarding Access to My past Newsletters and Op Eds …

One quick note to my long-time readers. As you know, I recently moved this newsletter over to Substack, the platform that you are now reading this on. I will be cancelling my account on the old platform this week.

What that means is that my past newsletter issues will only exist on Substack. However, all of the ones since 2023 have been brought over here and you can see them anytime you want. But it also means that you cannot pull up one of my old emails and click on the link for one of the archived ones listed there.

I hope that makes sense. If you have any questions, please reach out.

Now….on to me telling you about what I did last Friday night….

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What I Did To The New York City Grid Last Friday

Last Friday night, I decided to do something that had been on my “try it” list for some time. And since I am currently living in NYC as I work on some new projects here, I saw that I had a chance to scratch that one off.

After downing the requisite evening pint of Guiness at a local establishment, I walked down to SoHo from my place in the East Village and joined 25 others – mainly young people – who were interested enough to spend their Friday night trying to add a lot of clean, no-emissions energy to the NYC grid.

They were going to do this via a board game called Energetic, developed during the pandemic by City Atlas, a non-profit based here.

I had heard about this game before. It has been written up by numerous media outlets, and I was eager to see what it was all about.

Four boards were set up, and you can see an example of one below. There is one team per board. Everyone on each board worked together to add clean energy to the NYC grid. So, while there was a sum-up at the end to see which of the four teams had added the most Gigawatts, each game was independent and not based on competition with the other three.

I had intended to play myself but soon realized that I might come off as a “ringer” so bowed out to be an observer. Plus, I found it more interesting to walk around and watch the action on each board.

As with any board game, this involved dice and cards that got flipped over telling the team what they could and could not do as a next step. There was also a stack of money to be used to make investments in clean energy projects.

The board had many “nodes” pre-printed on it and it was on those nodes that the team could place different tokens like solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and the transmission necessary for them to happen.

For example, there were four nodes off the coast of Long Island, with each one representing an offshore wind installation. When all four nodes had been “filled” based on earlier moves over the course of the game, you could connect the wind resource to the mainland – but only if you had also arranged to also put down a transmission token offshore and onshore to handle the electricity input.

Here’s the interesting part. There were four “consequential” sliders that depicted the impacts of each move made by the team. One was the obvious slider to increase the GW. The three others were for Public Opinion, Stability (Reliability) and Election Years.

Here’s an example of a move. The team might agree to place a 1 GW nuclear unit on the grid. That obviously moved the slider for GW up. It also had a positive move on the stability scale. But it had a negative impact on the public opinion scale.

Here is an example of where a move couldn’t be made. A team pulled a BANANAS Card, as in Build-Absolutely-Nothing-Anywhere-Near-Anyone. So much for siting that Transmission Line they wanted to get that upstate hydro to the city.

I don’t know if I am giving you a good idea as to the game and how it is played. Below are links to the game’s self-described overview, along with a couple of reviews by major media sources. The New York Times one is an extensive one and the article is unlocked.

The game is extremely sophisticated, but yet fun to play. The people last Friday were laughing along but also taking things very seriously. At one table there was a serious debate about adding a nuclear unit even though it would be a big positive swipe upwards on the clean GW scale.

The game could probably use a little bit of an upgrade on at least two counts. One is to reflect the growth of energy storage and its potential for deployment today. The other is the lack of any demand-side actions that the game allows. There is no option for deploying energy efficiency, demand response, VPPs or Non-Wires Solutions. It would be good to add those, but their current absence does not take away from the realistic nature of the game.

Another comment is that if you do find a chance to play, read the overview (at least) before you do so you can proceed to play all that much faster once at the Board.

The game reportedly is and has been in use in colleges, high schools, etc. I can see why. If you are affiliated with an educational institution, or perhaps a library or some other entity that might want to host game playing, you may want to consider contributing a game set. Another type of group that I can see benefiting from playing this game is a climate and/or clean energy advocacy group. The game can only be so sophisticated given obvious limitations, but it still shows that ratcheting up clean GW is not as easy as it sounds.

I will leave it there. Check it out, and if you get a chance, grab a seat, roll the dice, and pick a card.

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Here is the website for the organization that created the game: https://newyork.thecityatlas.org/energetic/

Here is the review in the NYT (unlocked): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/nyregion/earth-day-energetic-game.html?unlocked_article_code=1.K1A.Gp-M.5xaq3bzRZgn_&smid=url-share

Here is the review by Yale Climate Connections: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/10/Players-of-this-board-game-explore-how-to-power-New-York-City-on-clean-energy/