Episode Transcript
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SH: Hello it is your host Sam Hansen and I am excited to welcome you back to Carry the Two, the podcast about how math and statistics impact the world around us from the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation. While we’re in between our more in-depth seasons, we like to bring you something a little different in mini-season format. And for this mini season, we are going to highlight some of the amazing researchers who have presented at IMSI over the past year. Our third guest is
FW: My name is Frank Wolak.
I am a professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University and teach courses in energy and environmental economics.
Essentially been involved in the electricity industry and power systems sort of issues for 25 years.
SH: Frank joined us at IMSI for a workshop on The Architecture of Green Energy Systems: The Underlying Problem and Its Challenges where he presented a talk titled The Engineering Economics of Low Carbon Electricity Market Design. And now, let’s dive right into my conversation with Frank Wolak
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SH: Well thank you, thank you so much Frank for joining me on Carry the Two today and I was wondering if you could start by talking a little bit about why when we start mixing in large scales of renewable energy into our existing energy infrastructure and systems why it becomes harder to run a system with those inputs?
FW: The simple reason is just you can't control how much energy they will produce in any given time because of the fact that they depend upon a resource that is location-specific and effectively intermittent.
A simple example would be solar.
If the cloud goes over you're gonna get much less solar energy out of your solar panels at that location and same with wind and I would say the one advantage of wind that is the fact that it can typically produce at any time during a 24-hour period whereas solar you're pretty confident that it's not going to produce much when it's dark and that creates significantly more challenge.
The other part about going to renewables is the fact that in the traditional power system you had the option to say I'll bring the input fuel to the location where load is and I'll produce it there or what I'll do is I will take the big power plant and locate it near where this very cheap source is and transport to power to the major, you know where people live.
The problem with renewables is you know you can't do that, the energy needs to be produced where that renewable resource really exists and it's very very good in terms of producing a lot of energy say on a yearly basis.
The only problem is it's intermittent so you're building a transmission line or a transmission network for a resource that sometimes produces a lot sometimes produces a little.
That's that that creates another set of challenges but the two big ones are just intermittent and you got to get the energy where it exists not where people live and that's a that's a big challenge given how much people like transmission lines and construction you know near their houses. It is a real challenge.
SH: So I, I know that one of the ways that that, well not just has been proposed but is definitely happening is that we have markets,electricity markets, that try to help solve this problem so how is market design for electricity markets different than it than it would be for you know a what a market for cars or any of the other markets that that we run into regularly.
FW: Yeah I mean the the big thing that whenever I give a talk to say the general audience is to say there's a very good reason that this industry was essentially vertically integrated.
I mean that every segment of the industry was owned by a single geographic monopoly and the output price of this vertically integrated company, say the utility in my area PG&E or if I live in LA and it's the municipal utility there LADWP, it would be something like, the way I could characterize it is say that your utility is really kind of like a kilowatt insurance provider.
What it does is it says look you pay the premium which is say ten cents per kilowatt hour you consume and we guarantee that whenever you need it you're gonna kilowatt that's that's not a bad model in terms of probably you know developing the system and doing these kinds of things because I'm the local utility I'm pretty confident that that's gonna work if I have a regulator that understands that that you know think of that insurance premium is going to recover the cost of serving all the customers my geographic service territory.
But the other way to think about it is that ten cents is pretty much saying you're only ever gonna get ten cents for every kilowatt you sell. And one of the things we know is high-powered incentives, you know, are really gonna make in some sense you could say very innovative things happen, but on the other hand high-powered incentives can also lead to what we've seen when there are high-powered incentives in financial markets and other kinds of things.
So the challenge of electricity is the fact that, wait, you know, if you were as an economist to write down everything that is a reason markets don't work electricity would fit it.
You'd say well I want capacity constraints meaning I can only produce this amount in any given time and so all my competitors know that's how much I can produce.
I have to deliver through this specialized network that is potentially congested and that network is kind of like the roads and highways.
And so that really is the difference I'd say between traditional products and electricity is that that infrastructure, if you like, is the sort of playing field on which competition takes place. And if it were a copper plate, meaning that if we had infinite capacity of virtual copper plate in the United States and the only thing you had to worry about was like losses and people just injected their electricity into that copper plate and you as a household just sort of pulled down for that copper plate, this would be a viciously competitive market.
SH: When Frank is talking about a virtual copper plate here, he is referencing treating the grid as if you can transmit from one area of the electricityl grid to another at will with no cost. Of course neither of these are possible. There are limits both to how much electricity can be transferred through the grid at a given time and there is always a cost involved.
FW: But you know sadly we don't have that virtual copper plate in spite of what you know Nikola Tesla went to his grave promising that we would have, but he was quite an interesting fellow, but we have to deliver it through this big transmission network that crosses state boundaries and has finite capacity and distribution network. And it really is, that's the thing that really complicates the, the market design process is that people can't vote with their feet.
You know they want electricity all the time and the network is how they do it but you can think of gee if we have that virtual copper plate people say well I don't like that supplier they did something I didn't like and they just go sign something else and write the check to the different supplier and always getting their electricity from, through if you like that infinite the capacity you know virtual copper plate that lives above us but it doesn't.(See Above)
SH: Well speaking speaking of Tesla, sorry this is gonna be a tortured segue, speaking of Tesla one of the things that you that you emphasized a lot while you were at the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation and giving a talk last year was that the importance of of real-world physics and these markets really taking into account what physics is possible and what physics isn't possible. Could you tell me a little bit more about why it is so important that we really consider physics when we think about electricity markets?
FW: Yeah this is one that I think most economists did not appreciate as sort of as much as they should have and, you know in the sense that maybe it was because you know I was an engineer in a science geek that it kind of started to make sense as a kid and got you got you know in that and then got in and all the stuff I done.
But the the way that I would explain it to people and to kind of provoke them to think that this is possible is to say look, in the end physics wins. And what I mean by that is I can't say, "Gee I'd like my electrons to go to you," that's a financial construct but that's not how the physics works. It's the you know what's called Kirchhoff's laws you inject into the grid and basically these laws you know govern, it's basically path of resistance and not much more than that.
So what happens is is that if I understand that and you have a market that doesn't respect that then effectively what I can do is essentially say well I know in the end physics is going to win so I'm going to do something now that maybe you're willing to be the counterparty on or something but I know, because in the end, the system operates got to make sure that everything's safe for the network to operate according to these laws of physics I'm going to get compensated for the fact that that knowledge and take position.
So there's all sorts of examples of this, that it really, you know the old saying, I guess you'd say is ignore the laws of physics particularly with intermittent renewable sources at your own risk because it gets more and more costly particularly in a market environment.
And a good example that I would always like to tell people about in you know markets with lots of hydroelectric sources is that when the system operator says, "Oh we don't have enough water" what the resource owner that has say a you know natural gas unit or some other unit that they can just turn on is they see offer high, it's a great day to be in the market.
And that's what you'd expect and so you need to design your market recognizing these kinds of incentives and the fact that if you don't recognize the physical realities of both nature and power flows and design a market that says that those don't really exist, it's probably going to be very costly for your consumers and probably not be very reliable in terms of its ability to supply. And there's sort of an increasing number of examples of that.
And you know it's not that it's in it's sort of a property of electricity markets it's a property of the fact that electricity markets create high-powered incentives and if those aren't aligned I guess I'd say an energy trader doesn't really care that you're getting electricity. He's compensated on the bonus he gets and that may be good for you and not good for you.
SH: Other than making sure physical realities like path of least resistance are respected and what role the inability to track specific electrons plays in market incentives, what are some of the other big areas that you like to focus on?
FW: Well the thing that the big thing that I would say is the pessimistic answer that I gave you before, I think in many instances can become the optimistic answer to the question.
So in other words, one of the things that I just find so interesting is this is, it's a financial market in the sense that, but it's a financial market that you know essentially you're what you're doing is you're taking bets upon how the grid's gonna operate in real-time.
And one way you could think about it is for the entities that really have good, you know excellent knowledge on how that's gonna actually play out now they're competing in terms of their views of that.
And what you get is that the entities that are very good at figuring that out will make money and the entities that aren't very good at figuring that out...
But like in any market right this the, the second that you know there's competition to try to figure something complicated out and there's money to be made from doing it that starts to dissipate.
And in a number of markets, you know, the what are called financial traders that are trading between say day ahead real-time markets in, in electricity, so think of a something happening at that location where you're setting a price for power to be delivered tomorrow or withdrawn tomorrow at that location and then real-time and other prices set, traders can actually say well I think the price tomorrow is gonna be lower than the price today I can take the position that position can influence what physical resources get actually, in the day ahead market, committed to operate and if they're right they make money but if they're wrong they lose money. And that's one of the you know one thing that just does not exist in a vertically integrated utility kind of context. And you know one of the fun parts of this kind of area is seeing that wow that really can work very well for, for consumers in the sense of, the way I would describe it is that the ones that win are the ones that essentially find the most efficient real-time dispatch of, you know, configuration of units to operate.
And that's just what we want from the market. We want that to be figured out, but there has to be some mechanism some set of agents or collective that's going to make that happen and that's what's so much fun about you know doing this stuff is that it can work, but you know it's sort of, you know, you kind of feel that oftentimes people think you're just talking Greek but there are certainly examples I think it will work.
But the one thing that doesn't work in, in a market is, is people that don't understand the market as well as someone that doesn't understand the market, that person telling them what to do That typically leads to things that don't work out too well. And that's one of the big challenges of this transition is that your skills as a regulator you know in the old regime may not translate to the new regime and, you may not be too happy about that because you're still employed as the regulator.
And that's that's one I think the big challenges that we're facing is not it's not the technology it's not the fact that it can't work it's just the fact that you really need everybody to be pushing the rock up the hill in the same direction and that's been a real problem in many contexts.
SH: I think you've spoken to this some but I'd, I’d love to to hear more about the ways you think that market design could help with the will electricity be available when we want it issue that we have with renewables?
FW: Oh yeah no this is again this is, this is another one of these things where...
Because what we've seen with markets is the, these very what people like to call crisis conditions. And for me, for me is being an economist, one of your roles is always to be very skeptical, which then tends to upset your wife, your friends, and everybody else that aren't economists, but you know you'd say well wait why is this happening? And in some sense the the way that I would call it is, electricity, because of the properties of electricity it really isn't, as we you might think of, it's not like tomatoes right so I'm gonna sell you this tomato and you're gonna get it at your house. No one's ever seen an electron, no one's ever seen a green electron, no one's ever seen a solar electron.
And so this gets back to the point about the only two things you can measure with electricity is how much I put in as a generator and how much I take out as a load at another location.
That's it.
I mean maybe you measure flows on various lines but you know if there's what we would call networks that kind of loop, meaning, you know, it's not just a great extension cord but there's like think like a triangle and I have generators and loads located at triangle, you have really no idea where your energy is coming from because again it just flows according to the path of least resistance.
So a good example would be is, that I think really helps to illustrate what I'd like to call this sort of in economist language the reliability externality associated with electricity that doesn't exist for many other goods, is that if I'm located next to you and you want a reliable supply of electricity at your house and, with you know the the various things that we have like the right voltage level, the right frequency in terms of the cycles per second and things that you see on the back of the appliances, then what it means is that almost like a free rider, I get that too. Because the way the line works is that it doesn't really matter what I do if that line goes out, you don't get power, I don't get grid supplied power.
And so this creates this kind of, what you could think of as, I have no incentive as the person that doesn't really care to make sure that I get it, because that costs me more money and you've already done it very well for me.
And so the way we might solve that problem is to say well, if you're the one that's left out in the lurch we're gonna set the price at this just ridiculously high level so you're the very, the very sort of you know risk averse guy that bought all the energy you're likely to consume at this low price and I'm the guy that bought at the spot price, well you know, and the price goes to whatever it goes to...
You know, that's, that’s, you can kind of think of that's not gonna work because I'm gonna go wait, the price went so high this is terrible and you're still gonna get curtailed because you can't stop me from consuming what I'm consuming. I'm just paying for what I consumed at that high price.
And so what are they, they might do is they might just say, okay we're gonna curtail to you. So effectively that's the challenge of what's called long-term resource adequacy in electricity.
It's that you have to internalize that externality, meaning this free rider problem, to effectively get it, the market to solve it.
And the interesting thing that I find is a lot of Latin American countries have done a great job of doing that, but we're Americans and we typically go Latin America why would I want to learn from them, you know, they need to learn from us.
But in fact that's one of the fun parts of this, this industry, is that electrons are the same everywhere, generation is the same everywhere. But their problem, if you like, is more urgent, in the sense that you know you're a Chile you're a Peru you're facing 20 years of low growth the five to six you know percent a year, you better figure that problem out of making sure everybody gets electricity.
In the United States we can afford to be, well load growth not that high, so we we can kind of ignore a lot of the physics and a lot in this problem, but with putting a lot of intermittent renewables on the system it gets worse because another thing is supply can dry up very quickly with a lot of intermittent renewables even in a place like US.
And so think of it as a big part of the problem that happened at ERCOT during Hurricane Uri was a lot of the wind and solar on very cold days disappears, not the only problem of course, but the standard sort of cascading, but certainly I think you know had it all been natural gas, coal, and the like and you didn't have this problem that it disappeared because of the weather it may have been different. And to give a shameless plug to a paper of mine that kind of looks into that, but you know but that's effectively the problem of: we need to solve this problem if we're gonna have a market because there's nobody responsible for ensuring to keep the lights on, but if that occurs…
Whereas in the vertically integrated regime if you're the utility for the service territory and you don't have enough electricity to serve all your customers the regulator and the government knows exactly who to go to they say, "You did the wrong thing we paid you ten cents which is maybe too high on average and you didn't keep the lights on." Whereas in all these places where you have a market the generators go "I was working as a hard as I could," the grid operator says "I was working as hard as I could," retailer says, "I'm work in as hard as I could" all may be true, but that's the problem
SH: Yeah I guess, I guess my lights go off I don't care how hard people were working
FW: Yes
SH: So, what are some of the things that you think US markets could stand to learn from your experience working in the US and South America?
FW: So the big thing I think both among economists and engineers is we need to get together and talk to each other and learn from each other.
One of the things that I found so enjoyable being on the market surveillance community of California ISO, is the crisis comes, and the market design and everything else, is there are a lot of engineers, there are a lot of economists, and we each thought we knew everything. And the trick was we didn't.
But as we talked more and more and met in meetings and talked about, you know, what was happening, the redesign, you as an economist would learn hey there's this thing that it's not like all the stuff I told you of: I can't send my electrons to him or, you know, I don't get 60 cycles per second sort of down from the gods.
It happens because there's somebody there that's actually making sure and, you know, frequency regulation, all this sort of stuff that I think people don't understand.
And then, you know, over time each side would learn from each other. But the trouble is, at least I think in the US, is that we better learn quick, because it really those are the types of scholars and individuals that we need is if you're gonna have a market the simplest way to think about it is, is that cost is only what I need to know to know, what I want to offer at, and demand conditions and everything else. And the way that I'd explain it is the difference between say the old world and the new world is, in a market I need to know what my competitors are doing because what my competitors are doing is what allows me to do better right.
If I'm competing against a slow sluggish competitor whose behavior is perfectly predictable, ooh that's great, but if I'm competing in somebody that's as smart as me and it understands power systems as well as me probably not as good. And so all those kinds of things are just a sea change in terms of how we think about this industry. But to me it's like wow this is a fantastic area if you're kind of a geeky kid that likes to play games and like strategic behavior i.e. somebody like me, in the sense that wow you know actually knowing a lot of these technical mathematical concepts and what they mean can really be quite useful. And as I like to joke to my students you can be a force for good or a force for making lots of money and buying lots of really wonderful things, but you may be a little guilty about how you're doing it.
Because one of the, one of my favorite stories I like to tell from the crisis is that,
SH: The crisis Frank is referring to is the California Electricity Crisis of 2000 to 2001, when California went through a prolonged period of rolling blackouts due to a lack of electricity supply. A lack of supply that was due in part to capped retail electricity prices and in a much larger part to rampant market manipulation by energy companies, including Enron, that they engaged in order to increase their profits
FW: was that starting in like 1998, till the start of the crisis and for quite a bit longer, I was like this independent market monitor which a lot of the markets have where we would look at the data, and we would debate market rules with stakeholders, and the like, and all this kind of thing, and I still remember at the height of the crisis one of the industry associations, one the generators, asked me to come speak at their conference and I started out this was after all the stuff that had happened in the summer of 2000, and like, and I said, “Look how many you guys thought you would make even say one tenth of the money you're making now two and a half years ago?” And you could see this kind of ehhhh, and you know, and you'd say, “You know, look we got to do something because if this keeps going this is going to be very bad for you know the long-term viability of this stuff.” You know, and then I went through and talked about it more. And finally I said, “Look one of you guys got to step forward and go to the governor's office, and like, and say look we're ready to go.” And one of the cleverer guys at the, that I’d gotten to know pretty well he goes, "Yeah but the first guy that goes is the turkey because he's the guy that gives the concession and everybody makes all the money" and I'm like, "Yeah that's kind of the opposite of competition right." They're all sitting there going, please don't…
It's like the gas station where you're looking across the way and the price of oil has fell and you're going to your competitor, “Please don't please don't cut your price, please don't cut your price,” Because you know if your competitor cuts his price. you've got to or use the volume. And so it's like okay this is why it really is a very different kind of regulation of this industry. And again I think regulation, and the other thing that I I love to tell with students the students all the dollars talk about oh you're economists you think free markets are great and I go, "No they don't I don't know of any free market in the United States." Every market is subject to regulation we just have to figure out what form it takes it's not telling people what to do it's setting up, kind of like market design as we talked, to harness the, the sort of incentives that market participants face. Ar the way that I tried to describe it to physics as I say, “Look market power and making money is like gravity you can't suspend it, you'd love to suspend it, but you can't.”
I mean, talk to the kids that go to the, you know, the major universities and they're all, “How do I make money?” and you're like, “Okay how do I make it so that you, your desire to do that benefits us?”. And it's, that's what's a lot of fun and very difficult, but I think it's the reality that we live in.
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SH: one of the things that you you mentioned in your answer there was that this could be a very interesting area for for people you know geeky kids who like to play games and to figure things out so how about we talk a little bit about about maybe what was the most interesting thing that I learned from your talk and that is that you have an energy market game.
FW: Yeah I mean, there's a good story in the same sort of vein, in that one of the things like probably 15 years ago when I, I took over a kind of a small research center that sort of...
You know what we're trying to do is figure out a lot of the stuff and we would get all these students that would come and want to know and say oh solar and you know...
Had a lot of misconceptions, I guess the way I do it, and so we said okay let's teach a course as sort, capture the economies to scale of, kind of telling them all these kinds of things, and one could say no good deed goes unpunished because it was more just okay there you want, you're at a university you want to actually try to help the students understand what's going on. But you get students to say, “Oh you're just a solar hater or you're a renewables hater, you're a battery hater,” and you go, “No it's just that there's got to be a business model that makes this money or else it's not happening unless you have subsidies.” And harnessing subsidies they go away if the government decides they don't like it. I mean I guess the events of the last two months would hopefully convince them now of those kinds of things but...
So, we decided to teach this course and one of the ways you overcome this problem, and that you have in business schools you typically have lawyers, artists, and everybody else, and the younger generation is not real into models and things like that. And so one of my first lectures in the business school I teach in the economics department I thought I gave a fantastic lecture with the graphs and everything else and a very nicely groomed MBA student comes up and says, and it was very smart student too, he goes, “Professor Wolak I was wondering what the purpose of today's lecture was?” And I was like, “Uh oh, not so good,” you know. So what we decided was, well wait this is the generation that plays on their iPhone, that's great at games, that all this kind of stuff, and so what we did is we just said okay maybe the best way to do this is just to develop a game. So we started with something that was essentially very primitive, and then over time 15 years, we just add everything in each year. And I have a fantastic former graduate student that loves to program and does all this stuff and the code's now something like, you know 50,000 lines of code, and the joke I would say is everything that's in the market and more is in the game, it's just that when we blow up the market it doesn't hurt anything but you know learn a lot. And the thing that's amazing is, is that it's much easier to teach students when they play it and do it themselves rather than me standing up there saying, “And this is true.”
I mean for the students that understand my logic, yeah they get it but that may not be all the students. But by grouping the students into teams, then they play the game together competing against one another, each team sort of teaches other students, and they get to see you know what students, winning and so...
The other thing that's fun is it's a lot of fun to teach. and then the students you'll have so many students come up to you like two or three years later and they look a little older and they'll say, “I took your course there and I thought it was fantastic.” It really hammers in some big points and it's much more effective for them to see it, than for them to have me tell it.
And this then led us to think of, “Well wait, it's also a great way to teach regulators,” who are typically lawyers and people who aren't acquainted with, you know, how things work. And a big difference, I think, between economists and other sorts of disciplines and we try to police it as economists, it's becoming more difficult and difficult, But the big thing is not how should the world work, but it's more about how does the world work because of the incentives or the rules or whatever. And that's tough to sort of teach people who aren't used to that mindset.
So the one pleasurable outcome that we've had is the first few times we played the game with lawyers, and other folks from regulatory agencies, the lawyers say, “Oh you economists, I always do this stuff with you guys, but you know I fall asleep after the first one. But my boss needs me, told me, I need to, like, take the, you know, to do this.” And we're always saying, “No, no we're not teaching any economics, it's nothing. You're just gonna be on this team. You, here's what we do.” And we explain, you know, this is what your costs are, this is what capacity you own, this is how the price clears, and pretty soon the lawyer in them, and the fact that they're a good lawyer, comes out and they become vicious competitors. And, you know, they go, “Wow, I thought I, I thought this would be boring. This is great and I make money.” And to me, that's the way that we have to teach students and regulators now.
And the other thing that we've developed is these, what we call e-learning modules. And there the idea is we learned that when we would do the games with people from disparate backgrounds, we would use jargon. You know, stuff that we thought was not really obvious, or, or maybe different words meant different things to different people. But we developed these modules, where what you do is, it's just like a interactive kind of game. And we know, okay what are the concepts we want to get across and what we've learned works pretty well is we figure out what questions we want to ask people at the end and then we sort of build the game backwards to get it.
And the amount in the level at which we can run each of our, sort of, games that we do in person just goes way up. Because before we'd have, “Well what do you mean by this variable cost thing? What's in variable cost?” Well we have a module that will tell you what that is, and what's not that, and you go through and we can start at a higher level and we can get through much more.
And that's the other thing, the question that I ask students when they say, “Why do we need this?” I say, “Well you're an energy trader what's your incentive to be smart?” “Well you're highly compensated for getting smart.” You're a regulator, what's your incentive to get smart? Well I mean, I guess a little, but your salary doesn't change and if you do the wrong thing you lose your job and your political career is done and so what does that create for you well you know…
So the idea that we're trying to say is we need everybody that's kind of on the side of making the markets work better and the like, having a common understanding, and things like that. It's just a tough lift, because you know you can think of each state thinks they're they're different. And certainly one of the big things we've been trying to do right now is to say look California has this market, the Midwest has a market, andt we think that there should be a single market for the entire interconnected West. And you'll always get from the states in the West is, “We hate California and they want they're gonna do terrible things to us.” Uhh, not really you're gonna get some real benefits out of this.
And it's, it's tough because if you don't know what those benefits are how they get realized you just go well...
It's kind of my favorite joke to tell people during the crisis was, one in eight people live in California and the other eight seven hate them for it. And you can see that in Washington when you go to these states and they'd be like, “Oh California is not doing too well”, and you'd be like, “…,” and they'd be like, “Yeah that's okay,” and you're like “No, no, no.”
SH: I'd like to, I'd like to wrap up with one, one last question here and that was, have you had any positives or anything from the time that you spent here at IMSI through the, through the workshops the, the green energy workshops this past year?
FW: Yeah, I mean that's the, to be honest, that's the whole reason that after about a month I said let's let's do the blog. Because to me it really gets back to the point that you asked me about, is there were, in my audience there were clearly a lot of smart guys and one of the, and guys I use generically in the sense but, just very smart and in many ways people that don't have the barrier that I think I encounter with a lot of economists of, “Oh what is loop flow, what is all the sort of technical stuff,” that I think most of the mathematicians and engineers, you know, that's easy.
And so my hope, and the reason that when I was you know asked to speak there was, look you know the thing that I think would be very interesting is just to say, look let's get these guys together for a week, the people that are willing to say look I don't know how the world works but I really want to use my skills in a way that I think is going to be helpful and go back to my universities and maybe talk to some economists, in spite the fact that many many economists as my wife would always remind me they think they know everything and I'm like maybe not, you know and so that is really, I think what what is necessary and I have to say that's been the most fun I've had, in the sense, that I know probably a lot more you know engineers that you know...
The other I'd say is, is there were a lot of students there that I thought were very interested. And, you know, so it really it's much more about just you know back and forth. and the other thing about this I think is lots of fun is, in many ways a lot of the students know as much as a lot of the professors.
I mean, I had one student that was very good and and decided, “Gee I really interest in this power system stuff,” and you know it's a lot of fun because if we don't produce those kind of people, ugh, I'd argue more is coming. And it's not good more, it's in some sense not so good more. It's gonna be either very expensive to keep the lights on, and maybe not very environmentally, sort of, for some folks, or it's gonna be, appear to be that way, but maybe not as reliable.
But look, this is, I'd argue, not a political issue. This is something, you know we got to solve because everybody pays for electricity. And, you know, it's one of those things where you're like look, we've been at this since 1998, I don't think it's that hard but it is much more about just...
I have this wonderful quote from Machiavelli that I always put at the end of my talks which is, it's essentially just the fact that if you have a new idea that works well and that may go against some, you know, incumbents, they can do whatever they want to make it look like it doesn't. And the only way you can guard against that, is have enough people that understand exactly what I just said, and that's education and that's the business we're in and so...
I had no idea the lift was so heavy when I started this many years ago, but it's lots of fun. And it's very rewarding in the sense you get some students that just really engage and that's, that's the end of my sort of public service announcement and that.
SH: Well thank you so much for giving me your time and, and talking to me about energy markets.
FW: Yeah, no. The only thing I'd say is on the times that you think I might get in trouble for certain things feel free to delete those out because…
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