Superpower: One Man's Quest to Transform American Energy

Gold is a superb writer and tells an important tale from the renewable energy trenches. I'm reading as much as I can about the US grid and how it needs to change to accommodate wind/solar. I've slogged through a lot of technical material. This is the first page turner I've come across. It's such a fun read that I'd recommend it in a heartbeat to someone who just likes engaging real-word tales of grit and triumph over odds.Gold's narrative gifts are compelling in the way he structures the book. His insider lens is a gifted, focused and nonconformist dynamo who plays a principal role in an enterprise that became first company to really deliver at scale in the nascent wind industry. He spins in history and other great characters going all the way back to Edison.Here's a yarn well worth your time even if you don't I've a hoot about renewable energy or the grid.

This nonfiction book tackles the wind energy industry through the eyes of an entrepreneur who understands the need to connect (unequally-distributed) wind resource in the Oklahoma Panhandle to a potential customer (the TVA) by building a new direct current transmission line between Oklahoma and Tennessee. Political challenges and regulatory roadblocks to building the line are painfully numerous.Readers gain a deeper understanding of the US electrical grid and how it may evolve as renewable fuel sources to make electricity are added.As an energy pro and someone who lived through the "Little Texas Ice Age" of Feb 2021, I disagree with the $/megawatt comparisons toward the end of the book. Intermittent power from renewables like wind is simply not as valuable, particularly from an energy security standpoint (i.e. freezing in the dark due to forced electricity outage when demand for electricity exceeds supply), compared to load-following sources (natural gas as needed, including as ready back-up for renewables) or baseload (coal, gas, nuclear) sources.(Battery storage to back up renewables doesn't get us there. According to one expert, the batteries we now have on the grid can store 20 seconds worth of US electricity usage and if we achieved a 10,000% expansion by 2050 we would only be able to store 20 minutes of US electricity usage.)That said, Gold gives a superb picture of the size, location, and variation in the US wind resource (other states are not as windy as Oklahoma--who knew?), tax policy and finance issues, and the changes in the grid necessary to harness the increasing diversity of primary fuel sources to make electricity, such as wind.Highly, highly recommended to all interested in the complexities of our energy future.

Gold has written the inside story of Michael Skelly, a driven entrepreneur with a huge goal: building thousands of miles of transmission lines to carry cheap, renewable energy across several states to where it’s needed. The project would require billions of dollars in spending before earning a dime, but raising money would be the easy part. Convincing landowners, state governments and utility commissions to approve the project would ultimately be Skelly’s quest.This book succeeds in many ways:• It's a fast-paced story that is impossible to put down.• Has interesting characters like an Oxford-educated Iraqi-Jew who ran a punk-rock record label before going into the oil business. (He decorated his Houston conference room with a poster of Johnny Rotten.)• You don’t have to be an electrical engineer to understand how the grid works. The author conveys the scientific parts with simple analogies.• Along the way, we learn how far renewable energy has come.• It’s a good startup story. Actually, it’s several startup stories.• Ultimately it teaches us about the rewards of pursuing a worthy life.ARE WE DOOMED TO A 1950s ELECTRICAL GRID?The good news is that our country respects individual property rights, local government rights, and limited federal power. The bad news is that we can’t seem to resolve those competing interests to replace aging infrastructure. Our electrical grid is the worst of any developed nation.The US has plenty of sun and wind to generate energy. We have plenty of investors with billions of dollars they want to invest in energy projects. But we are stuck. Like the immense amount of clean energy Michael Skelly wanted to release from the Oklahoma panhandle, our country’s greatness needs a new transmission line to get out.