Bishop: The Sour Taste of National Grid Derangement Syndrome

Bishop: The Sour Taste of National Grid Derangement Syndrome

Some have wondered if the constant resort to find some new flavor actually spells the end of microbrewery revolution. Wasn’t what they made yesterday fresh, genuine and anything but mass produced? One thing that has emerged in all this is the “sour” that makes one pucker so hard after a sip it takes 10 or 20 seconds before you can begin to come to grips with whether you liked it. This doesn’t so much a signal an industry gone wrong – some of them are quite good -- but is a metaphor for our state’s public discourse.

Dan Yorke is a sour man, or at least he plays one on the radio. He’s sour on Trump; sour on parties, very sour on the Pawsox exit, and now he’s really sour on National Grid. This is nothing new, he’s built a 20 year reputation for sourness to earn a living. I hope for his sake it is a cloak he can shed when they turn the mic off. I don’t have much good to say about our politics or culture either, but there are very few people who would suggest that I’m not energetically and happily engaged in the milieu I criticize or that all they ever hear from me is complaining. (There is a comment section to refute that although even my progressive interlocuters tend to call me affable, which to some makes me a special danger).

Dan has spent hours over the last week, with the tepid support of the Lieutenant Governor Dan McKee, berating National Grid for not having yet defined precisely what the 27b stroke 6 is going to yield by way of ‘compensation’ for those who experienced gas interruption in Newport and Middletown. The purported solution: fines for poor storm response, which Dan McKee again touted right here at GoLocal this week as he tacitly opens his bid for governor. What better windmills to tilt at than big corporations.

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Stirred up over nothing

Forgetting that this wasn’t a storm, both Dans continuously gloss over the fact that the fines they gleefully report as being levied in Massachusetts which they suggest are the proper incentive to get National Grid to snap to attention in Rhode Island are not for loss of service! They are for inadequate response to service loss. Dan McKee nor anyone else has articulated how National Grid’s response to the Newport interruption was inadequate.

Dan McKee faults the response of the Electric side of the utility to last year’s October storm, not their response to his outage which he generally suggests is just what it should be. Dan Yorke insists the present response is inadequate because Grid gratuitously offered some manner of compensation but wasn’t willing to say how far they’d go in the end. He characterized this in the vein of not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. I can agree with him in one respect, that Grid allowed themselves to be pushed into a corner when their principal message should have been that compensation is not generally available and that customers should do their best to protect their property and themselves while Grid did its best to restore service.

The National Grid tariff is clear, they are not liable for a failure to supply gas so in an unprecedented outage such as this it is entirely unclear whether they are setting a precedent that the PUC will support. Yes, they have the pecuniary motive that there is no existing rule on whether they would be able to recover moneys spent in their tariff, i.e. rates. But that is true of every expense a utility makes, regardless of whether they are an international concern – much scoffed at as if that makes a difference.

It’s oh so simple to suggest fining some faraway company that you claim doesn’t care properly about its clients in Rhode Island with no regard to whether they’ve done anything to merit fines as if this helps the ratepayers, Dan Mckee’s constant if logically off-key refrain.

Compensation Doesn’t Pay Itself

Fines themselves generally are not recoverable from ratepayers. But far from getting the incentives right, an overzealous plan for interruption response and prevention promises to cost ratepayers money in the same way that doctors practicing precautionary medicine order more CYA tests than they otherwise would. All the extra inspections, preparation and any response and compensation would all be chargeable to the ratepayers. After all, the Dans claim they don’t want poor response from National Grid, in which case there would be no fines, but there will be a lot of expense that raises rates.

It’s possible that some additional investment is warranted but we should be very cautious about setting some precedent that the utility should compensate those who lose service. Its no fun to draw that short straw in these affairs, but talk about getting incentives wrong! If the utility and not the homeowner is effectively responsible for protecting the property, where is the incentive for the homeowner to try to limit the loss?

Our neighborhood lost power three times for a week at a time during the winter last year and it never occurred to me that we should be seeking compensation, nor that Grid’s response was necessarily inadequate. It was up to us to employ coping strategies so our circumstance didn’t go from uncomfortable and inconvenient to the extreme cost posed if we had just thrown up our hands and left allowing the heating system to freeze. We relied on propane space heaters and a generator that was able to run the heating system in one building.

Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it

In this respect, the most thoughtful thing that Grid did in this entire affair was to provide space heaters. Yet, the state fire marshall took it upon himself to visit with the Dans on the radio to cast a wet blanket on one of the few things homeowners could do to protect themselves and their property. This is an insult to injury to believe that the average American cannot safely use a space heater. If this is so we ought to hand the keys to the Chinese.

Of course, space heaters can be used dangerously. Extension cords generally shouldn’t be added to electric space heaters without sure knowledge that they are as short as possible and of sufficient capacity for sustained use under those loads.

And while the emissions of propane and kerosene space heaters should be monitored, that is why most homes should already have CO detectors – and those could have been passed out too. That said, you really have got to load your house up with combustion space heaters for short term outages to pose a significant air quality hazard.

Any space heater has to be kept clear of curtains, furniture, paper or other combustibles and the cords and plugs monitored for excessive heat. But these heaters are going away the best way to preserve your pipes and a modicum of comfort when faced with loss of heat.

Use the professionals already there . . .

One big problem it can be difficult to head off is: the heating system itself freezing, if it is hot water baseboard. This is not something your average homeowner has the skill to prevent although it is not that hard. Before there is a problem, though, the serviceman or a handy neighbor can advise on how to keep water circulating even when the boiler is not providing heat which can buy time, and how to turn off water supply to that heating system so if it does freeze it doesn’t create water damage when it thaws.

This knowledge is of precisely the sort that many of the professionals who were going door to door shutting off gas services would have or could be quickly trained to communicate and effect. Being able to respond at that level is much more useful than information on where to get a hotel voucher, yet it was hotel vouchers that were the focus of Dan Yorke and the Governor for that matter.

Have we forgotten how to close ranks without the government? In Providence, we boys with sleds took cans of oil up the street to prevent the house that would eventually belong to Linc Chafee from freezing when it ran out in the blizzard of ‘78. It’s quite difficult to get natural gas in a can, the Macguyver solutions are different for every case. And actually, I’m reasonably sure that many people did as I did, call a friend in Newport and see what they needed. At first blush, such trials are not a regulatory problem but a challenge to our family ties and neighborliness writ large.

The drumbeat of liability

Regardless of the PUC, fines and response plans, the first lawsuits are already rolling in for this interruption. It remains unclear whether there was any operational negligence although my suspicion is that you could see what happens in other class actions, a settlement where the homeowner gets a modest voucher and the lawyers get a nice check. Now that isn’t to say the lawyers are wrong to try to hold someone responsible, but I fear the action may come short of revealing true culpability. I hope my [given] namesake Mr. Cunha will prove me wrong.

The pipeline company that had an equipment failure has indicated that this was compounded, or possibly precipitated, by extremely high demand that exceeded their capacity. It’s not clear how many interruptable customers are serviced on the Algonquin line and whether this consumption had already been shed. Perhaps without the valve incident, service might have been maintained despite the strain. It’s not yet clear if the equipment malfunction could or should have been anticipated. There was also a disruption outside the region in the supply chain we are connected to, although reports are that this line was not actually operating in our direction at the time.

Of course, big bad companies are always to blame for everything, haven’t you seen the movies. I’m no lover of National Grid nor Enbridge but I have far more concern about environmentalists who have been doing everything they can to restrict gas supply to our region and across the nation by opposing additional gas pipelines (after doing everything they could to force coal powered generation offline). Why is it that we sit idly by and let environmentalists prevent them from building and operating the infrastructure to serve us? And to the extent that this or future outages can be traced to blocking additional supply, is it time to start suing environmentalists?

Maybe potential liability is the problem, not the solution

National Grid’s real responsibility was to restore service as expeditiously as possible.  We might actually fault just the kind of reactionary policy advocated by the Dans (and hyperactive litigators) for the overabundance of caution that prolonged this event. It has been correctly reported that the low pressure of this Aquidneck Island incident was essentially the opposite of the overpressurization that occurred in the Merrimack Valley apocalypse. So there was not a danger that the integrity of the gas piping had been compromised in Newport as existed in Lawrence. The media has not pressed the utility on the actual necessity for shutting off all customers prior to restarting gas service.

The principal concern was that pilot lights (where still used) would have gone out. But unlike some reports about the danger of houses filling with gas, it simply is not true that there is a likelihood of a large flow of gas into homes where the pilot lights are out. Forgetting that the majority of present-day gas appliances no longer use standing pilots, any gas appliance beyond a stove top burner has had a pilot safety since the 1940s keeping the main burner closed if there is no pilot flame sensed.

It is remotely conceivable that someone trying to figure out what was going on early that Monday morning, when it got cold in the house, turned on their stove burner and didn’t turn it off, so reasonable caution may, and I stress may, have cut against restoring service on the night of the interruption. Although with those single digit temps, some reverse 911 and neighborhood and emergency service cooperation could have provided a primary safety check.

Given the overnight timing, maybe it was right not to turn the gas right back on, but 3 days later? In houses where nobody was home, there was no one to have turned any gas on. Is there really enough risk that someone got up in the middle of the night turned their gas burners on and then left for Florida?

Nor was there any likelihood of a vast range of appliances trying to start themselves in unattended homes upon the restoration of gas threatening the orderly return of pressure to the system. The modern electronic safety controls will lock out an appliance after 3 retries within about 5 minutes of that first interruption and piloted appliances don’t have any retry provision, they must be manually turned off and relit. While some impatient homeowners might have the savvy to jump the gun and reset their electronically controlled gas appliances, if stable gas delivery was not available, the units would simply lockout again. The dogged insistence on waiting to turn every service off should be amongst the policies reconsidered when we’re Monday morning quarterbacking here.

Of men and mice

The bottom line is we’re Americans. If we have lost all connection with the rugged individual spirits who peopled this nation such that we view as leadership the Governor encouraging people to run for their lives in an instance like this, maybe we have sunk to the point of no return. If our lives are so dominated by a mistrust of the industry and fuels that have brought America its wealth that we eschew to see the necessary infrastructure built and maintained because we let a bunch of zealots try to tell us the Cuyahoga River is still burning, then its not shame on National Grid, its shame on us.

Shame on National Grid for arbitraging that angst, for taking an extra cut off the absurd alternative energy regimes that have doomed our state to the most expensive energy on the continent, but shame on the Dans for letting them get away with that while pretending they are the villain of Newport.

Brian Bishop is on the board of OSTPA and has spent 20 years of activism protecting property rights, over-regulation and perverse incentives in tax policy.