Politics and Such

David Bernell     As President-Elect Biden is selecting people to serve in his government, I want to add something to the conversation.   I want a new government agency. To start it could be a council/committee/office in the White House. That way this idea can be taken out for a test drive to see if it works, without needing any action from Congress.   We know about the history of the United States (and if you don’t, you should). The big, horrible actions and injustices our country has taken against Black people and Native Americans. Locking up Japanese Americans during World War II. Forced sterilization of people found to be undesirable. These actions and others in our history can never be erased and maybe never remedied, even if there were agreement to confront these things head on.   There are also many smaller acts of injustice that have been carried out. These are smaller, everyday occurrences. Right now we all know about the Trump Administratio...

David Bernell     A handful of Republican elected officials have spoken up. A lot more Republicans and conservatives not in elected office have spoken up. They have spoken the truth, that Trump lost and Biden won. But it’s not enough.   Most GOP members of Congress seem to be driven by fear (and plenty of state Republican officials too), the fear of Trump and his strongest supporters. At first giving in to their fear meant that they would just go along with the fiction that the election wasn’t settled. They said that Trump had every right to pursue legal challenges to the vote. They thought they could dodge responsibility by shifting the problem to the courts and running out the clock to January 20. That way they didn’t have to rebuke Trump directly.   For the Democrats and the Never-Trumpers, it’s been satisfying to watch dozens of lawsuits fail, to see a small number of principled GOP officials in places like Georgia and Michigan stand st...

David Bernell   After a lot of posts about politics, here’s one about energy policy and technology. I find the electric power grid and the energy policy that governs it fascinating. There’s a massive interconnected machine that spans the continent and provides us all with electricity. Most of us are always really close to it since we’re often in homes and other buildings. We can even charge up our phones and stay connected to the world with our electricity just about wherever we go [1]. So here’s what I’m thinking…   There is a great deal of interest, study, deliberation and conflict about how to manage and pay for the electric power grid as it evolves into a system characterized by lots of clean, renewable energy, and   multidirectional flows of both energy and information. Big wind and solar farms are being built to supply the utilities, and new distributed energy resources (DER) that customers control such as solar, storage, efficiency, and demand response have bec...