Big Digital Energy

0:00 Hello everyone.

0:01 BDE fans.

0:03 I am Chuck Yates.

0:04 I have no idea if y'all remember me, but I used to do this show a long time ago and I'm back.

0:09 It's BDE the jet lag edition.

0:11 BDE the jet lag edition.

0:13 How long has it been since we were on the air?

0:15 Because y'all did a show after I'd already left, right?

0:19 No.

0:21 I think we did.

0:22 The last one was the week of the June 24th.

0:26 Okay.

0:27 Yeah I left June 25th.

0:28 So maybe I left on the 26th.

0:31 Okay.

0:32 So you and I got on planes.

0:35 The Chevron case was decided by the Supreme Court.

0:38 Presidential immunity was decided by the Supreme Court.

0:42 Russia launched

0:45 a big counter in the shopping bombs on Ukraine.

0:49 Hamas accepted a US peace proposal, which whoever thought that united kingdom throughout the conservatives in an election.

1:00 Ollie Robinson of the English Championship League and cricket gave up a record setting 43 runs.

1:09 A baby moose was saved in Alaska by an Alaskan man while the mother watched.

1:15 And as soon as the man handed the baby to the mom, the mom gored him, we had President Trump get shot.

1:24 We had center point in the hurricane barrel or barrel or whatever we're going to call it.

1:31 Shelley Duvall, Richard Simmons, Dr. Ruth, Shannon Daugherty all died.

1:37 So I guess like if Letterman was doing it.

1:39 I feel like you're missing one.

1:40 Well, hold on just a second.

1:41 I think with those four, if Letterman had a show in '95, he would have had to cancel that night.

1:50 And then local celebrity columnist, my former neighbor, Ken Hoffman, actually passed away Really, Mark, where do we even start?

2:01 I miss

2:02 the Ken Hoffman.

2:02 Yeah, Ken Hoffman passed away.

2:04 He was funny.

2:05 He had some great pieces over the years.

2:07 Great piece.

2:08 Horse's ass.

2:09 Yeah, I mean, he was my neighbor.

2:11 Everybody - Sardonic, would you say, acerbic?

2:13 Exactly.

2:14 Commudgingly?

2:14 Very well

2:16 stated.

2:17 But - I always liked his writings.

2:20 Incredibly funny.

2:21 And so anyway, rest in peace.

2:23 No one in the neighborhood ever liked him 'cause he grumped about everything.

2:27 But yeah Speaking of the fourth, Independence Day, we did manage to beat the British national team.

2:36 Game was played in Munich on the fourth.

2:39 So there was, I'm sure the British girlfriend is probably not as pleased at hearing that news as you - I'm not gonna bring it up after Spain last night.

2:50 This was after beating the French in Paris on the fourth last year as well.

2:54 So why don't we just do five BDEs?

2:56 We'll just do daily BDEs every other day, BDEs.

2:59 Well, there will be multiple this week as you and I were.

3:02 Yeah, we have nothing to do.

3:03 At least contemplating, we'll see how that, we'll see how the jet lag is.

3:07 Seems like yours is a little more severe than mine.

3:09 I'm like, I mean, it's crazy 'cause, so I went Singapore, Australia, and just to kind of tease it, I followed Brian Sheffield around for all the week and a half with a camera crew He's got

3:23 a150 million investment in the beetaloo basin.

3:26 He owns stock in the various public companies that have it, plus his private company has

3:37 a working interest there, and will ultimately be an operator.

3:39 We met landowners, politicians.

3:39 The mining minister of the Northern Territory in Australia might be the best dude on the planet, and he actually offered me a job as deputy chief of staff we concluded that, yeah, it could probably

3:52 go either way.

3:54 Let's go work out well.

3:55 But anyway, so we're gonna have, we've got maybe 40 hours worth of stuff.

4:01 So I'm gonna sort through that and eventually create some content on it.

4:06 But that's what I was doing and why I was gone.

4:10 And so the jet lag is just horrible.

4:12 And somehow I thought it'd be a really good idea to leave Sydney, fly to Denver, go to Energy Tech Night before I came home.

4:20 So that's what I did And somehow I weaseled my way Friday night into the Billy Joel concert in Denver.

4:29 Wow. And he crushed it as you would expect.

4:31 I was wondering where the venue, but I figured you might as well just kind of Fung

4:36 to New York and seen one of his shows at Madison Square Garden.

4:39 Yeah, it was of course field.

4:40 Complete the loop around the world.

4:43 Mine was more recreational.

4:45 It was the second, second of year of a collegiate baseball tour primarily with a lot of other.

4:52 interesting aspects from Munich to Prague to Vienna, day in Radislava, Slovakia, and then back to Munich.

4:60 Fortunately delayed a day on return due to a flight cancellation last Tuesday.

5:07 I was also on the more fortunate end in terms of barrel impacts.

5:12 I only lost power for 40 hours and no major damage.

5:15 So I

5:18 think one of the interesting observations this year, versus last year, about the same time of the year is that it seemed that there was a little less evident in people that you talked to on the

5:30 street and bars and restaurants.

5:34 I'd say the temperature was down a little bit in terms of living with the inflation and

5:44 just all the things that had beset Europe coming out of COVID and into the.

5:50 to the energy crisis that they experienced.

5:52 And was that kind of just the fetus I'm giving into it?

5:57 Or was there a little bit of optimism in

6:01 that?

6:01 It may be that the groups were different.

6:03 Last year was more outlying areas like Utrecht outside of Amsterdam or Bonn, which is not a large municipal center in Germany.

6:11 And then Suburb Paris last year.

6:14 This year was in city centers in Munich, Prague and Vienna in particular Although interesting graffiti I drove again this year, I don't know how many thousand kilometers I put on the vehicle, I do

6:29 know that gasoline was the equivalent of eight bucks a gallon.

6:32 So there you go in a Q7, which is about cruise ship size compared to most of the traffic you see now driving around the continent.

6:43 But the roads are really good.

6:48 I think it has more to do with

6:53 maybe

6:57 a different, kind of a different demographic, if you will, out in the outlying areas around some of these major metropolitan areas.

7:04 I mean, areas into downtown versus suburbs.

7:08 Exactly.

7:08 Okay, gotcha.

7:11 And, but most importantly, out of the sun, do.

7:14 Did really well Oh, cool, both on the mound and at the plate.

7:18 So it was a good repeat of this particular trip.

7:24 That's so cool.

7:25 That's not, Phil, remember its whole life.

7:27 Yeah, it was, and it was,

7:36 it was even more fun to, you know, to get to see some, some new places that we have not, we have not seen before And I tell you that they do the tour for the, for the baseball players are

7:47 completely separate.

7:48 and they're doing their own thing.

7:52 The last day in Munich,

7:56 they got

7:58 on the bus.

7:59 We were at an outlying area.

8:00 And so they had planned the tour of Dachau, the concentration camp, Memorial.

8:08 And the girlfriend just went there.

8:09 It was getting literally a week again.

8:11 I've been a couple of times.

8:12 It's

8:15 like nothing else that you've ever experienced, at least it was for me, certainly the first time.

8:22 And then the second time I went it had the same impact.

8:25 But they immediately left the field without going back to the hotel,

8:32 went to Dachau.

8:33 And that night,

8:36 Spain was playing Germany in Stuttgart in the Euro cup.

8:41 Yeah.

8:42 And so the girlfriend was actually there, that she and she and her son.

8:48 an exhausted team after a game, after actually a morning bicycle tour of Munich, after a game, an immediate kind of urgent trip to be on time for their tour of the Dachau Memorial decided to then

9:06 detour to Olympic Stadium where there was a big viewing party because the game, the match was played in Stuttgart,

9:13 and they were standing room-only tickets, and my son did say I think I had probably consumed enough second-hand smoke to the last lifetimes at Outdoor Stadium, but that's the other aspect that I

9:28 think is a bit shocking.

9:30 Last travel thing, and then let's pick two topics and talk about 'em, but

9:38 this was a weird moment I had, and I don't know that I'll be able to articulate it because of jet lag and it's not very articulate, Or two, I'm not very articulate, but

9:48 Well, it was interesting and it kind of went to, you know, my life, I really didn't travel that much, you know, oldest four boys, dad had a bad back, mom was scared of flying.

9:60 So we, we just never really traveled that much.

10:03 And then my career doing private equity and oil and gas, I used to joke, I'm the greatest private equity guy that flies wherever Southwest flies, right?

10:12 You know, because I was doing oil field and you, you don't get a lot of foreign investors and oil and gas just because of the furb to issue.

10:20 And so it's hard for foreign investors to own a real property interest in the United States.

10:28 So I mean, my life was pretty isolated until boom, get fired, have time on my hands, girlfriend being British, way more international.

10:39 The kids getting old enough where we could go to France and do that sort of stuff So, so my travels internationally are pretty recent.

10:48 And I had this moment down in Australia where I'm sitting around, I've got three or four oil and gas guys.

10:57 I've got the number one rated oil and gas research analyst, a couple of money managers.

11:03 And I'm sitting there and I go, you know what?

11:05 I actually feel more akin to these Australians that are halfway around the world than I do people from New York.

11:13 And it was a statement of just, we're all just people in this whole world.

11:21 And then number two, just the vast expanse of the United States, you know, and that literally you could have almost more diverse travel staying within our boundaries than flying to different places

11:34 in the world.

11:34 So anyway.

11:35 Yeah, I agree with that.

11:35 It was a crazy thought that I'd hit me.

11:39 I've traveled and lived a significant amount internationally, but that didn't happen until after I got out of college And it was just by fortunate.

11:48 circumstance and experience being in the oil and gas industry that I got to experience, you know, different places in the world.

11:56 But now that I look at it, there's a lot of places in the United States, even the lower 48 and spent some time in Alaska.

12:02 There's a lot of places in the lower 48 thing that seems to be on everybody's mainstream list and I haven't been there.

12:09 Yeah.

12:10 So that's interesting.

12:11 So how did y'all do with the hurricane?

12:14 We did okay.

12:15 And so I think I've mentioned before, we're on that fortunate peninsula of MISO or MISO and not on ERCOT, which means my provider is Entergy

12:32 and in defense of the numbers that center point versus Entergy had to deal with, Entergy's, I think, affected customer base in its Texas entity was something on the order of 265, 000.

12:48 customers.

12:50 And so they do a very good job.

12:52 EntraG does a very good job with its outage map and updating.

12:57 And so you can see the whole layout of the distribution grid and pinpoint your neighborhood and your location and all the segments, whether they're greener or red.

13:06 And that was easy to follow.

13:09 So I think we lost power for I'm up in the woodlands, which seemed to have the I believe the eye path went directly over the woodlands.

13:19 And so

13:21 mostly worried about tall pine trees snapping off while I was gone and smashing in the roof.

13:26 None of that happened.

13:27 We lost power for I think 40 hours and our flight delay had a late flight cancellation last Monday night at dinner and Munich

13:35 that put us a day later coming back which coincided perfectly with

13:43 the time the power came back on I think it was on for 15 hours before we we got back, so it came on sometime early on Wednesday.

13:51 So the house was at part of school and not too much that we had to throw away.

13:57 Yeah, I was in, and regretting that

14:03 exclamation that I made after going through three and a half days of power outage with Ike back in 2008, that by God, I'm gonna get an inline generator which I've never done.

14:13 We've actually been fairly lightly impacted by the series of things, Ike, to your party, to Yuri.

14:24 We had two, two 12-hour outages at the depths of Yuri which weren't all that bad.

14:30 And then derecho, we had nothing.

14:33 And so this 40 hours compared to what people down in Harris County and the center point service area have been through.

14:40 'Cause that was, I mean, so I got through it really well, Bein' down in Richmond.

14:47 I am equidistance from hospital police department and fire department.

14:52 And I don't know if that truly matters but it feels like it does.

14:55 It does.

14:56 It feels like if you go down, you're popped back up.

14:58 Well, the Green Island and the Intrigy map and the Woodlands was immediately and persistent right around the hospital district.

15:06 Yeah.

15:06 So I talked to somebody,

15:10 I knew that lived in that little cutout and they never lost power.

15:14 Yeah So I got a picture and unfortunately I was just drunk, I was drunk the whole time in Australia, the Australians can drink and I never really liked charauses but if you know which ones to order,

15:27 there are great charauses that don't get here.

15:31 I was hoping there was a meme of you, remember the big Foster's cans?

15:35 Yeah, I didn't see a Foster's.

15:37 Yeah, it's Foster's,

15:40 or what, Australian for beer So, Colin.

15:46 put out,

15:48 I think a reply thread last night on or a comment on Twitter that I saw that

15:55 was in response to someone talking about what center point had done following, I believe, Yuri where they had invested in about 500 megawatts of

16:08 in line generation.

16:09 Yeah.

16:12 And Colin made the point that, look, that's great It is the distribution.

16:17 Yeah.

16:17 And I think, you know, in my area, all the, all the distribution is underground.

16:25 And there were areas where,

16:28 at least from what I could pick up on some of the, the news flow that I was getting, you know, you had areas where above ground distribution lines, power lines where you could hardly see the lines

16:41 through the line of trees and vegetation and others.

16:45 not far away from those areas that appeared to have had significant clearing done around them.

16:51 And that's really the issue is that, you know, it is in this situation at least more about getting the distribution recovered and restored than it is the generation.

17:02 And as we talked about a few weeks ago the gills of derecho,

17:06 when we had pretty major transmission,

17:11 structural damage there, And that was the tornado.

17:14 The cypress, yeah.

17:16 That,

17:18 you know, the notion that we're diversifying the generation part of the grid with things are inherently not weatherizable.

17:30 Right.

17:31 Or because they got to be outside, wind turbines got to be outside.

17:34 So it's got to be unfettered.

17:37 Plus they need wires to get 'cause none of that stuff's in downtown Houston, so And if you think even further back.

17:45 some of the things that happen in California with the wildfires in PGE, and this whole issue of brush maintenance and clearing and keeping

17:60 combustible vegetation away from power lines and power generation.

18:06 I think it's going to be an interesting kind of aftermath and post-mortem based on this event What are we going to do with respect to the vulnerable parts of the grid, which I think what, at least

18:22 in this situation, has proven to be the complexity and just the spread of distribution and where that damage occurs and affects a lot of people in a fairly concentrated area.

18:35 I think there are going to be a lot of questions asked and demand for answers around, Okay, what has been the maintenance program?

18:44 over time as we've gone through this series of things in the last starting, starting back with, with Ike. So in the last 15, 16 years.

18:52 So I had dinner last night with my buddy that's power trader and he knows more about electricity than I do.

18:59 And so any of the electricity grid type stuff I've done, this dude actually introduced me like Campbell Faulkner I've had

19:06 on a couple of times, et cetera.

19:08 So we were having his take on it was center points and having bad union issues, relations with workers and just hasn't done the tree maintenance limb stuff that they're supposed to do.

19:25 I'm not taking a side on that.

19:27 I'm not saying management was right or the line workers were right or whatever.

19:31 'Cause I don't know the depths of it, but it just didn't get done.

19:35 And that the other thing is they probably haven't had

19:40 We haven't had.

19:43 crews deployed and ready to go in these situations because they've been negotiating nickels and dimes with the crews instead of just, we're gonna have a hurricane in five days.

19:54 Let's get people here, get 'em ready to go and stuff.

19:58 So that's kind of one thing I heard.

20:02 The second thing to throw out there, Art Berman tweeted this out on it within the last day or two that basically to bury all the wires or center points, Houston area, and I don't know how he

20:16 defined it, but whatever, you know, he's saying it's140 billion.

20:20 It's to a

20:25 get done and just the disruption that would cause and the costs.

20:30 It's just never gonna happen.

20:32 Yeah, they're not burying the wires.

20:34 I was thinking about driving in, getting out of an area where

20:39 There's no real evident.

20:42 distribution lines because they're all underground.

20:45 Well, the area I live in was built in, you know, started in 1974, which is really not that long ago.

20:51 And as it's expanded, all of those things were in

20:56 place.

20:56 So it's not retrofitting.

20:56 And it was master plan.

20:58 Right.

20:58 And George Mitchell was like, we're going to build this so they could plan.

21:01 Yeah, there's nothing trivial about having underground distribution lines, power lines, because of the water tightness assurance that you have to have And then in case and concrete, et cetera.

21:14 So

21:16 it's a massive undertaking.

21:19 And

21:21 I'm sure that estimate as well within an order of magnitude gives you - this is one kind of utility subgrid area defined as center point service area or the greater Houston area.

21:33 And what that cost is now scaled it up to getting it done just in

21:40 coastal cities that are vulnerable to things like tropical storms and hurricanes, and you're very quickly into the trillions, but that really goes in the kind of trade-off discussion as we've talked

21:54 quite a bit in recent months about

21:60 grid issues, grid resilience, and grid expansion and enhancement to handle all the things that are coming at us, particularly as it relates to data center and AI-related power demand.

22:13 And if we're going to elect fire houses, if we're all going to drive electric vehicles and charge it home and stuff, I mean if we're going to make that the center point of our life, no pun intended,

22:30 it's going to be very disruptive.

22:31 So

22:33 I think you have a pretty to get understanding of how

22:38 but the hierarchy is, I guess, of how utilities and rates and all of that is established and managed within the state of Texas.

22:48 You have the Public Utility Commission of Texas that has a five commissioner group.

22:56 Each of those are,

22:58 I looked at the website earlier this week

23:02 in their political affiliation, they're all listed as nonpartisan.

23:05 Right.

23:05 Appointed by the governor.

23:06 Yep

23:08 And as I did with the NRC in thinking about the growing technical complexities that we're facing with

23:17 electric power electrification and the grid,

23:21 I was just curious to look at the five commissioners on the Public Utility Commission of Texas, PUC Texas, there's only one with an engineering, at least academic background and that's in chemical

23:32 engineering And so that's, that's

23:38 That's an interesting observation, at least to me.

23:42 But as we get into dealing with more complex grids, growing demand, a variety of demand,

23:56 how we respond to making the grid more resilient while we expand it.

24:02 And then talking about all the other

24:06 things that we're introducing into the generation stack, it would seem that, you know,

24:15 Maybe we should have an engineer that the day will put in.

24:18 And maybe the

24:22 kind of the context in the perspective at the highest levels of decision making needs to be a bit more balanced.

24:30 Yeah, and this is rumor level stuff I don't want to say it as definitive.

24:38 But,

24:40 you know, I've played around a little, I've always been an oil and gas guy, never been an electricity guy, except for a brief period of being a power technology banker in the late '90s, which

24:51 meant oil sucked and I needed to do something internet related.

24:55 So I'm not qualified to say this, but generally my sense with grid, the center point issue is, there is a trade here and it's probably two-thirds caret, one-thirds stick.

25:11 However you wanna do it, where you go to admire, you go to check yates, folks in a certain socio-economic status, let's go kind of middle class and up and it's get a generator, you know?

25:26 And, but I need to have the right to turn you off and kick it on whenever I want You know, we can do that software-wise now.

25:36 The old school engineers monopolies used to say, Oh no, we'll bring down the whole grid if we do that.

25:41 No, we won't.

25:44 There's a trade in there, 'cause I mean, we're just gonna have to push stuff distributed generation-wise.

25:50 It's gonna have to happen, you know?

25:53 I've told the story of my dad and the batteries.

25:55 The interesting thing I've heard though, from friends that had generators kicked on, but there wasn't enough gas in the system so they were shutting off I mean, the gas guys weren't ready for, hey,

26:07 we might be having a hurricane.

26:08 We need to have more gas in that line.

26:10 I actually did some research on dual fuel solutions.

26:13 I want to be able to just watch over the diesel tank.

26:16 We're gonna have propane tanks in our backyard.

26:19 Well, propane

26:21 distributed

26:23 just on the LDC distributed natural gas from your utility or

26:30 an emergency diesel tank on that same generator, right?

26:33 And so I do think center point.

26:37 not their words or their messaging, but I do think

26:42 if I have this correctly in the timeline, the post-URY investment in essentially what is de facto distributed generation to the tune of 500 megawatts are telling you, yeah, this is the direction we

26:56 need to go And. if,

26:60 you know, I almost responded to a politician who referred to center points,

27:08 consumers as customers, they're not, they're rate payers.

27:12 You have no choice, ultimately, because utilities,

27:18 which are under the purview of, in Texas' case, PUC Texas, present a rate case, and they are guaranteed a rate of return.

27:27 And that rate base on which those rates are calculated, and this is probably utility 101 to most listeners, but

27:36 it's based upon

27:38 the under-appreciated assets in a utilities asset base from generation to distribution to office furniture, to real estate, whatever that is, that gets divided over

27:54 the rate payer base that utility serves.

27:58 And so the incentive to push the capital, the new capital into the system,

28:06 the under-appreciated capital on which, so the absolute base grows larger and larger, so they,

28:14 on a five to nine percent guaranteed rate of return, which I believe is really the working bracket of what the way guaranteed rates of return for the utilities work, or that's

28:28 a representative bracket,

28:31 that's the incentive to continue to add capital and take costs out of the system so your profitability is higher, which.

28:38 center points publicly traded company.

28:41 And there's this growing awareness now that we've had an event just a week ago that

28:51 is for the public utility, is a shareholder focus in priority the right one because the natural inclination is to maximize margins.

28:60 Well, how do you do things like that?

29:01 Well, you may forego some maintenance in the system in the grid to take costs out of the system or you don't have the capacity of response that you've had previously in terms of emergency crews that

29:16 can get out in rapid response to the assessment and then the restoration and repair.

29:21 Well, and

29:24 now let's throw just one big issue on top of that is you're spreading things costs a rate base.

29:31 There is a difference in the rate base between my parents' house and Richmond.

29:38 grandmother's house over here.

29:40 Big commercial user.

29:42 And we've certainly done a lot in terms of deregulating and big commercial users.

29:48 And go outside the system, they can get more.

29:52 So there is a little bit of a dynamic going on there of this residential subsidizing commercial because of the options it has, it gets really, really complicated with all this stuff.

30:06 But I mean, I will say this, I do think, you know, I'm a capitalist.

30:11 I'm a free market guy.

30:12 I think competition is great.

30:14 How you have free market competition on wires is just tough.

30:18 I don't know how I don't know how you do it.

30:21 But they're they're on the PUC. There needs to be a healthy skepticism of the wires monopoly when they sit there and say, Oh, we can't connect Mark's Tesla batteries are on the side of his house to

30:37 the grid.

30:38 because yes, they can.

30:39 They truly could.

30:42 And the engineering exists there.

30:45 But in fairness to the wires monopoly, it's like, hey, if that brings down the grid, that's not my fault.

30:50 But there needs to be a lot more science done on that and pressure put by the PUC looking at that of, 'cause we talked about this in the late '90s You would have power outages, I forget what the

31:07 exact numbers were.

31:07 You had 999 reliability back then.

31:13 And that meant eight hours a year of just outages that would happen, barring a hurricane, and stuff, just in general, stuff would kind of just happen.

31:24 Well, the average outage was five seconds.

31:28 That destroys microchips.

31:30 It didn't really matter in the mechanical, like your refrigerator would just cycle up, cycle back down.

31:35 That wouldn't matter.

31:37 Blitch has actually mattered.

31:39 And so in terms of pushing the grid to be able to handle the microeconomy, there was a lot of backup generation.

31:47 Everybody had diesel, gen set, all these companies.

31:50 Had we started being really aggressive about hooking that up to the grid, like kind of what

31:57 center point's done with what did we say 500 megawatts that they added?

32:03 Potentially we could have smoothed through some of those But that I think is going to be the PUC's dynamic is they're going to have to bring pressure bear.

32:07 Last thing, let's say on this and then we'll dump to another topic.

32:08 Communications by center point through this.

32:08 The Aussies were sitting around the

32:25 dinner table and look, we were bottles of straws in and having a good time.

32:30 What the hell is a water bugger?

32:34 I was like, no, no, no, it's like, it's like.

32:36 It's like our hamburger joint, and you check out where the restaurant's in, and that's where you know you have power.

32:42 It's like, are you Americans insane?

32:45 I was like, oh yeah, but that's what we're having today.

32:48 That'll go down as one of the

32:52 kind of urban legends of Texas.

32:55 Yeah, supposedly it didn't work very well in practicality, but I mean, just communication was horrible.

33:01 I tried to find an interactive, or at least a real-time system map for CenterPoint, like I was able to access readily for Entrigy.

33:12 And again, it's a smaller area and if you were customers or consumers, but it's the same software.

33:19 It's the same software.

33:21 And it was really, really hard to find.

33:24 It was mostly narrative updates, you know, that were

33:28 for too long of a period of time, way to generalize.

33:33 The other thing that And I picked up, I forget who it was on Twitter, was running around talking to a lot of these crews and seeing a lot of them just waiting around parking lots.

33:45 And apparently there was a, and it's been written about,

33:51 there was a real difference in the amount of tickets processed

33:58 by day by these crews because of the inertia in the approval system, the order submission and approval, however that works at the mothership with center point, there were some crews that had

34:12 experienced, they were in past recoveries, they processed upwards of a hundred tickets a day.

34:20 There were some that were highly frustrated, irritated that they'd been on a few days of just doing maybe one or two

34:28 So there was a breakdown there or a log jam there in terms of being able to go through.

34:35 get in an area and I don't know what the process is, but it was a bit kind of a domino thing when it worked well because you could do just knock down one after the other in a certain area.

34:48 You started at the at the kind of origin of the problem got it fixed.

34:52 It was a pretty short order, you know let, the tickets come later.

34:55 If I can, on the ground, if I can solve this and take care of our whole sub distribution area, let me go ahead and do that.

35:05 And that seems to be the way it has worked previously and it wasn't working that way now.

35:10 I will say this on the communication front.

35:15 In today's age, when everybody on the planet has this, there is no reason for every employee at center point not to take 20 seconds, 30 seconds, an hour or every other hour, boom.

35:35 or a pro tip, YouTube is landscape.

35:35 So always turn your phone like this 'cause you want 16 by nine.

35:35 But literally just recording.

35:35 Okay, here's what's going on in this area, blah, blah, blah, blah.

35:35 You could accumulate that.

35:35 Hey, I could go through and read all that and those could be blasted out.

35:35 I mean, you could do that with no money, no fancy software, nothing.

35:35 And quite frankly, the

35:60 CEO should have been doing that Well, when they did put something out, it was in a studio like setting with a thermostat over his left shoulder at 70 degrees.

36:13 Yeah, we'd see this.

36:14 You know, by the way, a good investigative journalist is gonna find out that, you know, he lost power, you know, was out, his power was out for some extended period of time, but he also has an

36:27 inline generator.

36:28 That's just, you know, that's not something you want to be kind of hiding behind the.

36:35 Yeah, rules for the, not for me.

36:37 The PR machine, and Colin did comment early on that this is what I would do.

36:45 If I was the CEO of CenterPoint, I'm out and about.

36:48 Oh, hell yeah.

36:48 Being visible, so, and I just thought that was a good observation.

36:52 So there's gonna be case studies.

36:55 And it's gonna be interesting to see if it actually pushes its way up to elective politics, will a mayor's race revolve around this county judge race, Dan Patrick, Greg Abbott, good stuff.

37:10 'Cause I felt more frustration this time than I ever have.

37:16 Historically, I've kind of felt, yeah, we're Houstonians, we deal with hurricanes, we're all in this, I'm frustrated, I don't have power.

37:23 This time I felt hate.

37:25 Yeah, and there were some - Apparently some physical threats against some of the workers here out in the field, which is

37:34 beyond the pale.

37:35 and then call them.

37:36 So Saturday, I fly back in from Denver.

37:40 I'm supposed to have dinner with my daughters.

37:42 My daughters have been staying at my house in Richmond 'cause it has power.

37:46 I'm supposed to go get in, gonna go have dinner with them.

37:50 I get the text of, Mom has power back, ie.

37:53 I can be closer to my friends.

37:56 See ya, dad.

37:57 Thanks.

37:58 So I get blown off for dinner.

38:01 Priest Patrick has been up in Michigan He does this cool thing.

38:04 He goes and preaches at a church there for four to six weeks.

38:07 It's kind of a sabbatical.

38:10 He does it every summer.

38:11 Let's the number two guy at St. Mark's in Houston, kind of run with the ball for a summer.

38:17 Good training for the, so it's a win-win.

38:20 He texts, Hey,

38:23 when a hurricane happens, the priest comes back.

38:26 So I'm gonna be at church on Sunday.

38:28 Let's go grab dinner.

38:29 So I go have dinner with Priest Patrick and fans of.

38:34 Chuck Yates is a job of seeing Patrick multiple times.

38:37 Great dude, you know Patrick, great dude and all this.

38:40 He is just a little left of Trotsky when it comes to politics.

38:46 But I mean, if I have the emotional crisis at three in the morning, he's the phone call sitting there at dinner, looking down at Trump injured in a rally, Trump falls on stage.

38:57 It's like all this.

38:59 And we're reading this going, oh my God, what happened?

39:02 And, you know, goofball fell or whatever.

39:05 Until you pull up the video and you realize you get shot, even

39:09 left wing priest Patrick was like, what the fuck?

39:13 This is not good.

39:15 Babylon B was pretty immediate.

39:17 And they had, you know, seven

39:21 historical incidents of the same time in the headlines from CNN over these,

39:29 CNN and it's ilk over these seven, um, think one.

39:34 The farthest back, or the farthest back was

39:38 Caesar.

39:40 Injured and grew pug, Lincoln nods off at theater, right?

39:45 Well, I mean, Kennedy has a headache in Dallas.

39:48 Yeah, it's a secret service on this one, which was an actual headline, after a Trump fall, right?

39:56 Yeah, CNN actually said that Trump fell.

39:59 I know we talk about New Murgolot, right?

40:02 They just made just an hour and a half ago, posted a special that really starts off with,

40:13 you know, we usually don't detour into politics, but sometimes the weeds grow up into the garden of energy policy and other things that we spend all of our time on that we have to address it.

40:23 And I thought it was interesting because another

40:26 thing that we've talked about a few months ago when what the doctor saw came out, to, you know, this really all has its roots in the Kennedy assassination.

40:39 Nothing has been completely healed since that time.

40:42 And so basically pointing out

40:46 and really filtering out all the noise around it, it was went back to the Parkland seven,

40:54 who were prepared

40:58 for this moment and had no bias in, in what they were tasked to do and recording what they saw and what they thought.

41:10 And was really, this piece was really focused on you don't need, you don't need to think about anything else.

41:17 But the doctor's notes.

41:19 Yeah, right.

41:20 Well, and again, we try not to get into politics here, except where it applies to to energy and, and like, what I think this did, though,

41:33 And again, I only vote for the libertarian candidate every year 'cause I'm always like the weirdo kooky folks that we, the libertarians, put up and get 3.

41:43 Maybe one day a decent person, a really good candidate will go, if those nut jobs can get 3, I can win it with their platform.

41:51 But, so, and I'm not even a fan of Trump.

41:53 I think he's kind of an asshole from New York, but I don't think he's Hitler.

41:57 You know, I just, I just think he's kind of a bully, but whatever, but, I mean, literally seeing the mainstream media saying Trump falls.

42:10 I mean, there is no one that saw that video that would have described it as Trump falls.

42:16 And, and, and why that bothers me is, if they're doing that about Trump, what are they doing about energy, you know?

42:24 And number two, the arrogance that they think can get away with it like we're stupid is the other part and so I This is something we all saw with our own eyes.

42:36 We can all make our own opinions for God bless iPhones being everywhere.

42:40 We got to see it.

42:42 Just think they're doing that to energy as well.

42:45 And that's what really bothers us.

42:47 Well, the debate aftermath and the obvious conclusions that were diametrically opposed to the messaging that has been about kind of the president's state of cognitive ability, some of the issues.

43:06 So I think they were already reeling from

43:10 that and that clearer picture has come out

43:15 post the debate.

43:16 And the notion that, you know, there has been a pretty steady drum beat of rhetoric and the Hitler connection And I think it was the New Republic had the Photoshop image.

43:32 Right.

43:32 And we can think back over the course of the last five or six years, some of the things that, you know, I think about the comedian with the

43:42 head.

43:42 From Ted. Yeah, and so the attempt to thread the needle with the headline, I think was a bit of a, an indication that there's a bit of disarray in terms of how to characterize this stuff and how

44:00 to headline it, and maybe still a bit of denial because there's no question that that

44:10 steady drum beat of demonizing

44:18 and characterizing one side was exposed in the debate.

44:19 And now you've got

44:23 a

44:25 very, very close to being successful assassination attempt.

44:31 way too much for them to deal with and the pivot that they're being forced to deal with right now.

44:38 Because the, so I was actually on the treadmill in Singapore watching the debate.

44:45 And I was texting back and forth with oilfield, Rando.

44:48 We actually just screen shot at all our texts about the live feedback we had.

44:53 And we tweeted it out.

44:55 And the interesting thing is he's very adamant that I do my Kegel exercises, but that's a whole nother Another point, but

45:03 I mean,

45:04 coming out of that debate, there's one of two things.

45:07 Either the media is so incredibly stupid that they can't tell, or they were covering it up and Chuck Todd coming out saying, oh yeah, I talked two years ago to a cabinet secretary that said,

45:19 Biden's, it's not only are they wrong, this is not a slight bias or difference of opinion They are willing to actively cover up the truth.

45:31 And so that's kind of, and I've always thought that 'cause I mean, I think the CIA killed Kennedy.

45:38 I wrote my senior thesis on it back at Rice.

45:40 Did a podcast on it too, which was, which was, but at the end of the day, they're willing to go that far on things they just don't like.

45:53 They've got to be doing that to energy.

45:55 And, you know, you can look at it and say, well, maybe they're not naive They just don't understand it.

46:01 No, I'm willing to sit there and say, they just don't like it and they're willing to lie.

46:06 And it's just horrible because energy

46:12 is life.

46:13 I mean, people die because of expensive energy or power lines get knocked down and all this.

46:21 And the fact we can't have honest discussions about this, of what to do is really, really important.

46:29 even more so important than who are elected officials.

46:34 Well, it's a zero sum view of the political debate on every issue and energies I would put energy at the very top of the list, because as you said, energy is life and the absence of energy is the

46:48 opposite of life.

46:49 Yeah.

46:50 And so the

46:55 sound by shaping of the message and the sound by delivery, I'm often surprised and maybe I shouldn't be when I see an obviously misleading take or the headline

47:11 is missing some core details in its summary.

47:16 I've spent the better part of my career as a research analyst and that's just my bent.

47:21 I like long form and this is why I love the podcast format having a conversation, I think the nuance is important.

47:29 And so,

47:31 but then thinking about, hey, wait a minute,

47:36 I don't know if it's the vast majority, but a significant number of our fellow citizens

47:44 take that stuff at face value as fact.

47:47 Yeah, no.

47:48 And,

47:52 it's just abdicating incredible responsibility The media is for that reason, what you just said.

47:60 I'll take you back to last Sunday

48:04 on the obligatory trip after the baseball tour was over, or we're on a

48:09 small group tour down to Neuschwanstein and Linderhof, which are the mad lugwood castles.

48:17 And the tour guide is we're leaving, or we're driving from Munich to Oberomregal You

48:24 know, we passed some, some solar farms, solar installations and she is gleefully announcing to our guests that we have just a year ago shut down our last nuclear facility and we've got all these

48:37 wonderful replacements.

48:40 And this is, you know, a group of tourists not just from the US, but from all over.

48:45 And Germany has been really the epicenter

48:50 of green policy and some of the consequences of those trade-offs.

48:54 But there was no, wait a minute,

48:59 you live here.

49:00 What's, what's the real experience that you've had as a result of?

49:04 Or do you, do you not understand the connection between what has happened such as

49:10 lesser reliability and, and highly inflated energy costs from where you were five years ago as a result of this substitution away from legacy nuclear, for example, almost raised my hand, but it

49:23 was kind of early in the morning.

49:24 And probably would have gotten over the head with an umbrella.

49:28 Yeah, but.

49:29 It is that I think that was a good example of, you know, at the very surface of how the news is reported, in fact, as fact, with this just automatic notion that there can't be any bias in it or

49:43 by mere station of your position as a leading national journalist or

49:50 whatever that you're, you're accorded all the credibility And the expectation that that is completely unvarnished, unbiased truth.

49:58 And

50:01 so, yeah, the, the, you know, I've always felt this, but just the, I don't know, this just seemed to, the last thought three weeks seemed to hit a lot harder of, they'll actually go hurt

50:14 people

50:17 because they're pushing in agenda and they're willing to lie That, that just, it just makes me uncomfortable.

50:23 I, I have no problems with somebody saying, I got solar power out here, blah, blah, blah, it's going to be better.

50:29 We're gonna have battery technology and be able to do this.

50:32 Go have an intellectual debate about it.

50:35 That's fine, but anyway, the second thing I wanna bring up about the Trump issue, there's a great saying, I forget who said it, but they said never attribute to malice what can be explained by

50:51 incompetence, you know?

50:54 And so I'm gonna keep it there.

50:55 I'm not gonna go into any conspiracies here And the like, but gosh,

51:03 the secret service

51:06 allowing somebody, basically a football field away to take a shot at the president, just shouldn't happen, stay in age.

51:18 And it just, and where this really gets me when I look through all this stuff and people are saying, oh, this was intentional, that I'm not gonna go there.

51:29 But it's just again, these big government bureaucracies letting us down.

51:36 And so much of our life has been driven by these big government bureaucracies and they just continue to let us down and I guarantee you this, I will make a prediction.

51:48 No one will be held accountable.

51:50 So there will not be a firing.

51:53 It will be glossed over and

51:57 that's just really dangerous.

51:59 I don't know if I would make that prediction just because, you know, there's so much rhetoric that amped up and there's been some really unfortunate things that people have said on record, on

52:16 social media and the aftermath.

52:18 And I'll even say on both sides.

52:19 Yeah, on both sides, I'll even say that.

52:22 But some of it is really just inhumane Yeah, and.

52:30 I've had a couple of experiences where the advanced teams have come in where a president was going to visit.

52:38 One was

52:40 at Hottern Hill a few years ago, we hosted as a keynote Bush 43

52:46 George W. Bush.

52:47 And then prior to that, I was at long ago some wedding when actually his father was president at the Estonian.

52:55 And the advanced team,

52:58 a scrutiny and the thoroughness of what they do.

53:04 And then ultimately how things are positioned where there are no blind spots, at least that was my observation.

53:11 I'm looking at aerial shots of this weekend and the layout and there weren't a ton of buildings in the air, right?

53:21 This was, you know, there was nothing between that rooftop and the stage And it wasn't that.

53:29 you know, whose responsibility is a perimeter 150 yards away, that would seem to be okay if I'm an advanced person going out and doing the site assessment and then thinking about all the

53:44 surveillance and the perimeter I need to establish.

53:49 That would seem to me in a mostly what was looked to be an open field or pasture, that would be a pretty obvious one.

53:56 I don't know that Well, what I heard - That is a, at least in my amateur observation and conclusion, that's a huge blind spot.

54:05 Yeah, I heard one interview with a former secret service agent who's like, at some point you establish the perimeter and the secret service has that outside perimeter, you're usually working with -

54:19 Multiple law enforcement agencies.

54:20 Multiple law enforcement, all this.

54:22 But within the perimeter, if you ever thought something

54:29 He said, just, he said, I can't believe that they didn't just walk around and go, okay, that's going to be an issue.

54:34 It's outside perimeter.

54:35 You put flags up, you put a big, you know, semi-truck there.

54:41 You know, you have local law enforcement, just put a car, a police car with the flashing lights there at a minimum, but you, you at least do stuff within the perimeter, even if, you know,

54:54 you're not, you don't have a Secret Service agent on the roof over there.

54:59 I think the scary thing that's going to come out of this, and again, I'm going to go to incompetence.

55:03 I'm not going to go to malice on this, but I mean,

55:09 data issue or evidence number one, RFK Jr. still does not have Secret Service protection, and you and I have talked about this on BDE. I mean, I don't care what anybody says, I'm not even a fan

55:22 of the Kennedys, but given what happened to his dad and his uncle, that worries me because that feels like politics.

55:30 There's not a reason why that guy shouldn't have secret service.

55:34 It all, if you think about it too long and too hard, it all leads to at least a menu of political choices as maybe a valid or if

55:50 bordering on the conspiracy that there's something going on.

55:53 It's gonna be real bad if it comes out that Trump requested resources and was denied.

55:59 I do think this, you know, I just thought about it.

56:03 I thought about it a little bit this weekend, but

56:07 we've got so much

56:10 high technology capability to do full coverage, constant real-time surveillance during high-risk areas.

56:19 I'd like to know is there are fleet of drones that the Secret Service employees have, you know, like a TV production truck where you've got a bunch of people just sitting in there watching all those

56:30 spots and areas.

56:30 Yeah, I watch it.

56:31 All that can be done remotely and is quick to set up.

56:35 And so, you know, when the full measure of evaluation and assessment of what happened, I don't know that we'll ever see kind of the full conclusion and full picture.

56:48 Are there things that can be done that

56:54 better deploy the technology that we have to help out?

56:58 The other aspect of it that's, I haven't heard anything definitive.

57:04 I have heard one side that said,

57:07 you know, they showed the two law enforcement snipers on the roof that

57:13 were aware of the potential threat.

57:18 And, you know, why are

57:22 we waiting to that close of a distance.

57:27 You're looking through

57:29 a pretty sophisticated, high-powered telescopic scope.

57:33 You've got to, I would imagine, a pretty clear picture of what that is.

57:38 You know, that's kind of a, again, my amateur conclusion is kind of a shoot first, ask questions later.

57:43 And why we haven't had a secret service problem, is in

57:52 a vacuum with lack of information, conspiracy theories go I mean, there should be a very basic secret service press conference on this.

58:02 We're just simple questions are answered.

58:04 Did the guy have the right to shoot or did he need authorization?

58:09 I mean, just various things like this where we could at least start, and I know it's an active investigation.

58:15 And so there are things you're gonna have to say, I just can't answer that at this point or I don't know, but gosh, again to, communications,

58:25 'Cause, you know, a lot of these political issues come down to communication.

58:30 And if a process seems kind of fair and a process is communicated about, can help bring us together on things.

58:39 And so, I mean, I think it's good that Biden came back to the White House.

58:44 I think it's good that he gave his speech.

58:46 I think his message was right and the like, but we just, we need more information about this stuff to, one of the things I heard in the last 24 hours is that, I don't know how he did it, got shot,

59:00 played golf the next day, and then apparently has rewritten his entire convention speech to be along the lines of unifying, right?

59:10 Which I think is the right message.

59:13 And it's gonna be an interesting week in Milwaukee, probably must see TV But

59:21 yeah, so it's fortunate that we haven't had, Yeah.

59:26 these violent convulsions in the immediate aftermath

59:31 of crowds and riots and things like that, which is that's, you know, that's, that's a good sign.

59:36 But yeah,

59:39 I'm gonna say that it was just, you know, an unfortunate oversight and blind spot in the protocol and in the process

59:50 and an isolated incident.

59:52 But,

59:53 you know, it'll be interesting to see what what comes out of that.

1:00:00 Yeah.

1:00:00 Wow, we've hit an hour.

1:00:02 Oh, I'm jet lag.

1:00:03 I want to get a sleep.

1:00:04 The jet lag hour.

1:00:05 Yeah, let's let's let's try to do a couple more this week.

1:00:08 Just, I mean, good grief.

1:00:09 There's something more to talk about.

1:00:11 I think we need to get to the Chevron deference.

1:00:13 Yeah, we need to talk about that because that's real.

1:00:16 I mean, that that's going to materially change.

1:00:20 Uh, business, I think in a good way, but, but we ought to, we ought to talk about that one.

1:00:25 So.

1:00:26 All righty, well, thanks everybody for joining us.

1:00:29 Yes, I did eat kangaroo while I was in.

1:00:33 Tastes like chicken.

1:00:34 No, it actually tastes more like steak.

1:00:36 Really?

1:00:37 It kind of tastes like deer.

1:00:39 Or, you know, think of eating any of your gamey or beef-like meats.

1:00:45 It's pretty good.

1:00:46 This is kangaroo.

1:00:46 This is kangaroo.

1:00:48 I had a lot of bratwurst, schnitzel, and something I'd missed before in my travels in that part of the world, but crispy pork knuckle is a big thing.

1:00:58 Oh yeah, that's awesome.

1:01:02 All right, hopefully we'll see you a couple more times this week.

1:01:06 Go take a nap.

1:01:07 Yeah, thanks.