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The research instead suggests the opposite is true.
When former President Donald Trump was campaigning in Michigan last week, he warned autoworkers that President Biden’s electric vehicle policies would “put an end” to their “way of life.”
“Hundreds of thousands of American jobs, your jobs, will be gone forever,” he said. “By most estimates, under Biden’s electric vehicle mandate, 40% of all U.S. auto jobs will disappear.”
Trump may be exaggerating, but the underlying idea, that electric vehicles require less labor to manufacture than internal combustion engine cars, is the conventional wisdom. It has been circulated for years by automakers, autoworkers, politicians, and journalists. EVs contain fewer parts, the thinking goes, so naturally they will require fewer workers.
That logic seems obvious, which might be why it hasn’t received much scrutiny. But when I tried to find any research supporting it, what I found instead suggested the opposite. A number of analyses showed that electric vehicles could actually require more labor to build than gas-powered cars in the U.S., at least for the foreseeable future.
There are countless news articles and studies that reiterate the point that electric vehicles “have fewer moving parts” or are “less complex” and therefore pose a threat to autoworkers’ jobs. Many cite a 2017 Ford presentation that mentioned a “30% reduction in hours per unit” as a benefit of producing EVs, or former Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, who said in 2019 the company would need to make job cuts due to its switch to EVs, which “involve some 30% less effort.” More recently, as the United Auto Workers strike has ramped up, a 2022 quote from Ford’s CEO Jim Farley that “it takes 40% less labor to make an electric car,” has been circulating.
But I couldn’t find any data, research, or even further explanation backing up these figures. Part of the challenge of digging into these claims is that it’s not clear what they even refer to. Are the CEOs talking about the labor required for final assembly, like dropping in the motor and putting on the doors? Are they taking into account the production of components, like the EV battery? Where do they draw the line on what constitutes EV manufacturing?
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Ford didn’t respond directly to my request for more information about its public estimates. Instead, spokesperson Dan Barbossa replied that if I was going to quote Farley, I needed to include his entire quote. After dropping the “40% less labor” statistic, Farley had continued, “So as a family company, we have to insource so that everyone has a role in this world. We have a whole new supply chain to fill out, in batteries and motors and electronics.”
There may be more to Farley’s words than a bit of public relations fluff. His suggestion that building out new supply chains will help people find “a role” aligns with the conclusions of a study that Volkswagen’s independent Sustainability Council commissioned in 2020. It was conducted by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering, a German research group, using Volkswagen company data, and found only minor impacts on employment due to the transition. Losses can be mitigated by “shifting to the production of new components,” it said, like the individual battery cells that make up the battery packs.
One of the findings was that “employment intensity” for the final manufacturing of Volkswagen’s electric ID.3 is only 3% lower than that of the conventional Golf Mk8. The bigger gap is in the labor required to produce the individual components of each car’s drivetrain. The employment intensity of the battery system and electric motor, combined, was about 40% lower than that of the combustion engine and transmission system.
Notably, the study did not include the jobs required to produce the individual battery cells which make up the battery system, because Volkswagen wasn’t producing them at the time. But a more recent analysis of the U.S. manufacturing landscape found that cell production holds the most potential for job creation, and concluded that if you account for this, the transition to EVs could actually result in significantly more jobs.
Turner Cotterman, a McKinsey consultant, led the research as part of his Ph.D. in public policy and engineering at Carnegie Mellon under Associate Professor Kate Whitefoot. He sought out partnerships with U.S.-based automakers and electric vehicle component manufacturers and collected original data from nine companies on the number of hours it takes to complete more than 250 process steps. In some cases he visited the shop floors and personally gathered the data himself. In his final analysis, he also incorporated public data for an additional 78 production process steps. He used the data to model three scenarios where EV and combustion engine powertrains are produced at the average efficiency, as well as a “most efficient” case and a “least efficient” case.
In every case, EV manufacturing required more hours. The conventional powertrains took 4 to 11 worker hours, while the EV powertrains took 15 to 24. “A lot of the confusion sits around, what parts are you counting in this evaluation?” Cotterman told me. “We’re saying that if you were to produce every single component in an EV in the U.S., that the total sum of those powertrain components will be higher than the equivalent ICE components.”
Cotterman, Turner and Fuchs, Erica Renee and Whitefoot, Kate, The transition to electrified vehicles: Evaluating the labor demand of manufacturing conventional versus battery electric vehicle powertrains (June 4, 2022)
There are a few important caveats to the research. For one, Cotterman stressed that these are present-day numbers, and they might change as EV plants scale up and learn to be more efficient. When he looked at data from Chinese manufacturing plants, they were a lot more efficient than what he saw in the U.S. And that relates to his other point. Currently, most battery components are not made in the U.S.
“With so many battery components made in China and South Korea, a lot of those potential labor hours are being captured by other countries,” he said. “So it's a question of the future American manufacturing workforce — how do we value them? How many opportunities do we want to extend to them?”
Another report published in 2021 by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, reached a similar conclusion. It found that the stakes for workers in the EV transition depend largely on public policy efforts to shore up U.S. manufacturing and enhance job quality. “The real challenge is making sure U.S.-based producers can invest enough to become competitive in battery production, and claw back some of the overall sales market share they lost since the Great Recession,” Josh Bivens, chief economist at the institute, told me in an email. “These are much bigger deals than anything about the inherent production process of EVs — and they’re very amenable to policy.”
Automakers have claimed that paying workers more would put them at a disadvantage and hinder their ability to invest in the EV transition. But in a recent blog post, the Economic Policy Institute argued that with the help of subsidies from President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, automakers have “more than enough money” to invest in EVs, pay workers a fair share, and maintain healthy profits.
The IRA created a domestic manufacturing tax credit that subsidizes the production of battery cells to the tune of $35 per kilowatt-hour of capacity. It offers an additional $10 per kilowatt-hour tax credit for the domestic production of battery modules, or the process of assembling the cells into arrays that later get put into battery packs. And there’s another incentive for automakers to onshore battery production — it will help their vehicles qualify for the IRA’s consumer tax credit.
According to a database maintained by the advocacy group Climate Power, there have been about 10 EV battery manufacturing plant projects announced in the U.S. since the IRA was passed, at least some of which will produce cells.
So is the crux of the matter that EV job losses or gains all come down to batteries? Not necessarily.
Whether or not the U.S. is able to build up domestic battery production, early evidence of the EV transition in the United States shows that EVs may require more labor, even in the final assembly stages.
Anna Stefanopoulou, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, has been investigating three manufacturing sites that used to produce conventional cars and are now producing EVs: A Tesla factory in California that used to be a jointly-owned facility between GM and Toyota that produced Pontiacs and Corollas; a Rivian plant in Illinois that previously produced Mitsubishis; and the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan, where GM transitioned from producing Chevy Sonics and Buick Veranos to electric Chevy Bolts.
Her research has not been peer reviewed or published yet, but Stefanopoulou told me that after analyzing publicly available data sources for employment and output at each plant, she found that productivity had gone down in all three cases. Each one is producing fewer vehicles per worker than they were before, meaning it’s taking more people per vehicle to produce electric cars. The California site, which has been producing EVs for the longest out of the three, showed the most dramatic change. At its peak, the GM/Toyota plant produced 80 vehicles per person per year. The Tesla plant averages 30.
Stefanopoulou believes the data reflects the nascent state of U.S. electric vehicle manufacturing. She predicts that after a decade or so, as processes become more streamlined, the commonly-held belief that EV assembly requires less labor will turn out to be correct. However, she also said that if she were to consider battery cell production, as Cotterman did, EV production on the whole could require more people.
She also stressed that her data is not conclusive, and poses many more questions. For example, she found that overall production per worker in the U.S. is falling. So does the labor intensity at the EV plants reflect something specific about those factories, or a bigger issue in U.S. manufacturing productivity?
It’s also been hard for her team to identify what was actually being produced at each plant at any given time. For example, the previous owners of the California plant did not assemble engines there, but the Tesla factory is assembling battery packs. So that might explain why productivity is so much lower now. But there are a lot of unknowns. “Over the years, they changed their patterns,” she told me. “They take the cells and assemble the pack, or occasionally they manufacture cells. So we don’t know exactly what kind of work the plants include. We know the outputs are vehicles, but what does assembly include?”
In any case, Stefanopoulou is torn about what conclusion to draw from her findings on productivity. “Sometimes I don’t know if what I will present in my paper will be good news or bad news,” she told me. “Maybe it’s good news for our people that are involved, but at the end, you know, we need to be productive also, so that we can actually lower the costs so people can afford buying electric vehicles.”
What seems clear is that whether the transition results in more jobs or fewer depends a lot on which processes you’re including, how many of them will ultimately be done domestically, and how much will get streamlined through automation and other efficiency measures.
At the same time, topline job numbers aren’t the full story. The jobs created in the EV transition will certainly not all resemble the jobs that are lost. They may not be located in the same places, or require the same set of skills. Workers are right to be worried about upheaval.
But these are things that can be managed, if automakers are willing to come to the table with workers, and vice versa. For example, when Ford negotiated the closure of its Romeo Engine Plant at the end of last year, every employee was offered either a buyout or a transfer to another facility. Barbossa, the Ford spokesperson, told me many are now working about 20 minutes away, at the Van Dyke Electric Powertrain Center, building EV power units for the F-150 Lightning and hybrid powertrains for the Maverick and F-150.
I reached out to the United Autoworkers to get their thoughts on these studies, but the union did not respond to my questions. The UAW does appear to have a good handle on the stakes of battery manufacturing, however. Last week, Jim Farley of Ford provided an update on the negotiations, and said that “the UAW is holding the deal hostage over the battery plants.”
Farley vowed that none of its workers will lose their jobs due to battery plants during the next contract period. “In fact, for the foreseeable future we will have to hire more workers as some workers retire, in order to keep up with demand,” he said. “We are open to working with the union on a fair deal for battery plants, but these are multi-billion investments and they have to make business sense.”
Read more about electric vehicles and labor:
What the UAW Wants Exactly — and What It Means for Electric Cars
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Ecolectro, a maker of electrolyzers, has a new manufacturing deal with Re:Build.
By all outward appearances, the green hydrogen industry is in a state of arrested development. The hype cycle of project announcements stemming from Biden-era policies crashed after those policies took too long to implement. A number of high profile clean hydrogen projects have fallen apart since the start of the year, and deep uncertainty remains about whether the Trump administration will go to bat for the industry or further cripple it.
The picture may not be as bleak as it seems, however. On Wednesday, the green hydrogen startup Ecolectro, which has been quietly developing its technology for more than a decade, came out with a new plan to bring the tech to market. The company announced a partnership with Re:Build Manufacturing, a sort of manufacturing incubator that helps startups optimize their products for U.S. fabrication, to build their first units, design their assembly lines, and eventually begin producing at a commercial scale in a Re:Build-owned factory.
“It is a lot for a startup to create a massive manufacturing facility that’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars when they’re pre-revenue,” Jon Gordon, Ecolectro’s chief commercial officer, told me. This contract manufacturing partnership with Re:Build is “massive,” he said, because it means Ecolectro doesn’t have to take on lots of debt to scale. (The companies did not disclose the size of the contract.)
The company expects to begin producing its first electrolyzer units — devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — at Re:Build’s industrial design and fabrication site in Rochester, New York, later this year. If all goes well, it will move production to Re:Build’s high-volume manufacturing facility in New Kensington, Pennsylvania next year. “It takes off all the uncertainty around building a large manufacturing facility and allows us to move once we’re able.”
The number one obstacle to scaling up the production and use of cleaner hydrogen, which could help cut emissions from fertilizer, aviation, steelmaking, and other heavy industries, is the high cost of producing it. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a suite of policies designed to kick-start the industry, including an $8 billion grant program and a lucrative new tax credit. But Biden only got a small fraction of the grant money out the door, and did not finalize the rules for claiming the tax credit until January. Now, the Trump administration is considering terminating its agreements with some of the grant recipients, and Republicans in Congress might change or kill the tax credit.
Since the start of the year, a $500 million fuel plant in upstate New York, a $400 million manufacturing facility in Michigan, and a $500 million green steel factory in Mississippi, have been cancelled or indefinitely delayed.
The outlook is particularly bad for hydrogen made from water and electricity, often called “green” hydrogen, according to a recent BloombergNEF analysis. Trump’s tariffs could increase the cost of green hydrogen by 14%, or $1 per kilogram, based on tariff announcements as of April 8. More than 70% of the clean hydrogen volumes coming online between now and 2030 are what’s known as “blue” hydrogen, made using natural gas, with carbon capture to eliminate climate pollution. “Blue hydrogen has more demand than green hydrogen, not just because it’s cheaper to produce, but also because there’s a lot less uncertainty around it,” BloombergNEF analyst Payal Kaur said during a presentation at the research firm’s recent summit in New York City. Blue hydrogen companies can take advantage of a tax credit for carbon capture, which Congress is much less likely to scrap than the hydrogen tax credit.
Gordon is intimately familiar with hydrogen’s cost impediments. He came to Ecolectro after four years as co-founder of Universal Hydrogen, a startup building hydrogen-powered planes that shut down last summer after burning through its cash and failing to raise more. By the end, Gordon had become a hydrogen skeptic, he told me. The company had customers interested in its planes, but clean hydrogen fuel was too expensive at $15 to $20 per kilogram. It needed to come in under $2.50 to compete with jet fuel. “Regional aviation customers weren’t going to spend 10 times the ticket price just to fly zero emissions,” he said. “It wasn’t clear to me, and I don’t think it was clear to our prospective investors, how the cost of hydrogen was going to be reduced.” Now, he’s convinced that Ecolectro’s new chemistry is the answer.
Ecolectro started in a lab at Cornell University, where its cofounder and chief science officer Kristina Hugar was doing her PhD research. Hugar developed a new material, a polymer “anion exchange membrane,” that had potential to significantly lower the cost of electrolyzers. Many of the companies making electrolyzers use designs that require expensive and supply-constrained metals like iridium and titanium. Hugar’s membrane makes it possible to use low-cost nickel and steel instead.
The company’s “stack,” the sandwich of an anode, membrane, and cathode that makes up the core of the electrolyzer, costs at least 50% less than the “proton exchange membrane” versions on the market today, according to Gordon. In lab tests, it has achieved more than 70% efficiency, meaning that more than 70% of the electrical energy going into the system is converted into usable chemical energy stored in hydrogen. The industry average is around 61%, according to the Department of Energy.
In addition to using cheaper materials, the company is focused on building electrolyzers that customers can install on-site to eliminate the cost of transporting the fuel. Its first customer was Liberty New York Gas, a natural gas company in Massena, New York, which installed a small, 10-kilowatt electrolyzer in a shipping container directly outside its office as part of a pilot project. Like many natural gas companies, Liberty is testing blending small amounts of hydrogen into its system — in this case, directly into the heating systems it uses in the office building — to evaluate it as an option for lowering emissions across its customer base. The equipment draws electricity from the local electric grid, which, in that region, mostly comes from low-cost hydroelectric power plants.
Taking into account the expected manufacturing cost for a commercial-scale electrolyzer, Ecolectro says that a project paying the same low price for water and power as Liberty would be able to produce hydrogen for less than $2.50 per kilogram — even without subsidies. Through its partnership with Re:Build, the company will produce electrolyzers in the 250- to 500-kilowatt range, as well as in the 1- to 5-megawatt range. It will be announcing a larger 250-kilowatt pilot project later this year, Gordon said.
All of this sounded promising, but what I really wanted to know is who Ecolectro thought its customers were going to be. Demand for clean hydrogen, or the lack thereof, is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry faces to scaling, after cost. Of the roughly 13 million to 15 million tons of clean hydrogen production announced to come online between now and 2030, companies only have offtake agreements for about 2.5 million tons, according to Kaur of BNEF. Most of those agreements are also non-binding, meaning they may not even happen.
Gordon tied companies’ struggle with offtake to their business models of building big, expensive, facilities in remote areas, meaning the hydrogen has to be transported long distances to customers. He said that when he was with Universal Hydrogen, he tried negotiating offtake agreements with some of these big projects, but they were asking customers to commit to 20-year contracts — and to figure out the delivery on their own.
“Right now, where we see the industry is that people want less hydrogen than that,” he said. “So we make it much easier for the customer to adopt by leasing them this unit. They don’t have to pay some enormous capex, and then it’s on site and it’s producing a fair amount of hydrogen for them to engage in pilot studies of blending, or refining, or whatever they’re going to use it for.”
He expects most of the demand to come from industrial customers that already use hydrogen, like fertilizer companies and refineries, that want to switch to a cleaner version of the fuel, or hydrogen-curious companies that want to experiment with blending it into their natural gas burners to reduce their emissions. Demand will also be geographically-limited to places like New York, Washington State, and Texas, that have low-cost electricity available, he said. “I think the opportunity is big, and it’s here, but only if you’re using a product like ours.”
On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
Current conditions: Storms continue to roll through North Texas today, where a home caught fire from a lightning strike earlier this week • Warm, dry days ahead may hinder hotshot crews’ attempts to contain the 1,500-acre Sawlog fire, burning about 40 miles west of Butte, Montana• Severe thunderstorms could move through Rome today on the first day of the papal conclave.
The International Energy Agency published its annual Global Methane Tracker report on Wednesday morning, finding that over 120 million tons of the potent greenhouse gas were emitted by oil, gas, and coal in 2024, close to the record high in 2019. In particular, the research found that coal mines were the second-largest energy sector methane emitter after oil, at 40 million tons — about equivalent to India’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Abandoned coal mines alone emitted nearly 5 million tons of methane, more than abandoned oil and gas wells at 3 million tons.
“Coal, one of the biggest methane culprits, is still being ignored,” Sabina Assan, the methane analyst at the energy think tank Ember, said in a statement. “There are cost-effective technologies available today, so this is a low-hanging fruit of tackling methane.” Per the IEA report, about 70% of all annual methane emissions from the energy sector “could be avoided with existing technologies,” and “a significant share of abatement measures could pay for themselves within a year.” Around 35 million tons of total methane emissions from fossil fuels “could be avoided at no net cost, based on average energy prices in 2024,” the report goes on. Read the full findings here.
Opportunities to reduce methane emissions in the energy sector, 2024
IEA
The Environmental Protection Agency told staff this week that the division that oversees the Energy Star efficiency certification program for home appliances will be eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and reorganization, The Washington Post reports. The Energy Star program, which was created under President George H.W. Bush, has, in the past three decades, helped Americans save more than $500 billion in energy costs by directing them to more efficient appliances, as well as prevented an estimated 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere since 1992, according to the government’s numbers. Almost 90% of Americans recognize its blue logo on sight, per The New York Times.
President Trump, however, has taken a personal interest in what he believes are poorly performing shower heads, dishwashers, and other appliances (although, as we’ve fact-checked here at Heatmap, many of his opinions on the issue are outdated or misplaced). In a letter on Tuesday, a large coalition of industry groups including the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in defense of Energy Star, arguing it is “an example of an effective non-regulatory program and partnership between the government and the private sector. Eliminating it will not serve the American people.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that the electric vehicle tax credit may be on its last legs, according to an interview he gave Bloomberg on Tuesday. “I think there is a better chance we kill it than save it,” Johnson said. “But we’ll see how it comes out.” He estimated that House Republicans would reveal their plan for the tax credits later this week. Still, as Bloomberg notes, a potential hangup may be that “many EV factories have been built or are under construction in GOP districts.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, President Trump flirted with ending the $7,500 tax credit for EVs throughout his campaign, a move that would mark “a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles,” my colleague Robinson Meyer writes. That holds true for all EV makers, including Tesla, the world’s most valuable auto company. However, its CEO, Elon Musk — who holds an influential position within the government — has said he supports the end of the tax credit “because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, [and] it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance.”
Constellation Energy Corp. held its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, announcing that its operating revenue rose more than 10% in the first three months of the year compared to 2024, beating expectations. Shares climbed 12% after the call, with Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez confirming that Constellation’s pending purchase of natural gas and geothermal energy firm Calpine is on track to be completed by the end of the year, and that the nuclear power utility is “working hard to meet the power needs of customers nationwide, including powering the new AI products that Americans increasingly are using in their daily lives and that businesses and government are using to provide better products and services.”
But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Dominguez also threw some “lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections,” telling investors that “it’s not hard to conclude that the headlines are inflated.” As Matthew points out, Dominguez also has some reason to downplay expectations, including that “there needs to be massive investment in new power plants,” which could affect the value of Constellation’s existing generation fleet.
The Rockefeller Foundation aims to phase out 60 coal-fired power plants by 2030 by using revenue from carbon credits to cover the costs of closures, the Financial Times reports. The team working on the initiative has identified 1,000 plants in developing countries that would be eligible for the program under its methodology.
Rob and Jesse go deep on the electricity machine.
Last week, more than 50 million people across mainland Spain and Portugal suffered a blackout that lasted more than 10 hours and shuttered stores, halted trains, and dealt more than $1 billion in economic damage. At least eight deaths have been attributed to the power outage.
Almost immediately, some commentators blamed the blackout on the large share of renewables on the Iberian peninsula’s power grid. Are they right? How does the number of big, heavy, spinning objects on the grid affect grid operators’ ability to keep the lights on?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob dive into what may have caused the Iberian blackout — as well as how grid operators manage supply and demand, voltage and frequency, and renewables and thermal resources, and operate the continent-spanning machine that is the power grid. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: So a number of people started saying, oh, this was actually caused because there wasn’t enough inertia on the grid — that Spain kind of flew too close to the sun, let’s say, and had too many instantaneous resources that are metered by inverters and not by these large mechanical generators attached to its grid. Some issue happened and it wasn’t able to maintain the frequency of its grid as needed. How likely do you think that is?
Jesse Jenkins: So I don’t think it’s plausible as the precipitating event, the initial thing that started to drive the grid towards collapse. I would say it did contribute once the Iberian grid disconnected from France.
So let me break that down: When Spain and Portugal are connected to the rest of the continental European grid, there’s an enormous amount of inertia in that system because it doesn’t actually matter what’s going on just in Spain. They’re connected to this continen- scale grid, and so as the frequency drops there, it drops a little bit in France, and it drops a little bit in Latvia and all the generators across Europe are contributing to that balance. So there was a surplus of inertia across Europe at the time.
Once the system in Iberia disconnected from France, though, now it’s operating on its own as an actual island, and there it has very little inertia because the system operator only scheduled a couple thousand megawatts of conventional thermal units of gas power plants and nuclear. And so it had a very high penetration on the peninsula of non-inertia-based resources like solar and wind. And so whatever is happening up to that point, once the grid disconnected, it certainly lacked enough inertia to recover at that point from the kind of cascading events. But it doesn’t seem like a lack of inertia contributed to the initial precipitating event.
Something — we don’t know what yet — caused two generators to simultaneously disconnect. And we know that we’ve observed oscillation in the frequency, meaning something happened to disturb the frequency in Spain before all this happened. And we don’t know exactly what that disturbance was.
There could have been a lot of different things. It could have been a sudden surge of wind or solar generation. That’s possible. It could have been something going wrong with the control system that manages the automatic response to changes in frequency — they were measuring the wrong thing, and they started to speed up or slow down, or something went wrong. That happened in the past, in the case of a generator in Florida that turned on and tried to synchronize with the grid and got its controls wrong, and that causes caused oscillations of the frequency that propagated all through the Eastern Interconnection — as far away as North Dakota, which is like 2,000 miles away, you know? So these things happen. Sometimes thermal generators screw up.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.