It seems like the term “rapid unplanned desynchronization” was inspired by “rapid unplanned disassembly”, which is used by aerospace engineers when their rocket blows up.
Does this predate Space-X? That's where I first heard it. I think the flight where Musk really wanted it to launch on 4/20 even though the pad wasn't ready and had lots of gravel.
Sorry, but I need to finish one thought. I often 'dis folks in CO's gov't for a few things I think they are getting way wrong. But I know they are trying to get us decarbonized.
I'm truly peeved at the FF counties which turn down "industrial" solar on some small fraction of their farm or range land. In four cases I personally visited, the sites were already bisected by high voltage transmission and three were even pockmarked by old O&G wells or compressor stations. Sure, the construction jobs aren't as great as pipefitters, and ongoing maintenance is modest, but laborers throwing glass aren't going to cause a $10M, life-threatening explosion or spill if they slip up. So they aren't going to get 5 years of training and $75/hr. It's something. There is some tax revenue, and a build out of say 10 or even 20 x 150 MW solar/BESS is not going to upend the ag economy or ruin their wildlife habitat.
Up near Craig, an underground coal mine just closed. A few years ago a pumped hydro facility was proposed in the county. With some focused "Just Transition" planning, maybe an actual "all of gov't" mobilization, a few subsidies and certainly a low interest loan, those miners could have transitioned to tunnelling for the PHES for five years.
As far as "minimum viable scale," or specifically capacity... Probably 5-10 years ago one/some of our coal plant owners proposed fairly expensive modifications to their plants to allow them to ramp up/down more quickly and start/stop more quickly. Good complement to VRE, w/o building new gas backup. No, no, no said all the enviro and climate activists, consumer counsels, and eventually the PUC. Guess who's doing that; China.
A fascinating conversation. Since the early 1970s I've been urging various versions of transitioning from the daily commute by auto to telecommuting as a way to reduce demand for oil while also diminishing traffic congestion. Much of this also involved exploring the side effects of extensive telecommuting on the oil industry, urban and central cities design, management systems, social impacts and so on. I'm gladdened to see the work of Emily Grubert and others for making these transitions less lumpy than they might otherwise be.
Great conversation. In the context that the fossil fuel industry agrees that the transition is necessary (a mandatory prerequisite for cooperating with the renewable industries to achieve a smooth transition) why would the fossil fuel industry just choose to control its own future by engineering that transition itself? BP has made noises in that direction twice and subsequently backed away? Thus, I think nationalizing all the energy industries and publicly managing the transition is going to be mandatory.
How transferable are the skills, knowledge and physical capital of the oil industry?
Ok you can put some of it to use in geothermal. Maybe some plastic manufacturing, but what do they have to offer the solar and wind industry besides money, and (temporary) baseload power.
One point of discussion was "what about the staff at a "backup" gas turbine plant that only has a 5% capacity factor or so. If they know how to maintain a turbine, maybe they can assemble big honking semi-custom turbines-in-reverse, i.e. heat pumps. In what is almost certainly a fantasy, they stop work at the shop when they walk across the street to start up that turbine.
Lots of compressors and pumps in pipelines. "Natural refrigerants" are hydrocarbons, ammonia and CO2, so flammable, toxic and high pressure, which they know. The O&G biz is not just drilling. Closely related to drilling, would be the capping of stripper and orphan wells. There are about 20,000 in my county.
In any case for the backup turbine, we've had "peaker plants" for years with very low capacity factors. They manage somehow.
The Poland prosumer case is a small-scale preview of exactly this dynamic. When net metering switched to net billing in April 2022, the policy assumption was that the market would adjust gradually. What actually happened was a sudden reordering — a rush to lock in old terms before the deadline, followed by an abrupt slowdown. The grid inherited 12 GW of installed prosumer capacity it wasn't designed to absorb, with 600 GWh curtailed and nearly 200 negative-price hours in 2024 alone. Nobody planned the handoff. The cliffs Grubert describes at macro scale are already visible in miniature at the prosumer level across Europe — Poland, Spain, the Netherlands all running the same sequence at different speeds.
This was a great podcast, thank you! You might want to take a look at the Dutch programme of managed residential gas phaseout. They are doing it neighborhood by neighborhood, precisely to prevent network costs spiralling out of control.
Fascinating podcast, though I do wonder why the author of the paper seems so dismissive of the ability of markets to find solutions to some of these issues.
To put not too fine a point on it, if some relatively minor product from the fossil fuel system is really that important, that implies that they will be prepared to pay handsomely for its continued supply, which has a habit of drawing alternative supply sources out.
This very phenomenon is happening in the tech industry right now, where memory chips have become extraordinarily expensive because of - you guessed it - data centres. So Chinese memory suppliers have entered the market and are finding a lot of new customers.
Mostly great insights. Very applicable to Colorado right now. A few quibbles.
Early on Emily seems to imply folks aren't thinking about this. CO has a mess of "Just Transition" programs, policies and PUC rulings. I mean mess in both a quantitative and qualitative sense. At the start of it, I listened into a zoom call about Craig, and the state reps and consultants didn't seem too with it. Also, NREL (RIP) was doing combined elec-gas distribution modeling starting quite a few years ago. Not sure where that's at.
Gas stations going away seems overblown. Even in Craig, the SuperCharger is at Maverick's c-store and I expect the chargers and pumps will be there for the rest of my life. Somewhere I read a China EV story w/an amusing vignette. The C-store/gas/EV station on the Beltway had to install a tall brick wall between the EV chargers and the gas pumps. The EV taxi drivers insisted on yakking and smoking cigs while their cars charged.
Lots of other issues I agree with. Probably good for all that my noodles are ready.
David, the framework for managing the phase-out of legacy fossil systems is structurally sound for a peacetime equilibrium, but the math breaks down entirely when subjected to an abrupt kinetic phase transition. We no longer have the timeline for a "managed decline."
The consensus models assume a linear runway where we smoothly swap hydrocarbons for advanced grid tech. But we are hitting a thermodynamic Absorbing Barrier. If the current escalation permanently traps the 20M bpd flowing through Hormuz, the US SPR's physical plumbing limit of 4.4M bpd cannot bridge the gap. We hit a Sudden Stop.
More critically for the transition: if Beijing exploits this vacuum to quarantine Taiwan, the 90% monopoly on advanced TSMC logic nodes goes offline. The "zero-chip" shock instantly freezes the production of the EVs, smart-grid transformers, and solar telemetrics required to replace the dying fossil system.
We ran the 10,000 Monte Carlo iterations on this dual caloric and cognitive deficit at Synaplex. The fate of these systems isn't a transition; it's a violent fragmentation into autarkic "Cellular Citadels" and localized micro-grids to do nothing more than just keep the lights on. The global mesh is already dead. I mapped the exact physical constraints of this 90-day phase transition here:
Fascinating conversation! I had very similar thoughts playing around with scenarios, and linking the outcomes to the real world. I had thought about the fuel stations, but had not yet thought of the impact on refineries. It is clear to me that the transition in transport fuels is where a proper planning is crucial. When HGV go electric, fuel stations quickly become uneconomical due to the massive amounts they require, and which is then disappearing potentially over night. In developed countries a large part of the HGV fleet is exchanged every 5 years and as soon as they reach 100%electric it is game over for a fuel station most likely in two years.
It seems like the term “rapid unplanned desynchronization” was inspired by “rapid unplanned disassembly”, which is used by aerospace engineers when their rocket blows up.
I am not sure how the failure of the pen stock at the Colgate Power Plant will be classified but its a recent example of how things go wrong-
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2026/03/05/new-colgate-powerhouse-breach-what-do-the-longer-term-impacts-look-like/
Does this predate Space-X? That's where I first heard it. I think the flight where Musk really wanted it to launch on 4/20 even though the pad wasn't ready and had lots of gravel.
It sounds like the term has existed in some form for a few decades, but SpaceX definitely popularized the term, because they've had so many RUD events and frequently use that term to refer to them. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-the-phrase-rapid-unscheduled-disassembly
Sorry, but I need to finish one thought. I often 'dis folks in CO's gov't for a few things I think they are getting way wrong. But I know they are trying to get us decarbonized.
I'm truly peeved at the FF counties which turn down "industrial" solar on some small fraction of their farm or range land. In four cases I personally visited, the sites were already bisected by high voltage transmission and three were even pockmarked by old O&G wells or compressor stations. Sure, the construction jobs aren't as great as pipefitters, and ongoing maintenance is modest, but laborers throwing glass aren't going to cause a $10M, life-threatening explosion or spill if they slip up. So they aren't going to get 5 years of training and $75/hr. It's something. There is some tax revenue, and a build out of say 10 or even 20 x 150 MW solar/BESS is not going to upend the ag economy or ruin their wildlife habitat.
Up near Craig, an underground coal mine just closed. A few years ago a pumped hydro facility was proposed in the county. With some focused "Just Transition" planning, maybe an actual "all of gov't" mobilization, a few subsidies and certainly a low interest loan, those miners could have transitioned to tunnelling for the PHES for five years.
As far as "minimum viable scale," or specifically capacity... Probably 5-10 years ago one/some of our coal plant owners proposed fairly expensive modifications to their plants to allow them to ramp up/down more quickly and start/stop more quickly. Good complement to VRE, w/o building new gas backup. No, no, no said all the enviro and climate activists, consumer counsels, and eventually the PUC. Guess who's doing that; China.
A fascinating conversation. Since the early 1970s I've been urging various versions of transitioning from the daily commute by auto to telecommuting as a way to reduce demand for oil while also diminishing traffic congestion. Much of this also involved exploring the side effects of extensive telecommuting on the oil industry, urban and central cities design, management systems, social impacts and so on. I'm gladdened to see the work of Emily Grubert and others for making these transitions less lumpy than they might otherwise be.
Great conversation. In the context that the fossil fuel industry agrees that the transition is necessary (a mandatory prerequisite for cooperating with the renewable industries to achieve a smooth transition) why would the fossil fuel industry just choose to control its own future by engineering that transition itself? BP has made noises in that direction twice and subsequently backed away? Thus, I think nationalizing all the energy industries and publicly managing the transition is going to be mandatory.
How transferable are the skills, knowledge and physical capital of the oil industry?
Ok you can put some of it to use in geothermal. Maybe some plastic manufacturing, but what do they have to offer the solar and wind industry besides money, and (temporary) baseload power.
One point of discussion was "what about the staff at a "backup" gas turbine plant that only has a 5% capacity factor or so. If they know how to maintain a turbine, maybe they can assemble big honking semi-custom turbines-in-reverse, i.e. heat pumps. In what is almost certainly a fantasy, they stop work at the shop when they walk across the street to start up that turbine.
Lots of compressors and pumps in pipelines. "Natural refrigerants" are hydrocarbons, ammonia and CO2, so flammable, toxic and high pressure, which they know. The O&G biz is not just drilling. Closely related to drilling, would be the capping of stripper and orphan wells. There are about 20,000 in my county.
In any case for the backup turbine, we've had "peaker plants" for years with very low capacity factors. They manage somehow.
We seem to be in an unplanned reorganisation of physical assets mode now.
The Poland prosumer case is a small-scale preview of exactly this dynamic. When net metering switched to net billing in April 2022, the policy assumption was that the market would adjust gradually. What actually happened was a sudden reordering — a rush to lock in old terms before the deadline, followed by an abrupt slowdown. The grid inherited 12 GW of installed prosumer capacity it wasn't designed to absorb, with 600 GWh curtailed and nearly 200 negative-price hours in 2024 alone. Nobody planned the handoff. The cliffs Grubert describes at macro scale are already visible in miniature at the prosumer level across Europe — Poland, Spain, the Netherlands all running the same sequence at different speeds.
I wrote about this pattern in more detail here: https://groundtruthenergy.substack.com/p/europes-prosumer-policy-whiplash
This was a great podcast, thank you! You might want to take a look at the Dutch programme of managed residential gas phaseout. They are doing it neighborhood by neighborhood, precisely to prevent network costs spiralling out of control.
(https://ce.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/CE_Delft_210381_The_natural_gas_phase-out_in_the_Netherlands_DEF.pdf)
Fascinating podcast, though I do wonder why the author of the paper seems so dismissive of the ability of markets to find solutions to some of these issues.
To put not too fine a point on it, if some relatively minor product from the fossil fuel system is really that important, that implies that they will be prepared to pay handsomely for its continued supply, which has a habit of drawing alternative supply sources out.
This very phenomenon is happening in the tech industry right now, where memory chips have become extraordinarily expensive because of - you guessed it - data centres. So Chinese memory suppliers have entered the market and are finding a lot of new customers.
Mostly great insights. Very applicable to Colorado right now. A few quibbles.
Early on Emily seems to imply folks aren't thinking about this. CO has a mess of "Just Transition" programs, policies and PUC rulings. I mean mess in both a quantitative and qualitative sense. At the start of it, I listened into a zoom call about Craig, and the state reps and consultants didn't seem too with it. Also, NREL (RIP) was doing combined elec-gas distribution modeling starting quite a few years ago. Not sure where that's at.
Gas stations going away seems overblown. Even in Craig, the SuperCharger is at Maverick's c-store and I expect the chargers and pumps will be there for the rest of my life. Somewhere I read a China EV story w/an amusing vignette. The C-store/gas/EV station on the Beltway had to install a tall brick wall between the EV chargers and the gas pumps. The EV taxi drivers insisted on yakking and smoking cigs while their cars charged.
Lots of other issues I agree with. Probably good for all that my noodles are ready.
David, the framework for managing the phase-out of legacy fossil systems is structurally sound for a peacetime equilibrium, but the math breaks down entirely when subjected to an abrupt kinetic phase transition. We no longer have the timeline for a "managed decline."
The consensus models assume a linear runway where we smoothly swap hydrocarbons for advanced grid tech. But we are hitting a thermodynamic Absorbing Barrier. If the current escalation permanently traps the 20M bpd flowing through Hormuz, the US SPR's physical plumbing limit of 4.4M bpd cannot bridge the gap. We hit a Sudden Stop.
More critically for the transition: if Beijing exploits this vacuum to quarantine Taiwan, the 90% monopoly on advanced TSMC logic nodes goes offline. The "zero-chip" shock instantly freezes the production of the EVs, smart-grid transformers, and solar telemetrics required to replace the dying fossil system.
We ran the 10,000 Monte Carlo iterations on this dual caloric and cognitive deficit at Synaplex. The fate of these systems isn't a transition; it's a violent fragmentation into autarkic "Cellular Citadels" and localized micro-grids to do nothing more than just keep the lights on. The global mesh is already dead. I mapped the exact physical constraints of this 90-day phase transition here:
https://theairlock.substack.com/p/the-2026-singularity-why-global-trade
So no political economy insights?
Fascinating conversation! I had very similar thoughts playing around with scenarios, and linking the outcomes to the real world. I had thought about the fuel stations, but had not yet thought of the impact on refineries. It is clear to me that the transition in transport fuels is where a proper planning is crucial. When HGV go electric, fuel stations quickly become uneconomical due to the massive amounts they require, and which is then disappearing potentially over night. In developed countries a large part of the HGV fleet is exchanged every 5 years and as soon as they reach 100%electric it is game over for a fuel station most likely in two years.