Eric Dollard put his ammeter on an 800-amp switchboard in a building with a computer center. Phase A read 80 amps. Phase B, 80 amps. Phase C, 80 amps. He had been taught that when the phases are balanced the neutral carries nothing, so he almost did not measure it. The neutral read 80 amps, and none of it was 60 cycles. It was all triple odd harmonics: the 3rd, the 9th, the 15th.
That reading is where Gangrene Energy begins. It is Dollard’s name for dirty electricity, and the subject of his 155-minute presentation from the 2026 Energy Science and Technology Conference: where the current in a balanced neutral comes from, how the grid was opened up to carry it, and what the ground pin in every wall outlet is really connected to.
Get Gangrene Energy, the full 155-minute presentation
The grid Dollard grew up with had no harmonics
Dollard was drawing utility poles at six. A fifth-grade teacher carried his transformer drawings to the Pacific Gas and Electric engineering office, and PG&E line practice became his schooling. Then came the multi-megawatt lines feeding the RCA station at Bolinas, the Navy, and a working life in power, transmission, telephone and maritime systems.
The system he learned had two loads, the incandescent lamp and the induction motor. “Neither of those generate any harmonics,” he says. It was delta connected, insulated and closed, and a delta winding gave the triple harmonics a loop to circulate in instead of a wire to travel on. Every induction motor was also a generator, so the iron and copper spinning across the country carried the system through a brownout.
How the system was turned inside out
The Y connection came in through office-building lighting, and fluorescent lamps put the first third-harmonic current on the lines. In a four-wire Y system the triple harmonics do not cancel in the neutral; they add. Then the high-voltage neutral was bonded to the customer’s neutral and ground rod. In Dollard’s words, “the whole system has been turned inside out Delta into an open system, which is Y, which is an antenna.”
The loads changed too. “Rectifiers are a very prodigious source of harmonics,” he says, and the grid is now full of them: inverters, LEDs, variable-frequency drives that short the line for a microsecond every half cycle. One example is close to home: a gas station motor controller in Tonopah that shock-excites his Tesla transformer through the shared neutral.
The ground pin in your outlet is not ground
“Don’t get any idea that the ground pin on your wall outlet is any type of ground at all,” Dollard says. The round pin connects to the building’s equipment-grounding wire, and in a typical North American service that wire is bonded to the neutral at the panel. It is not a private wire to clean earth.
He makes it concrete with the washing machine. Under the old arrangement its metal case was tied to your neutral, your ground rod and your neighbors’ ground rods, a local reference. With the transformers bypassed and a high-voltage neutral brought in, the same wet hands are connected to the high side of the line all the way back to the substation.
The same change took away the protection. With the grounded neutral, ground-fault relaying disappeared, so ground faults now burn instead of tripping, and Dollard shows the substation and pole-fire footage. His verdict on why it continues: “It’s not an engineering problem we’re dealing with here. It’s a sociology problem.”
Earthing sheets plugged into the outlet are not earthing you
Most people who sleep on an earthing sheet or mat plugged into the ground hole of a wall outlet believe it connects them to the earth. It does not. That wire runs to the building’s grounding conductor, which is bonded to the neutral at the panel, and the neutral is where the harmonics and switching noise of every load on the system end up. Plug yourself into it and your body is wired into that circuit, with its noise riding on you all night.
Dollard put a scope on it. “If you put a scope on the ground on any of the regular 110-volt outlets, that ground is very noisy. And people that are connecting these earthing mats and all the pads on the beds with the wire into that ground, you’re soaking all that garbage up. It’s better to do nothing than to use these earthing mats connected to ground.” His summary in the Q&A is blunter: “You’re connecting yourself right to the gangrene energy.”
It is also an electrical safety issue. A wiring fault, a lost neutral or a miswired outlet can put voltage on that ground wire, and anything tied to it, including a person lying on a sheet, is tied to that voltage. If you want to be connected to the earth, in Dollard’s words, “you’ve got to get down in it.”
Measured, not theorized
Dollard does not ask you to imagine a bad sine wave. He shows the traces: the waveforms from wall outlets in town after town on a drive across the country, and the scope on the neutral at Tonopah, referenced to his own station ground. The neutral current, he says, “has all these radio frequency type things on top of it,” and looks more like a television video signal than anything that should come out of a wall outlet. When a digital scope image is too poor to tell an instrument artifact from a real waveform, he says so.
What is inside the full 155 minutes
- The 80-amp neutral reading, step by step, and why it drove Dollard off every Y-connected service for the rest of his career.
- The Rural Electrification Administration decisions that put transmission voltages on Y loads.
- The substation that exploded when a traveling wave jumped the gap between its 33 kV and 7,200-volt sides and burned out the electronics in a whole town.
- The transformer connections chapter from his unpublished 800-page three-phase book, including why a delta-to-Y conversion shifts the reference 90 degrees, not the 30 taught in school.
- The Q&A: what he would do to fix the grid, and the isolation-transformer arrangement he recommends for a house. “Isolation transformer is the only thing that works.”
The video gives you what a post cannot: the drawings, the traces and the full reasoning, connection by connection, so that when you look at a pole or a panel you see what he sees.
Get Gangrene Energy, the full 155-minute presentation
More from the 2026 conference
Dollard’s other 2026 presentation, The Alexanderson Antenna, goes from the Bolinas blueprints to a radio telescope pointed into the Earth. Al Francoeur’s Onan and Dynamotor Tech is the bench report on a motor-generator that ran from April 17 to the solstice.
EPD Laboratories, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit carrying Eric Dollard’s work forward at its Tonopah, Nevada field site. Donations are tax-deductible. Donate to EPD Laboratories.
Energy Times announces each 2026 conference release as it comes out. It is free, and you can leave any time. Get Energy Times.
Aaron Murakami
Energy Science and Technology Conference · emediapress.com
