On Top of Its Mayor Election Debacle, New York Now Faces Blackout Warnings

Call me a simple man. Many have, and worse.

But when you take reliable electric power off the grid right before summer, and then you warm up in the summer, you might miss that power you took off the grid.

New York closed its Indian Point (ignore the politically incorrect name) nuclear plant on April 30, 2021. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s write-up of the closing includes this interesting bit.

Indian Point Unit 3 was one of New York’s 10 largest electricity generators; it produced over 270 TWh of carbon-free electricity since it began operating. Because of Indian Point Unit 3’s retirement, a large amount of new carbon-free generating capacity will need to come online to help meet the state’s CES goal.

Well, that hasn’t happened yet. Some natural gas plants are being built. New York the state is at the same time blocking safe and reliable gas pipelines. They were warned about that but didn’t listen.

New York is a little hotter than usual as 2021’s summer rolls in.

So…

JUST IN – New York City mayor urges citizens to reduce electricity use "IMMEDIATELY" to avoid blackouts.

— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) June 30, 2021

Maybe the lights will go out while they’re trying to figure out who the next mayor will be. It’s the 2020s, which so far is the Loki of decades. Why not have a blackout hit, and then whoever the powers that be on the left want to be mayor, suddenly has the votes to be mayor when the lights come back on?

Texas has faced similar energy issues this year, once when we froze and once again when it warmed up. We’re fine at the moment. California regularly faces blackouts and the threat thereof, and it’s generally milder in climate than either New York or Texas.

While Texas can cite its population increase for lagging behind its power needs, New York and California cannot. They’re losing population — to Texas, and Florida, mainly.

We do have infrastructure issues, which Biden addressed by packing a lot of political spending we can’t afford and half the country doesn’t want into the infrastructure bill, causing resistance to that bill. That bill wouldn’t help right now, anyway. Right now is being affected by decisions made a few years ago.

What was going on a few years ago?

Over the past decade or so we’ve seen the push to wind and solar at the expense of cheaper and more reliable energy sources, when wind and solar are neither affordable nor reliable, with little regard for introducing unreliable elements to one thing a modern country really needs to be rock solid: the power grids. At the same time, though this hasn’t made a dent in the grids’ needs yet, we’ve seen the push to electric vehicles.

Elon Musk and the head of Toyota have both warned that the grids aren’t ready for that. They say we need a lot more power, not less, if we’re going to electrify cars instead of powering them with gasoline. We need more nuclear power, frankly. As things stand, we’re powering cars by all fossil fuels, or mostly fossil fuels.

But hardly anyone is listening to Musk and Toyota. It’s just an inconvenient truth.