You’ve probably already been made aware of the predictions that there will be numerous electric grid failures this summer, even in areas not normally prone to blackouts or brownouts.
The reasons are complicated but at the top of everyone’s list is replacing reliable coal, oil, and nuclear-powered electric generating plants with far less reliable and less powerful wind and solar energy generation.
Saving the planet is going to be annoying, dangerous, and far less of a smooth transition than we’ve been led to believe. In fact, green energy fanatics have lied about how easy the transition is going to be.
Renewables are the least reliable form of power. But because of subsidies, they can outbid others in auctions that are supposed to encourage competition and deliver value to consumers. Faced with this subsidized competition, traditional power plants can’t make enough money to stay online. When people describe the Palisades nuclear plant as “uneconomic,” that’s exactly what they are talking about. It was shunted off of the grid by these dynamics.
No one can be held responsible for keeping the grid running. Independent system operators, the authorities set up to oversee the RTOs, can’t tell power plants to keep fuel on-site or order them to prefer one type of generation over another. The federal government doesn’t allow them to, because that would create bias in the markets and entrench the “market power” of larger, more reliable plants. To work around this, various regions have created “capacity markets,” in which generators bid to be on call for seasonal peaks. But capacity markets often fail because they treat unreliable and reliable forms of power as if they are the same thing.
In other words, renewable energy generation is just another racket subsidized by the federal government. It’s not that there isn’t enough energy to generate electrical power. There’s plenty of oil, plenty of coal and natural gas.
But who can compete with subsidized energy like solar and wind?
Take the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which allocates power for the upper Midwest and parts of the South. It holds capacity auctions under which power plants guarantee they will be online during seasonal demand spikes—when everyone’s cranking their AC in summer or turning up the heat in winter. But MISO’s capacity market is horribly flawed.
For one thing, wind power is treated the same as power generated by fossil fuels.
Moreover, intermittent sources like wind are allowed to bid into MISO’s capacity auction. But wind is unreliable and can’t be dispatched—you never know when it will produce, and you can’t make it produce when you want it to. So, wind bids in at an average expected level of generation. A simple visual (left) reveals what a fatal flaw this is.
As Orr, the energy analyst, points out, this model assumes that wind will blow at 15 percent capacity. But there is no guarantee that it will do so.
In the end, it comes down to a simple, mathematical equation: will our company make a profit from generating electricity or not?
It should be noted that this is a feature, not a bug of renewable energy. Making it too expensive to use fossil fuels to generate electricity is part of the charm renewable energy holds for green fanatics.
And they want you to feel pain, they want you to suffer. They figure you aren’t going to be mad at heroic green warriors fighting to save the planet. They think you’ll become enraged at the dirty, greedy, energy capitalists the heroic green warriors are trying to destroy — along with a couple of million jobs and a reliable supply of energy.
They just don’t mention those last two goals or say them out loud.
