Jazz Shaw points us to a coming crisis in the American power grid as residents in 14 states will have issues with power outages this summer due to excessive demand exceeding inadequate supplies.
This is a man-made problem made worse by the government’s unwillingness to do much of anything about it.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released its latest reliability assessment for this summer and it’s not good. It claims that extreme temperatures and ongoing drought could cause the power grid to buckle in several states, not just California and Texas.
The federal government can not afford to simply ignore this problem and hope it goes away or miss the warning signs as they did with the current baby formula shortage and so many other things where the Biden administration claimed they aren’t “mind readers.” There will be no planes flying in extra electricity from Europe. There is no emergency federal reserve of electricity that the President release with an executive order. When demand for electricity exceeds supply, the utility companies will either have to begin a series of rolling blackouts in all of the affected states or the grid will suffer crippling damage and be down for months.
It’s not a question of fuel. There’s plenty of oil, gas, and coal to operate the power plants. It’s the plants themselves: specifically, there aren’t enough of them.
We can’t build nuclear plants, coal plants, or even oil-fired plants. We can’t build hydroelectric plants because they ruin rivers. We can build solar and wind farms but, as California has shown, it’s asking too much to transfer the load from fossil fuel plants to so-called “renewable” energy plants.
Related: Clean Energy Has a Dirty Little Secret
The NERC reliability assessment shows why worrying about fossil fuels is a fool’s game.
NERC says much of North America will have adequate resources and electricity on hand this summer, but several markets are at risk of energy emergencies.
The Upper Midwest and mid-South along the Mississippi River will experience the highest risk this summer, NERC warns, where the retirement of old power plants and increased demand are troublesome. Furthermore, the region is without a key transmission line that was damaged by a tornado in December 2021. Texas, the West Coast and the Southwest are at an elevated risk.
In addition to extreme weather, supply chain issues and an active wildfire season will further comprise reliability this summer, the assessment warns.
What’s needed — and Republicans have been saying this for years — is an “all of the above approach” to electricity generation. But the greens see our power problems as a blessing. Can’t burn fossil fuels if there’s no plant to burn them in.
Action could be taken, but it needs to start yesterday. It’s too late to restart work on the Keystone XL pipeline and have it up and running by this summer, but we need to do that anyway because this problem will appear every summer and winter going forward. Meanwhile, the closure of the coal plants needs to be stopped at once. If you don’t want to burn coal, fine. Convert them to natural gas as has been done to more than 100 coal-fired plants in just the past ten years. We need to streamline the regulatory hurdles in the nuclear power approval process to bring more of the next-generation small module reactors (SMRs) online quickly wherever it is practical to do so. And yes, if there is room for any more wind turbines and solar farms, get to work putting them up also. We’ll take juice wherever we can get it at this point.
Jazz points out, “There will be no planes flying in extra electricity from Europe. There is no emergency federal reserve of electricity that the President release with an executive order. When demand for electricity exceeds supply, the utility companies will either have to begin a series of rolling blackouts in all of the affected states or the grid will suffer crippling damage and be down for months.”
Does anyone have any confidence that the Biden administration will be able to address this crisis with any more competency than they have dealt with the Afghan withdrawal, the baby formula shortage, or the economy?
