Introduction
When we flip the switch, the lights come on without anyone thinking about it. This has only been true for the last hundred years in metropolitan areas, and for only approximately eighty years in rural areas with the enactment of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
In 1935, only 25 percent of rural homes in the United States had electricity, and there are people alive today who grew up without electricity. Today, few people are even aware of the monolithic system that generates, distributes, and controls the electricity that flows with seeming effortlessness across the United States. This system is referred to as the grid, which is actually three grids covering the entire lower forty-eight states.
Over the past one hundred years, there have been only two area-wide blackouts affecting over 30 million people caused by a failure of the transmission system. There have been other blackouts—mostly caused by storms—affecting smaller groups, perhaps as many as several million people. Overall, the grid has worked remarkably well. Reliability can still be improved upon, but this is primarily a question of placing transmission and distribution lines underground to minimize weather-induced outages.
Suddenly, we are faced with a threat to the grid we haven’t seen before. It is a threat that can dramatically increase blackouts and the suffering that accompanies them. Some in leadership positions have viewed climate change as an existential threat to mankind and have implemented actions to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity. Some have claimed that wind and solar and other renew- ables can replace all the coal-fired, natural gas, and nuclear power plants in the United States. It can be argued that the actions these people are taking are making electricity more costly and less reliable, and placing Americans at risk for little or no reason. They are willing to gamble the safety and lives of Americans, as well as the American economy, on an ideology.
Our nation has suffered through a medical war fighting COVID-19 in which thousands died. As my neighbor said,
“The inability of our country to anticipate the corona- virus pandemic and put in place adequate reserves of all of the things we needed—PPE, ventilators, masks, tests, hospital beds, etc.—speaks loudly and directly to the need for reliable on-demand electricity and the need to plan for it right now.”
Imagine if Americans had to suffer through rolling blackouts while quarantined at home during a future pandemic. How would newly erected emergency hospitals operate without electricity, let alone our existing hospitals without diesel fuel or natural gas to power emergency generators?
This was brought home by an oped in the Washington Post. Quoting from the op-ed:
Residential use is up as workers and school children stay home.
[Demand is down] in locked up restaurants, offices and factories.
Hospitals are a different story: They consume twice as much per square foot as hotels . . . lead schools and office buildings by an even greater margin. And their work couldn’t be more vital as they confront the novel coronavirus.
A grid operator, sequestered in his dispatch center in East Greenbush, New York, said it all, “Keeping the lights on. . . . It’s so critical.”3
There is little doubt there will be another pandemic. The only question is when. We must do what is needed to guarantee adequate and reliable supplies of electricity in preparation for the next pandemic.
President Trump recognized the vital importance of the grid when he issued an executive order on May 1, 2020, to protect the grid from foreign adversaries. He said the grid, “provides the electricity that sup- ports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastruc- ture, economy, and way of life.”
There is also an ideology that threatens the grid. This book will examine how federal regulators, state governments, utility companies, and the operators of the grid themselves are imposing their beliefs about climate change on all Americans and placing the grid in great jeopardy. Unelected bureaucrats and self-imposed intelligentsia are making decisions that place all Americans in danger.
Looming Energy Crisis will show you why we must continue to use fossil fuels and why we must protect the grid from the actions of those who are imposing their personal beliefs on the rest of us. Our objective should be low-cost reliable electricity available for everyone.
Reliability is a national security issue.
I bought my Lake Erie house in Feb.1996 and in May 1996 the water was within 1 inch of getting in the main house. Then for the next 10 years the water went down to the point we had to dredge our channel to get our boats out to the lake. Now the water is back up to the 1996 levels. The old timers say this is normal and happens on a 20 to 30 year cycle. So in about 10 years it will be back to it’s low level. Some people blame every disaster on climate change with no facts to prove.
Thanks. I thought of you when I wrote the article.
Donn,
Nice reply to the uninformed Associate Professor. I sailed the Lakes during a few seasons and have relatives whose entire careers have been aboard a Laker. Long before we knew how to spell Global Warming the Lake level variations were either flooding some home-owner’s kitchen or their boat dock was high and dry.
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Thanks. It’s amazing how reporters and others ascribe natural events to global warming.
Most reporters today only read what suits their preconceived notions. Usually, the Journal is better than that.
Thanks for your comment.
There was a time when the WSJ only printed facts and could be believed. Starting about two years ago, I noticed a definite shift to the left. It’s very unfortunate that the WSJ can no longer be relied on to report the news without editorial comment and bias.
It’s all a matter of how cold the winters are, how much ice is on the lake during the winter and thusly, how much evaporation takes place. That is cyclical as well.
Thanks for the comments.
Ice coverage and evaporation are factors, however, I suspect that precipitation is the greatest factor.
In thinking about ice coverage, I’m not sure how that affects evaporation. At first blush, it would seem as though there would be less evaporation with ice coverage, but I’m not sure if that’s true. With ice coverage there is also sublimation. In addition, when the ice melts there will be evaporation with the melting.
It would be interesting if there has been a study on this subject.
Please let us know if you know of a study that can answer the question.
See a Great Lakes Integrated Sciences report of 2011 (before the current lake-level rise)
http:// http://www.glisaclimate.org/media/GLISA_Lake_Evaporation. pdf.
The first section of which is “Great Lakes Water Levels: The Critical Role of Evaporation”. It says:
The highest evaporation rates on the Great Lakes typically occur in late fall and early winter, when conditions are much colder. This is because evaporation is not directly driven by warm air temperatures, but instead by warm water temperatures. More specifically, high evaporation requires three factors: 1) a large temperature difference between water and air (i.e., warm water and cold air), 2) low relative humidity, and 3) high wind speeds. If all three ingredients are present, as often occurs in the fall and winter, evaporation rates from the Great Lakes can get as high as 0.4-0.6 inches per day. To put this number in perspective, a 1-day loss of 0.5 inches of water from the total surface area of the Great Lakes (94,250 mi2) represents a volumetric flow rate of 820 billion gallons per day–nearly 20 times the flow rate of Niagara Falls.
Warming temperatures in recent decades have led to significant declines in the duration and extent of Great Lakes ice cover, with correspondingly longer periods of open water… At the same time, significant increases in summer water temperature have been observed in the Great Lakes, particularly since the early 1980s.
The implication being, of course that rising lake levels are more consistent with a cooling climate or local climate than with a warming climate. But of course, when science degenerates to a strategy of claiming dibs on particular phenomena, who’s to say they can’t have it both ways? /s
I tried using the link and it didn’t work.
The evaporation rates noted in the quotation are impressive.Spread over a period of several days they would have an effect on water levels.
To fully understand the effect, however, we would need more information as to how this compares with earlier years.
Taken at face value, it should mean that water levels should be higher than reported.
Placing this in context of over 100 years experience is hard to do without a great deal more evidence from prior years.
Very interesting, and many thanks.
This discussion must also consider the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the US and Canada. This agreement has led the participants to maintain higher water levels in the lakes for the sake of restoring historic wetlands and improving shipping. New York State discussed suing the GLWQA for its role in flooding on Lake Erie. Their policies restricted the amount of water flowing through dams and locks over the winter to reduce spring flooding.
Thanks. Thea’s an interesting observation. I had not paid much attention to it so looked it up to see what it covered. A quick glance showed that much of the act focused on water quality and preventing invasive species, though there were areas of concern. There was also a section on preventing the consequences of climate change which is obviously a political statement from the previous administration and Canada’s preoccupation with it.
I’ll have to look closer to see how much effect the act has had. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Try this
http://www.glisaclimate.org/media/GLISA_Lake_Evaporation.pdf
Great. Excellent resource. Many thanks.
I ned to read the entire paper, but the information is clearly useful.
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I have now read the entire paper, and it is very interesting. The effirt to measure evaporation is well worth the time and expense.
One quote from the report with respect to climate change is interesting. “The net result will be persistently lower water levels for the Great Lakes.”
Low water levels are not the current issue, high water is.
I think it’s premature to draw any valid conclusions about the interrelationship between climate change and evaporation until several years, possibly a decade or two, of new, accurate data is obtained.
Conjecturing, i.e, what ifs, is inappropriate until there is more data. The report cites a specific short time period, for only one lake, and even here the amount of level change was not very significant.
One of the more interesting observations of the study is that “Most of the energy for evaporation comes from solar radiation, but the primary solar input occurs roughly five months prior to the annual peak in evaporation. Thus, there are important leads and lags in the Lake Superior system, and this leads to complexities in the atmospheric controls on Great Lakes evaporation.” This perhaps reflects the inertia of the system.
It seems to me (as a non-professional) that the Great Lakes represents an important but unrecognized proxy for the climate system. The water stores great amounts of solar heat, mixes it fairly well, both horizontally and vertically, and has but very few significant human sources of heat input. They are large enough to influence the climate of adjacent lands but small enough to be isolated from vast ocean currents with unknown periods. Being of significant international concern they are also quite well studied, with records for ice cover, water temperatures and lake levels going back many years. Further those records seem not to have been subject to the adjustments like land temperature records, and the international treaties and competing interests tend to keep the science honest, with disputes substantially aired and resolved in public.
Perhaps more significance should be accorded to them.
Interesting observations.
I agree the data is clean, for the reasons you cited.
Whether it is a proxy for climate change, is another matter. I’m inclined not to think so. Water levels have been rising and falling for over 100 years so they can’t be a proxy, and I don’t see what else would be.
Interesting thought however.