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.
Texans will either learn from history or repeat it. I’m beginning to think the “green new deal” is the new virus and “fossil fuels and nuclear” are the vaccines.
Thanks for your comment. Interesting analogy.
You seem to have forgotten the history of Ercot. The same thing happened in 2011 without all the Green energy, so Green energy wasn’t and isn’t the problem. Texas power suppliers are. This also happened previous to 2011 in 1989. Do your research and stop embarrassing yourself. Your delusions are not helping the situation.
Thanks for your comments. I’m afraid you are pushing a wet noodle.
I’ve lived in Plano and we used to call these freezing weather conditions Blue Northerns. I’ve read the reports on earlier instances where ERCOT had blackouts and failures.This time around there shouldn’t have been as many failures due to weather. It looks as though ERCOT management failed to implement corrective actions that were identified in 2011. There is no question that reserve margins depended on wind, which was a serious mistake. My articles have shown the ERCOT charts where wind was part of the 15% reserve and where it was predicted that there would be zero reserve margins using baseload power. Using wind and solar for reserves is a huge mistake that is also occurring elsewhere in other RTO/ISOs due to activists trying to force wind onto the grid and then having wind and solar be used for reserves. Another book, Shorting the Grid, by Meredith Angwin, also describes how wind and solar are creating dangerous problems, so I’m not alone in recognizing the problems that wind and solar create.
Wind and solar are unreliable and cost more than natural gas, coal and nuclear power generation.
Nonsense. Green power is less than 25% of the system and to try and pin a reserve of 15% of the 25% is infinitesimally small. Wind is free and solar is free. A sunny day or breeze cost nothing. You don’t have to mine it or dispose of it. Nuclear power has yet to locate an area to permanently store its waste. Look at how Gov. Abbott was whining to Trump back in Oct. 2020 about the storage of nuclear waste next to the largest domestic producing US oilfield in Texas. The waste was across the border in New Mexico. Other utilities EVERYWHERE ELSE BUT TEXAS have no issues with their wind turbine power or solar generation. The problem is Texas utility companies. How come Norway or any of the countries in Europe don’t have these issue? Or Japan, South Korea or other any asian countries that employ wind and solar technology?
Thanks for your comments.
Fortunately wind is still a small portion of the total generation mix. The problem is in trying to include wind and solar capacity in reserve margins. You can read my book for facts about what is happening in other states, or if you don’t like what I write, read Meredith Angwin’s book Shorting the Grid. New England, for example, barely prevented a regional blackout that would have been caused by policies against using fossil fuels while forcing wind and solar onto the grid.
It’s very unfortunate that environmentalists have created fear of radiation and convinced people in Nevada that it’s unsafe to store nuclear waste. Nuclear power is safe and we should be using more of it. We definitely shouldn’t be forcing it off the grid with rigged auctions. As for Europe, I suggest you follow the CLEW group who publish information on Germany and other European countries. You mention Norway, but Norway gets the preponderance of its electricity from Hydropower which provides a solid backup for wind. You’ll find that these other countries are having problems. Germany for example, still relies heavily on coal, and Merkel has refused to accelerate the closing of coal-fired power plants just because of the problems I have raised. I hope you will avail yourself of the books I have mentioned and of CLEW so as to become better informed on the issue.
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Don,
Thanks for the well written article. I can’t imagine how any sane person thinks we will get totally off fossil fuels and on to intermittent green energy.
47% of homes in the USA are heated with cheap, reliable Natural Gas, Millions more with oil.
with Biden’s plans we are headed for a energy disaster
Thanks. It’s important for Americans to realize what is happening. Energy is not something most Americans think about since our systems have been so successful in bringing everyone reliable and plentiful energy. But now we face situations where energy won’t be reliable and plentiful because of bad energy policies.
Donn,
Thank you for the references to “Shorting the Grid.” I appreciate it!
Shorting the Grid should be read by everyone.