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.
Good luck. You will be missed.
Thanks for your comments.
Donn, you are a true patriot and a true scientist. You blog as been a ray of truth and information for me. Your books have been an essential element in my energy and climate education.
May God bless you and your family.
Thanks Greg. I appreciate your comments.
Nooooooo! Donn, it’s been educational and so useful to follow your arguments and supporting data. I will miss your efforts. And, I appreciate all the time you spent asking the right questions. Thank you.
Thanks. I appreciate your comments.
Bless you, my hero.
Thanks Steve. You are too kind.
Donn
That you for sharing all your knowledge with us. You are a true inspiration.
Rob
Thanks Rob. You are very kind with your comment. See you at lunch, hopefully.
Just simply, Thank You Donn!!!
Thank you.
Donn,
Thanks for your many valuable essays, including this final one.
I wish you the best going forward and hope that ddears.com will be available in the future.
John Shanahan
website: allaboutenergy.net
Thanks for your comments. Keep up the fight.
I’ll be sad to see you go and you will be missed Donn but its been a good and long run.
Thanks. Appreciate your comments.
Have always appreciated your insight and clarity of thought, Mr. Dears. Thank you for making the effort to educate and guide we non-scientists by providing the facts. Your voice in the face of so much ignorance and misinformation will be greatly missed.
Thanks for your comments.
Hate to see you go! Tucker Carlson and now Donn Dears!
Thanks. Interesting comparison.
I’m sorry to see you go, I hope all is ok with you, and yours. Your posts are part of the ammunition I use against the Brain Dead Supporters Of Renewables. Best Wishes
Thanks for your comments
Donn,
Thanks for all the insightful articles over the years. Over the last 11 years you have helped me understand how the use of LOCE can be misleading. I thought of your earlier posts on the subject when I saw this posted this morning-
“ LCOE has been useful for a time, but it was never intended to deal with intermittent energy sources.”…
REF-
Dollars, Sense, and Kilowatt-Hours | The Breakthrough Institute
You’re cutting to the chase of an argument will be missed.
Thanks for your comments. Greatly appreciated.
Thanks for so many concise, consistently good articles from an engineering point of view. I hope the archives remain for a while, as these articles are good one year later, and five years later.
I know you are not taking requests … but how about a list of your favorite two dozen articles (titles and links) as a going away gift .. and give us some time to read them!
I recommend 20 climate and energy articles every day on my blog. Some days 20 good articles are hard to find. Older articles from here would fill in the gaps, even if I already recommended them once when they were published.
https://honestclimatescience.blogspot.com/
I’ve been using old articles from a climate website that stopped adding new articles in 2020 for that purpose. Their articles from the past are still excellent. That website is primarily on CO2 enrichment and plant growth, not energy.
http://www.co2science.org/index.php
Thanks for your comments.
I appreciate your interest in having some articles republished in groups.
My website will be taken down next week and the published articles will go with it.
I have all my articles on my computer, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to do what you suggest, though it’s a great idea.
Dear Donn: I’ve appreciated your website and books. I know that you have been battling cancer, which is a huge challenge. Based on your previous response, I note with regret that you will be shutting down https://ddears.com very soon. Any chance I could send you some funds to keep it open a bit longer?
No. But thanks. It’s not a matter of money. I just can’t handle the workload.
I’m in the final stages of mesothelioma and it’s hard to breath and do much of anything.
I just need to close up shop.
I appreciate the thought behind your offer.
I’m saddened to learn of your mesothelioma. I understand it is quite painful. I constructed a pair of Google queries.
“nuclear power” site: ddears.com and
“Diablo Canyon” site: ddears.com
I’m in the process of archiving the informative results. I’m archiving both your articles and the comments. Is there any mechanism by which I could obtain a complete set of your articles and responses so they could be accessible to energy researchers in the future?
My son will have all my articles, but I don’t know how to retain comments once the website is shut down.
The articles aren’t grouped by topic so, as a group, they are hard to work with.
I’ll discuss with hime what he might be able to do.
I greatly appreciate your interest.
Thank you. Please have your son contact me via email at government [at] CGNP dot org. (My email is formatted to discourage spammers.)
My contact information is also found at the CGNP website:
https://cgnp.org/team-view/inga-north/
One of my fellow nuclear power advocates says, “It is possible to export an entire website and all of its documents fairly easily using a WordPress Expert/Import plugin, if his site uses WordPress, which it might. They could then be much more easily archived, searched and reused.Then he could shut down his hosting but not lose anything.” However, I do not see an indication that your website is on WordPress.
Donn
My sympathy. I hope you’re as comfortable and happy as it’s possible to be.
Thanks for all your articles. It’s a pleasure to see some good sense.
Thanks for your comments.
Dear Donn. So sorry to hear of your battle with cancer. You have been a strong voice of truth. Something that is sadly missing in todays world.
God’s blessings on you and your family.
Tom Sieswerda
Thank you.
Thank you for your contribution and all the best
Thank you.
Dear Donn: I learned how to archive your complete web page in a few minutes, depending on the speed of your internet connection.
From Google,
How can I save a whole web page?
You must be online to save a page.
On your computer, open Chrome.
Go to a page you want to save.
At the top right, click More More Tools. Save page as.
Choose where you want to save the page on your computer.
Click Save.
Hope you get what you need.
Donn,
It was great to read information put together by an actual power systems engineer. Always refreshing and insightful. You’re irreplaceable and you will be missed! Best wishes from one of your Villages fans.
Many thanks.