For a president whose chief of staff reportedly begins each morning by checking the average price of gasoline, Joe Biden’s administration is awfully dismissive of warning signs that the nation’s electrical grid can’t handle the summer heat.
Last month, the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit electrical grid watchdog, issued a new report warning that two-thirds of the United States face a heightened risk of power outages this summer. [bold, links added]
Part of the problem is adverse weather conditions. A drought in the West has diminished hydroelectric capacity, and a drought in the Missouri River basin is denying thermal generators the natural cooling they need to stay operational.
But not all of the grid’s troubles are related to weather. Government regulations and taxes designed to reduce carbon emissions have also caused a huge loss in generating capacity from power plants reliant on fossil fuels.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (covering a 15-state region extending north from the Gulf through the Midwest) alone has 3.2 gigawatts less power capacity this summer than it did last year, all due to the retirement of fossil-fuel power plants.
“We are headed for a reliability crisis,” said Mark Christie, a Republican-appointed commissioner on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, noting that utilities are being forced to move too quickly to supposedly “renewable” energy sources such as wind and solar. “We’re just not ready yet,” Christie warned.
For the Democrats on the commission, rolling blackouts may just be the price we all have to pay to meet their party’s carbon emission reduction goals.
“We are in a transitory phase on the electric side in particular of the industry, and we need to address some of the challenges that are associated with that,” Biden-appointed FERC Chairman Richard Glick said.
“I think the argument about going back to the way it used to be 30 years ago, that’s not going to happen,” Glick continued. “We’re moving forward.”
In other words, the Biden electrical grid policy basically boils down to: “Damn the blackouts — full decarbonization ahead!”
From the Left’s perspective, there is a certain logic to this policy. Every ounce of pain that Democrats can inflict on working people is another step toward pushing energy consumers toward a decarbonized future.
Democrats even have polling that tells them this is exactly what voters want. Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg recently released a survey he conducted for something called the Climate Policy and Strategy Project, which he claims shows that “big majorities” support “major action on climate change despite inflation.”
“The public mostly supports the administration’s priorities and agrees with U.S. climate envoy John Kerry when he says that the war in Ukraine will indeed lead to the United States accelerating the transition to renewables,” Greenberg writes. ”That means moving with speed to clean energy.”
But does his polling really say that? Greenberg asked respondents which statement they agreed more with: “Climate change is a threat and we need major action to combat it” or “The threat of climate change is exaggerated and the high cost of fixing it may not be worth it.”
This question seems to be more about whether climate change is happening at all — not whether the cost of a quick transition away from fossil fuels is worth rolling blackouts.
Who knows? Maybe Greenberg is right. Maybe voters will happily keep their pantry stocked with food, switch to candles, and keep plenty of ice on hand so that their medications don’t go bad — as Biden’s Department of Energy cheerfully recommends.
Or maybe voters will see rolling blackouts as a problem — as yet another Biden-created crisis to go along with so many others, including illegal immigration, Afghanistan, inflation, and gas prices. We’ll find out this November.
Read more at Examiner
Most have experienced short power outage of a few hours. Fewer have experienced long term power outages. Even fewer have experienced regional outages.
If your landline phone is based on the internet you know it will not work even if you have a generator unless you also have satellite internet. Wired based internet always goes down when there is a power outage. In most cases for a short power outage cell phones continue to work. However, with a long power outage the cell phone towers start to fail as their back up power runs out.
With a regional power outage you can’t buy gas. The service stations don’t have the power to pump it. If you are relying on a generator to get through the coming power outages, make sure you have enough gas on hand.
With the high price of gas and inflation at the highest level in our history, you can bet in the 2022 and 2024 elections the Democrats will go full out to get reelected. This will certainly include massive free advertising and lying by the mainstream media. It will also include election fraud on a scale not seen before. In this way blackouts will be a good thing. The blackouts will alienate even more people and make it more difficult for the standard tools of the Democrats to work.
The most extraordinary thing about the current hysteria is the constant cry that “we must tackle climate change” or “fix the climate issue”, which is massive hubris, since even the best of scientific knowledge still has little understanding of the vast complex factors of nature, the solar system, the sun, gravity, the large planets, cycles, orbit, magnetic pole shifts etc etc which influence climate on all the planets. Even if any such programme might succeed to a small degree, any such result would not even be noticeable for many decades, if at all. The proposed new “clean” energy plans anyway will cause more problems environmentally than current methods of fuel production. They themselves have the potential to work towards refined methods and new discoveries. Wind and solar are dead ends with huge environmental problems, as well as financial. Dream on, Biden and Kerry etc..
“…“big majorities” support “major action on climate change despite inflation.””
That’s before the coming summer. A few rolling blackouts, or worse, a breakdown in the system that could result in days, even weeks, of outage, might change the outcome of the poll if repeated.
The current poll outcome could be a precursor to the mid-term elections. There’s a lot of voters who still aren’t convinced that Biden is bad for the country, and that if he had a democrat majority in the senate he could do all sorts of wonderful things.
If you don’t like the present situation, don’t forget to VOTE!
“…“big majorities” support “major action on climate change despite inflation.”” Yet, poll after poll shows that the average American is not willing to spend more than $10 a month on climate change. Of all the issues that Americans are concerned with, climate change has consistently polled at the bottom of the list or had such a weak showing that it wasn’t even listed. Pollster Stanley Greenberg is obvious using techniques to get the results he wants rather than show what the public thinks.
“We’re just not ready yet [to go all green energy],” Christie warned.
And we will never be ready. We cannot power a modern economy on intermittent and such low density power source as wind and solar. Our society would revert to the 19th century life that was both short and brutish with large numbers of people dying from cold and/or starvation. But then maybe that’s what the lefty elites want.