Several Democratic governors are railing against a power grid operator for skyrocketing utility costs that their policies helped spike, as a potential reliability crisis looms large. [emphasis, links added]
Democratic Govs. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Wes Moore of Maryland, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Matt Meyer of Delaware have criticized PJM Interconnection in recent statements and interviews to blame the operator for high electricity costs, according to The New York Times.
Despite their outrage, East Coast Democrats have championed zero-emissions policies that have led to coal plant closures that threaten grid stability and raise utility costs for consumers, energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“PJM is trying to keep the lights on,” Amy Cooke, co-founder and president of Always on Energy Research and the director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Center, told the DCNF.
“These governors passed unrealistic goals for these net-zero clean grids, and now they don’t want to own their bad policy. … Their fantasy is meeting reality.”
Electricity rates and grid instability have been on the rise on the East Coast for years, particularly in the states that rely on green energy technology and have sought to phase out readily available power sources like coal.
The cost of electricity for consumers in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania has increased, all states that have made net-zero pledges or plans to phase out coal plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
These states have instead opted to push for green energy technology sources like wind and solar that are known to be less reliable.
PJM helps provide power to all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, according to its website.
The governors told the NYT that PJM has been too slow to add new solar, wind, and battery projects, and that they have, in turn, decided to sue, draft, or sign laws to enforce changes at PJM.
“PJM has lost the plot,” Murphy said in an interview, according to the NYT. Moore told the NYT, “I am angry” about PJM.
Murphy and Meyer also told the NYT that they supported legislation to reform PJM.
“I do not think PJM is serving the good people of Pennsylvania well,” Shapiro told the NYT. “We’ve got to re-examine whether or not Pennsylvania should be a member of PJM. We are a net energy exporter, meaning we create more energy than we actually need. That puts us in a strong position to both keep consumer prices low and also create markets in other states.”
Shapiro sued PJM in December over high electricity costs, though André Béliveau, senior manager of energy policy at the Commonwealth Foundation, told the DCNF that it is Shapiro’s policies that have led to this price increase.
“PJM doesn’t write policy. PJM has to work within the policy and political realities that they get from the states in that region,” Béliveau said, adding that his organization’s recent report analyzes how some of Shapiro’s proposed energy policies would immediately increase electricity costs.
Read more at Daily Caller
This is sabotage on a grand scale and he has happened because the meteorologists never issued wind drought warnings and the architects of the intermittent energy industry never checked the reliability of the wind supply,
The immediate need is a Presidential order for all weather reports to include the amount of wind and sun in the energy mix in the local grid so that people can become aware of the times that breakfast and dinner would be served cold for want of wind and solar input to the grid. Added to that a public education program to explain that supply of energy to the grid has to be unbroken and it will always be broken on windless nights and there is no feasible or affordable grid scale storage to bridge the gaps,
Independent Australian investigators documented the impact of wind droughts on the electricity supply over a decade ago but nobody in officialdom took any notice, at home or abroad.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-late-discovery-of-wind-droughts
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply to become aware of wind droughts, wind lulls, known as Dunkelflautes in Europe.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/we-have-to-talk-about-wind-droughts
Wind droughts become an existential threat to thousands or tens of thousands of people when the wind drought trap closes on a windless night during extreme weather conditions coinciding with outages of conventional power.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/escaping-the-wind-drought-trap
Wind droughts frequently happen with extreme weather. During bitter cold there tends to be low winds as has been seen in places like Minnesota so Xcel Energy has to crank up their natural gas plants and beg residents to turn down their thermostats to leave enough gas to generate electricity–this happened a couple years ago there. It also happens during heat waves as happened in Texas also recently (not to mention the disastrous outages in Texas a couple years ago with the bitter cold, wind turbines froze, and fossil fuel plants tripped off, resulting in many deaths). These problems are happening in a supposed advanced society and will only become more frequent as more reliable base-load plants (coal and nuclear) are closed.