Winter is coming to New York, which should send a shiver — and a shudder — through residents who know how close the city came to catastrophe just two years ago, and how little has been achieved to prevent it from happening again. [emphasis, links added]
As Christmas approached in 2022, so did Winter Storm Elliott, a 2,000-mile-wide storm that produced blizzard conditions and plunging temperatures across the Eastern United States and Canada.
Elliott killed more than 70 people, knocked out more than 1,700 electricity-generating units, caused rolling blackouts in Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Kentucky, and dropped thermostats in Wisconsin to 60 degrees.
Conditions were especially dangerous in New York, which depends on natural gas to generate the largest share of its electricity and to provide home heating and cooking to more than a million customers.
Frozen wellheads on pipelines that provide natural gas to the city suffered a rapid drop in pressure that threatened to collapse the system.
Had pipeline pressure fallen further, New York City would have lost its gas distribution for the winter.
Workers would have needed to be brought in from other states to help go door-to-door to clear pipelines, make repairs, and relight pilot lights.
It’s not difficult to imagine the chaos that would have ensued: massive evacuations and relocations, shuttered businesses, and threats to the health and survival of thousands of people. ConEd, the local utility, estimated it would have taken months to fully restore service.
Modest improvements to the state’s gas infrastructure have been made in the two years since, largely in the areas of coordination and communications between power entities, but the risk of a severe supply disruption remains.
In its “winter readiness assessment” issued last month, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned that operators are “likely to be challenged in maintaining sufficient reserves during periods of extreme cold weather.”
It noted, “Ongoing capacity expansion efforts by pipeline companies aimed at … cold weather demand for natural gas are facing regulatory and legal complications that have slowed the development of multiple critical capacity additions.”
The nation’s climate press routinely reports on environmental catastrophes that it imagines decades away, but a potential disaster in its immediate future has eluded its notice.
The public has heard crickets, which according to one worrying report could be chirping faster than ever because of rising temperatures from global warming.
Climate reporters spilled far more ink on the misguided prediction that hurricane season in 2024 would bring an unprecedented 33 named storms to the North Atlantic, creating the “busiest hurricane season on record.” The season ended with 17.
Likewise, the state’s political leadership is far more interested in climate change than energy reliability, with pledges to drastically reduce carbon emissions and transition to “clean energy” through a panoply of mandates, subsidies, and tax incentives.
The state pressured the early retirement of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021, banned fracking of its shale formations in 2014, and pushed electrification of home heating, cooking, and transportation with the assumption that it would come from renewable energy.
Even so, it is a fossil fuel — natural gas — that is by far the state’s biggest source of electrical generation, providing ten times more power (35.8 percent) than wind and solar combined (3.6 percent), according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
That’s particularly important during the winter, which has already dumped several feet of snow upstate this year. While the climate alarmists frame their scariest predictions on a warming earth, it is colder weather that is the larger threat to human safety.
At current trends, the New York Independent System Operator projects that peak demand for electricity will come in the winter rather than the summer in the 2030s.
That poses a particular challenge for renewable energy since wind turbines don’t turn when the winds blow too hard or not at all, solar farms provide no electricity when they’re covered with snow, and battery storage reaches its limits in extreme weather.
Read rest at NRO
