Insurance companies got rich because of Obamacare rules, now electric utilities are poised to get rich because of Biden climate rules

 Utilities are shutting down "dirty" capacity without adequately replacing it. The law of supply and demand means only one thing: higher prices. OK, two: blackouts.

Meanwhile, tax credits under Biden's phony Inflation Reduction Act are masking the true costs of renewables.

From a Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Coming Electricity Crisis: Artificial-intelligence data centers and climate rules are pushing the power grid to what could become a breaking point" here :

Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.

The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.

About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.

Some plants are nearing the end of their useful life-spans, but an onslaught of costly regulation is the bigger cause. A soon-to-be-finalized Environmental Protection Agency rule would require natural-gas plants to install expensive and unproven carbon capture technology.

The PJM report cites “the role of states and the federal government in subsidizing resources and in environmental regulation.” It added: “The simple fact is that the sources of new capacity that could fully replace the retiring capacity have not been clearly identified.”

Meantime, the Inflation Reduction Act’s huge renewable subsidies make it harder for fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to compete in wholesale power markets. The cost of producing power from solar and wind is roughly the same as from natural gas. But IRA tax credits can offset up to 50% of the cost of renewable operators. 

Baseload plants can’t turn a profit operating only when needed to back up renewables, so they are closing. This was the main culprit for Texas’s week-long power outage in February 2021 and the eastern U.S.’s rolling blackouts during Christmas 2022.

There was nothing wrong with the coal or natural gas plants of the Tennessee Valley Authority: It was one-off wind damage and too many far-flung customers dependent on its electricity for heat

 Cold weather pushed up electricity use in TVA's seven-state region where more than 60% of homes are heated by electricity. ...

TVA Chief Operating Officer Don Moul is heading an investigation of the problems that led to the power outages last week. Moul said in a telephone interview that high winds damaged several of TVA's protective structures at the Cumberland plant and several gas-fired combustion turbines used for such peak power periods. TVA's directive to local power companies to cut some of their energy use was the most efficient means to respond to the inadequate energy supply, Moul said.

More. 

 

The left, of course, is blaming the fossil fuels themselves instead of wind damage to existing energy infrastructure, whose maintenance has been neglected in the rage for so-called green energy and against coal:

"[T]he mandatory blackouts were due to coal and gas failures," [Amy] Kelly [the Tennessee representative for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign] said.

     

The hysteria of this prejudiced response is matched, however, by the feckless customers of the federally-run utility, whose only care is that their power was cut when it was 5 degrees F outside, and on Christmas Eve:

 

"Why would anyone in their right mind decide it is a GOOD idea to have rolling blackouts today? First of all, it is a whopping 5 degrees outside and second, it is Christmas Eve ... This is ridiculous."

Tennessee has had plenty of much colder temperatures than this Christmas and never had to turn off the power before, but that was before they went insane

 What we know: TVA ordered rolling blackouts for the first time in 90 years amid freezing temps

Tennessee Valley Authority retired 3,370 MW of coal electric power capacity in 2012, 2017, and 2018.

The reason for that isn't because the plants were old, built in the 1950s. TVA still operates a bunch of much older hydroelectric plants dating back as far as 1911.

It's pure anti-fossil fuel ideology driving that, and foolishly allocating new capacity to solar and wind, which can't cut it.

And that's why they had to shut off the power in Tennessee for the first time.

The damn fools got 0.7 inches of snow and said it was one inch deep, too.

 

Texans face rolling blackouts because "wind generation is currently generating significantly less than what it historically generated in this time period"

 Actually, it's because Texas retired reliable sources of electricity from coal and natural gas for unreliable "green energy".

The New York Times as usual just leaves that part out, here:

The regulator forecast demand in Texas to peak at 79,671 megawatts, just short of the 80,168 megawatts that will be available.

That's a forecast margin of just 497 megawatts.

Texas has retired 6,453 megawatts of coal generation capacity since 2017 and added 3,945 megawatts of wind generation capacity.

In addition Texas has retired 2,316 megawatts of natural gas generation capacity since 2008 and added 3,425 megawatts of solar generation capacity since 2010.

Not only is Texas short a net 1,399 megawatts of generation capacity over the period, if the wind doesn't blow it's potentially short another 3,945 megawatts, and another 3,425 megawatts if the sun don't shine.

Way to go, Brownie.

LOL California's Governor Newsom takes drastic action to make it look like he's not a total raving lunatic as recall vote looms Sep 14

 

And so temporarily, or so they say, the state has been forced to set up five natural gas power plants in order to avoid rolling blackouts. This move is the result of an emergency order signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last month. 

More.

This has to be the dumbest blackout story ever written: The crisis is entirely of their own making

Blackouts Threaten Entire U.S. West This Summer as Heat Awaits :

States shuttering coal and gas-fired power plants simply aren’t replacing them fast enough to keep pace with the vagaries of an unstable climate, and the region’s existing power infrastructure is woefully vulnerable to wildfires (which threaten transmission lines), drought (which saps once-abundant hydropower resources) and heat waves (which play havoc with demand).

 

Well don't shutter 'em then!

 

Bunch of idiots.

Power outage Manhattan: 42 is the answer to everything

BIG ZAPPLE New York power outage grinds Manhattan to a halt stopping subways and Broadway shows EXACTLY 42 years after 1977 blackout:

It comes exactly 42 years to the day - and very nearly to the hour - since a famous blackout plunged New York into darkness on July 13, 1977.

Sad to see Glenn Greenwald retweeting the spitting-on-Vietnam-vets-is-a-myth crap

The left-wing standard for doubting the veracity of the claims continues to be the inability to find corroborating news accounts at the time of the alleged spitting incidents, as if Vietnam vets were such whiny weenies that they ran like babies to the papers to complain "that hippie spit on me!" See the 1998 book by Jerry Lembcke which depends on this line of reasoning to argue the spitting incidents are a myth.

In our own time there has been a virtual news blackout on assaults against Trump supporters, especially during 2015 and 2016, which partisans point to as evidence those also are myths.

"If we don't report it, it's not news."

News networks to help Obama by not broadcasting his unconstitutional plan to break the immigration law

There's no sense in riling up the people unnecessarily over such a trivial issue, after all. Note that this blackout includes so-called conservative Fox News Network, which is co-opted by its open-borders libertarian owner, Rupert Murdoch (Australian-American naturalized in 1985).  

"If anyone assumes the government by fraud [hello ObamaCare] this is a tyranny. ... To preserve a tyranny ... guard against everything that gives rise to high spirits." -- Aristotle

FERC Study Warns Sabotage Vs. 0.01% Of Electrical Grid Could Blackout The Nation For Months

Reported here:

A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission raises concerns about the seriousness of electricity grid vulnerability, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The study found that if saboteurs attacked just nine of the country's 55,000 electric-transmission substations, the country's power network would collapse. An ensuing nationwide blackout could last weeks or even months, the newspaper said.

Or Maybe Terrifying Blackouts Mean Hillary Clinton Is Just A Drunk?

Leon Panetta to the Rescue: Implicates Live Feed Breakdown for Ignorant Statements

See the video here:

"[T]here was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we - you know, we really didn't know just exactly what was going on . . .."

Live Feed From Abbottabad Assault Was Cut Off For 25 Minutes

The White House was blind during that whole time:

Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, revealed there was a 25 minute blackout during which the live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the US special forces was cut off.

Full story here.

BLACKOUT NATION

More "year of the black:" black president, Chicago Blackhawks, black beaches, and now blackouts.


Thom Patterson reports for CNN.com on the growing problem of electricity blackouts because of an aging electrical grid, now an estimated $1.5 trillion problem, at which the current administration has thrown roughly $4 billion, a drop in the bucket:

Experts on the nation's electricity system point to a frighteningly steep increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers.

During the past two decades, such blackouts have increased 124 percent -- up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to 92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of Minnesota.

In the most recently analyzed data available, utilities reported 36 such outages in 2006 alone.


Read Patterson's worthwhile article here. 

Obama Allocates A Drop In The Bucket For A Critical $100 Billion Problem

So says Alex Kingsbury, here:

But while it may have been a technical wonder at the time of construction, the nation's power grid has become dangerously antiquated over the past few decades. If technology in the home is racing ahead at broadband speed, the power grid is stuck back in the days of rotary-dial phones. According to industry statistics, the dog food industry spends more on research and development than the electrical sector does. Aging technology means more frequent blackouts, a greater vulnerability to computer hackers, and, perhaps most insidious, colossal inefficiency. As part of the economic stimulus package, the Obama administration has pledged $3.4 billion toward "smart grid" technology—the next generation of infrastructure, meant to stabilize the grid in the event of a failure, incorporate green technology, and vastly improve efficiency. But those billions are a drop in the bucket toward bringing the entire national grid into the 21st century, which could take decades and cost upwards of $100 billion, some experts estimate.

Meanwhile the nearly $800 billion stimulus package gets spent preserving government sector votes, I mean jobs.