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.

The National Weather Service predicts Ice-Out for the Tanana River at Nenana will be at the usual time, with river ice normal depth after big cold snap in February and March into April

 

Ice-Out for The Nenana Ice Classic is going to be delayed, but it's too late to buy your ticket anyway

All-time April low could fall in Alaskan city :

"A cold snap this extreme in April hasn’t been experienced in the Fairbanks area since 1911, when three consecutive record lows were set from April 9-11," Duff said. Two of these record lows are likely to be challenged during the latest cold wave, including Thursday night’s record of minus 16 F and Friday night’s record of minus 32 F.

Nenana Ice Classic 2021 

Hey! Where's the rope on that thing?

Earliest Ice-Out ever since 1917 was April 14 (2019).

June cold snap in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Using Cooling Degree Days (the more of which you have the more you need to run your air conditioner) Grand Rapids, Michigan has been about 56% cooler than normal to date.

Through June 19 we've had 33 CDD. A normal full June would have 139.   

Did Michigan's Consumers Energy lose 50 billion cf in the compressor fire this week?

On Wednesday the utility was reported to have 350 billion cubic feet of natural gas in storage. Tonight it is reported that the utility has 300 billion cubic feet, 50 billion cubic feet less than a day before. That would mean 14% of its storage went up in flames in the fire in Macomb County.

No one was bright enough at today's press briefing to ask about this.

This was a catastrophic loss of capacity during the most severe cold snap in twenty-five years, rescued only by the efforts of consumers and businesses who voluntarily cut their consumption while the utility scrambled to bring reserve fields on line.

You can turn your heat back up after midnight, Consumers Energy says:

The Jackson-based utility has 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas in storage across Michigan. On Wednesday, the company broke a record, needing 3.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Michigan residents asked to keep thermostats no higher than 65F through Friday evening during cold snap

No heat interruptions yet, but Consumers Energy still asks Michigan to keep thermostats at 65:

A Wednesday night plea for customers to turn their heat down made an impact, [Consumers Energy spokesman Brian] Wheeler said.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer took to Facebook to ask Michiganders to reduce usage and an emergency alert was sent to cellphones.

Residents should keep thermostats down through the end of the day Friday, officials said, to avoid the possibility of service interruptions.

Propane Prices In MI Skyrocket In Part Because Supplies Were Used To Dry Late-Harvested Taxpayer-Subsidized Crops

But the story, here, never mentions the insane taxpayer-funded feedback loop of government interference in both agriculture and fuels:

Propane prices are up more than 70 percent over last year’s levels amid heavy demand caused by the abnormally cold winter and late harvest that required propane for drying grain throughout the Midwest.

So put it together: corn-growing is subsidized by the federal government which means by you the taxpayer, then the crop happens to be harvested late due to weather conditions and has to be dried with fossil fuel which impacts propane supplies, after which the corn is distilled into ethanol at taxpayer expense to put in your gas tank by government decree which you pay too much for at the pump, and then the hapless souls depending on propane get stuck with enormous bills during a cold snap and above normal snows where bad roads impact the deliveries of already stressed supply.

Brilliant! The taxpayers pay and pay and pay, and the governor, Rick Snyder, condescends to rebate just 10% of a tax surplus.

They should all be in jail!

Arrests Spread as Occupy Wall Street Spreads

Like a disease.

Last time I checked, ZERO Tea Partiers have been arrested for anything since 2009, but just over the weekend unruly Occupy Wall Streeters in scores have been arrested:

175 arrests in Chicago;

another two dozen in New York City (where police were injured);

an unknown number of arrests in Tucson;

maybe 40 in Phoenix;

and at least two dozen in Colorado.

See the AP story here.

Tea Partiers protested bailouts in the name of free market capitalism's cure for failure: bankruptcy. They showed up at the ballot box in November 2010 and put a stop to Barack Obama's Democrat Party. Now they wait for November 2012.

Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Streeters suddenly decide to protest bailouts in the name of bailouts for their student loans, a living wage, and sundry other entitlements which don't yet exist but they hope to extract by mob action and intimidation, the modus operandi of the unions.

A cold snap can't come soon enough, or a flu epidemic.

Temps in the Single Digits F in Ciudad Juarez Since Tuesday

For more on this global warming related cold snap, see here.

Global Warming Freezes Lake Erie For First Time in 14 Years

Accuweather.com has the story:

Following a cold snap in the Northeast, Lake Erie's surface is virtually frozen over for the first time in about 14 years.

The ice ranges in thickness between paper thin along the northern shore and several inches along the southern shore, where many people are ice skating.

GoErie.com reports that the lake hasn't completely frozen since the winter of 1995-1996. ...

Lake Erie, with an average depth of 62 feet, is the most shallow of the five Great Lakes, which is why it is the only one that completely freezes over.

There's more at the link.