More than 2.5 million still without power 64 hours after category 4 Hurricane Helene made landfall

 

Hurricane Beryl made landfall just before 5 AM on July 8th, four days later 1 million are still without power in Texas, mostly around Houston, mostly customers of Center Point Energy

 CenterPoint reported $867 million in profits for 2023, down 14% from 2022.

The company has asked state regulators to approve around $2.2 billion in resiliency investments for 2025 through 2027, during which time it will have to continue to focus on expanding the system as well. It expects to keep adding about 2% more customers each year.

More.

A power outage on tax-filing weekend is just what Joe Biden needs in Michigan and Ohio

 

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.

Storms knock out power in California Sunday affecting more than a million, half a million still in the dark

 Story.

 

356,000 without power in the US Midwest this morning after storms last night

 

Some of the power outages in Ohio on today's national map are due to another train derailment, second one in a month there

 A third world shit-hole of problems, problems, problems.

 

US power outages get more ridiculous by the day

 

Michigan hands off power outage leadership to California

 

Michigan power outage update: Day 6

 

Michigan power outage update: Day 5

 Over 100k still out in DTE service area in the east, 28k in the Consumers Energy service area in the south.

Pretty shocking multi-day outage, with overnight lows averaging 26F for the last five nights.

Michigan power outage update

 Consumers Energy outages: ~36k still affected (~90k restored overnight).

DTE outages: ~279k still affected (~65k restored overnight).

This evening it will be four days since the power went out for these people.

 

 

California has power outages because it is insane and has weather, Michigan has power outages because it has weather and is insane

 127k of the current Michigan outages belong to Consumers Energy, 344k to DTE in the Detroit area.

Peak outages for Consumers Energy were ~237k at one point in this event.

Progress overnight: Just 12k restored for Consumers Energy.

In the last 20 years Michigan ranks 4th overall for total outages, but California remains the big daddy for outages, followed by Texas and New York.

Power outage due to ice storm just gets worse for Consumers Energy customers in Michigan, so they run PR ads on YouTube while it's happening

 Earlier in the day there were 137k without power.

Tonight there are 139k. 

I wouldn't have thought about it again today but for the YouTube ad which interrupted my evening video.

Consumers Energy should spend more money actually helping people instead of running a propaganda operation.

People are freezing their butts down there. It's 25F in the outage area.

DTE in the Detroit area is actually making some progress restoring power. Looks like ~200k have been restored since earlier in the day, but hundreds of thousands remain without power.

 

 

400k without power in California

 

 

... hurricane-force winds ...

 

The storms won’t be enough to officially end California’s ongoing drought but they have helped.

 

Germany boosts electricity from coal to 10 gigawatts, a drop in the bucket

 Bloomberg, here:

Germany now generates more than a third of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, according to Destatis, the federal statistical office. In the third quarter, its electricity from the fuel was 13.3% higher than the same period a year earlier, the agency said.  

Germany as recently as 2019 still had 40 gigawatts of electricity capacity from coal, and planned to reduce that to 27 by 2022, so obviously Germany has much more capacity available than 10 gigawatts during its present natural gas supply crisis caused by the Ukraine war.

But Germany's more serious mistake than reducing its coal capacity was its voluntary and hysterical reduction of nuclear generation capacity by 40% in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Now it's got just 3 reactors left out of the 17 it had back in the day. 

Meanwhile US electric capacity from coal in 2021 dwarfed the German, at about 210 gigawatts, but that is way down from almost 318 in 2011, a similarly ideologically driven, self-imposed, and illogical reduction of 108 gigawatts, or 33% in ten years.

The foolish growing reliance on unreliable "green energy" in the US and the turn away from coal which began in earnest under Obama has meant increasing unreliability of electric resources during extreme events, and a huge increase in the duration of power outages experienced by customers.

The average customer outage was just north of 8 hours in 2020 vs. about 3.5 hours in 2013, an increase of over 130%.

This will only get worse if America tries to rely on wind and solar at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear.

 

 

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.

 

Christmas Eve: At least 1.7 million without power in USA

 

Joe Biden's America two days before Christmas is a third world patchwork of power outages all over the place

About 1.04 million without power this morning.

It's going to be a rough Christmas Eve without power with forecast real lows in the single digits.