January 10, 2023
There’s growing alarm that the top-down push for America to transition to renewable energy is surgically dismantling our existing electrical grid and its capacity to provide reliable power when needed.
Blackouts in California and Texas weren’t anomalies. As one energy regulator warned, there should have been a national wakeup call for a system in crisis. From one coast to the other, the nation’s power supply is getting increasingly thin and less stable. The North American Electricity Reliability Corp., which oversees the electric grid’s reliability, is sounding an ever-louder alarm that we’re stumbling into a wholly avoidable but perilous situation.
According to NERC’s winter reliability assessment, Texas, the Northeast, the Midwest and the Southeast are all at high risk of emergency operating conditions, with a chance for blackouts in New England during the coldest days of winter now registering as a shockingly high probability. One leading author of the NERC winter assessment told reporters, “The system hasn’t been stressed in this manner in the past and probably, more importantly, it hasn’t been as widespread.”
The obvious question is why is the nation’s power supply on the ropes. While advocates of renewable energy like to point to anything but the intermittency of their resources, the hidden headline is that traditional sources of power — namely coal plants — are being forced off the grid with no real plan to reliably replace the fuel security and on-demand power they provide. Trying to replace coal generation with sources of power at the mercy of the weather has proven to be a fool’s errand.
High penetration of renewable power on electricity grids has become a defining challenge everywhere large amounts of solar and wind are being added. For example, the boom-and-bust nature of wind power means billions of dollars in investments can carry a grid for hours or completely disappear when the wind stops blowing. At the end of November in the United Kingdom, for example, wind power went from generating 16 GW of power — equivalent to 15 large coal plants — to 0.4 GW in a day and a half. Planning for and accommodating that kind of volatility is precisely the crux of our pending energy crisis.
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