Looming Catastrophe: Power Grid Collapse Now In Sight in New York

“…many staff people at DPS, DEC, and NYISO who know this is going to end badly.”

Guest essay by John Droz Jr.

Here is a fascinating and revealing news article behind a paywall that I’m alerting you to. It is about just a few of the complications that will result from New York State’s (NYS) Clean Energy Standard (CES).

It discusses the NYISO (New York State Independent System Operator) 2018 Power Trends Report which (paraphrasing Winston Churchill):

…defends itself against the risk of being read by its very length and obfuscating technical jargon.

Note that the article observations are coming from a top NYISO person. In other words, this is someone on the electrical energy front lines who is struggling to deal with political energy policies — which (in NY) are divorced from science or economics and are completely oblivious of the technical consequences.

Seeing these unusually frank insider observations should be an eye-opener.

As an overview, there are several startling acknowledgments, essentially saying:

1. Wind energy is an unrelentingly unpredictable and uncontrollable energy source,
2. Increasing wind energy on the grid is causing serious reliability issues,
3. Wind energy has very little Capacity Value, and that has not been adequately addressed,
4. Due to the inherent nature of wind energy it must be permanently paired with gas,
5. Adding more wind energy to the grid will require substantially more gas to be added to the grid,
6. The costs to deal with wind energy on the grid are rapidly increasing,
7. None of the costs incurred by wind energy are directly attributed to wind energy,
8. There are similarly major issues with solar, also not quite as severe,
9. None of the politicians or NGOs promoting wind or solar are acknowledging any of these issues,
10. “Stakeholders” are currently discussing a carbon tax, to make this situation even worse.

What else do you need to know to confirm that we are headed for a catastrophe? Well, there’s more…

Note that there is a very strong parallel here with the US mortgage meltdown of several years ago — which led to a world-wide major economic downturn. After the fact, when insiders were interviewed about what happened, they acknowledged that everyone-in-the-know knew that the lending, etc. policies put in place (by lobbyists) were guaranteed to fail.

Unless major changes are made quickly, several years from now there will be experts commenting on how the US energy grid failure (which will lead to a collapse of our economy, and our national security, and our society), was entirely predictable based on the self-serving unscientific energy policies put in place by lobbyists.

If you think this is an exaggeration, simply shut off the electricity in a major city, and see quickly it is before chaos and lawlessness ensues.

Now do the same for an entire region. Etc.

Once you’ve grasped the magnitude of that, you’ll understand why the Russians have put so much effort into promoting US energy policies that are completely nonsensical — to anyone but them. (See Subverting US Energy Policies for more details.)

The ONLY solution is to change our energy policies to be Science-based — starting with dumping the absurd “All of the Above” slogan, and replacing it with “All of the Sensible” as a national energy mantra.

The good news here is that this calamity is 100% preventable….

See this insightful article on the exact same subject.

After reading the Politico piece yesterday, an NYS utility expert shared with me several observations, including the following:

“A close colleague of mine worked at NYSERDA and is familiar with NYS agencies.  We both acknowledge that there are many staff people at DPS, DEC, and NYISO who know this is going to end badly.

However, the micro-management of the agencies and the overt pressure on the NYISO to not be independent of the Administration, is keeping dissent under wraps.  The only people that the NY political administration listens to, are those that say what they want to hear.

“Reading the Politico article and the platitudes about incentivizing rapid response resources makes me want to either laugh or cry.  Just as there was not enough private interest in offshore wind, NYPA had to step in; I guarantee that no private developer will want to develop a new gas turbine plant.  There is no business case for such a development in NYS.  The problem is that the only way this issue will be recognized as important is when it gets to a crisis at best, and at worst after some blackouts occur.”