By Admin,
May 9, 2022 4:27 PM
From California to Texas to Indiana, electric-grid operators are warning that power-generating capacity is struggling to keep up with demand, a gap that could lead to rolling blackouts during heat waves or other peak periods as soon as this year.
California’s grid operator said Friday that it anticipates a shortfall in supplies this summer, especially if extreme heat, wildfires or delays in bringing new power sources online exacerbate the constraints. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, which oversees a large regional grid spanning much of the Midwest, said late last month that capacity shortages may force it to take emergency measures to meet summer demand and flagged the risk of outages. In Texas, where a number of power plants lately went offline for maintenance, the grid operator warned of tight conditions during a heat wave expected to last into the next week.
The risk of electricity shortages is rising throughout the U.S. as traditional power plants are being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage. Power grids are feeling the strain as the U.S. makes a historic transition from conventional power plants fueled by coal and natural gas to cleaner forms of energy such as wind and solar power, and aging nuclear plants are slated for retirement in many parts of the country.
The challenge is that wind and solar farms—which are among the cheapest forms of power generation—don’t produce electricity at all times and need large batteries to store their output for later use. While a large amount of battery storage is under development, regional grid operators have lately warned that the pace may not be fast enough to offset the closures of traditional power plants that can work around the clock.
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Every serious study of renewable energy has pointed to two facts:
1) more RE means you need big interstate transmission lines to move power between regions. These aren’t getting built because of NIMBY and Federal permits.
2) more RE means you need more gas peakers. These aren’t getting built because regulators and market makers know that the business case for RE is dismal if you include the cost of these investments.
These investments are expensive. Making the system reliable means undermining the inflated value of RE. This is career suicide. Electric systems are political. Telling unpopular truths leads to unemployment.
Using wind turbines to generate electricity:
*Kills millions of birds and bats
*Destroys the local environment/landscape
*Tears up the earth mining some rare earth metals used in their magnets and for the manufacture of steel, which is made of iron
*Units last around 20-25 years, then these massive monstrosities fill up our landfills
*Very unreliable. Power is only generated when the wind is blowing.
*Power-lines lose energy during transmission process
*Batteries to store wind power longer term still not developed. Those will result in more mining of rare earth metals that tear up the earth.
Its renewable since the planet will always have a pressure gradient that erratically causes wind.
However, wind power is FAKE green energy.
“The challenge is that wind and solar farms—which are among the cheapest forms of power generation—don’t produce electricity at all times and need large batteries to store their output for later use.”
Sigh. First. there is no such thing as “the cost of wind power” or “the cost of solar power” because those systems do not exist on their own. They CANNOT exist on their own. There are only “hybrid power systems” which include wind and/or solar power combined with a traditional baseload power source such as gas, coal, or nuclear.
When computing the cost of wind, you have to include the cost of maintaining and running the backup capacity.
Wind and solar are NOT cheap. Coal and natural gas a cheap, reliable and abundant. The only reason wind and solar LOOK cheap is because the idiots in charge have artificially raised the cost of coal/natural gas through fees/taxes and massive regulations. If coal was not cheap, India and China would NOT be building huge number of coal plants for power. Was not long ago coal was providing electricity to homes here in the US for <6c/kwhr.