A recent article at Hot Air claims that climate-focused energy policies, including premature closures of coal power plants, threaten the reliability of the U.S. electrical grid. This is true. Multiple utility operators have issued warnings over recent months that shutting down reliable energy sources without suitable backups will result in rolling blackouts and grid instability.
The article, “Will the Sierra Club Apologize If the Lights Go Out in Baltimore?” written by Hot Air contributor Beege Welborn, describes the situation many states are facing, but especially the New England region, as green and net-zero emissions policies are taking their toll on electric power generation in the states. Welborn writes:
I’m no math major (although I play one here at HotAir), and even I can see – without a whiteboard presentation – that (the numbers of incoming people + conversions to all-electric household/businesses + some unreliable minimal generation renewable power sources) – shutting down functioning, reliable, megawatt fossil fuel plants ≠ enough power when you need it.
He lists several instances of utilities being forced to apologize for blackouts, including Duke Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and PJM.
The Sierra Club, a large, well-funded environmental activist group, is apparently directly involved in some of these coal plant shutdowns. Welborn points out that a major Maryland coal plant even entered an agreement with Sierra Club to shut down in order to avoid lawsuits from the green group. That particular shutdown is forecast to potentially reduced the grid reliability for more than one million electricity customers, Welborn reports. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Mark Christie warned that the shut down was “potentially catastrophic.”
Such warnings are being issued more and more often, and in more urgent language, as Climate Realism has reported in previous posts detailing the so-called energy transition, here and here.
In the first linked Climate Realism post, the same FERC Commissioner, Christie, described at a House Committee hearing the danger of a too-rapid shutdown of fossil fuel infrastructure, “we’re heading for potentially very dire consequences,” and that the reason is “a shortfall of power supply[.]”
The intermittent nature of wind and solar make them bad candidates for replacing fossil fuels, a fact confirmed by utility companies and grid operators like PJM Interconnection, which recently released a report explaining that you need multiple megawatts of wind or solar to replace just 1 MW of a fossil energy source, plus battery storage.
The catch is, the needed battery storage to replace all of the Northeastern United States’ electric power plants with renewables is physically and economically impossible. A recent study (Fekete, et al.) crunched the numbers and determined that three months of electricity storage are needed, at a minimum, to make a renewables-only grid work. Battery technology to hold several months of energy does not exist, but even it if did this project alone would cost trillions. To replicate it throughout the United States would likely cost four times more than the entire Gross National Product.
These facts don’t seem to bother activists, however, because additional coal plants are being shut down with regularity, with nothing reliable, and sometimes nothing at all, to replace them. Hot Air is correct to point out these problems with green policy and the looming threat to the electric power grid. Losing electricity regularly would not just be inconvenient, it would be dangerous, deadly, and citizens and utility customers have a right to know this fact.
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Worst headline evah!
Or is it that I’m coffee-deprived this morning?
I propose an alternative:
No Joke, Hot Air! Blackouts Coming
We should discontinue use of antibiotics too, and who needs meat, and farmers too for that matter?
Genetic engineers should “improve” out digestion system so we can eat leaves off trees and bushes. 🙂
Bill Gates is on it.
Get working on your appendix.
mine came out 63 years ago- though that surgery probably wasn’t necessary- my dad asked the hospital for the surgery report- they wouldn’t give it to him- so he was certain the surgery wasn’t necessary and they were hiding that fact- we didn’t have insurance so the cost was substantial for our low income family- back then of course they routinely did this and tonsillectomy, need or not- dam crooks! I think now you have a right to any and all of your medical info.
Maybe we could improve our digestive systems so we could eat grass. Then we could get rid of lawnmowers, lawn mowing, and all the gas needed to run the mowers.
And breathing. At least breathing out.
Bill Gates approach is to stop both.
Hot Air is a conservative American political blog. It is written by ….
Who knew? Not me! 🙂
Yeah, my only beef was with trying to parse that run-on sentence where Hot Air is a name, rather than a substance.
“Correct, Hot Air, Premature Coal Closures Pose a Serious Threat to Grid Stability”
The commas were necessary but not sufficient. And a headline should fit on one line.
“Correct, Hot Air: Premature Coal Closures Pose….”
“You are correct, Hot Air; Premature Coal Closures Pose a Serious Threat to Grid Stability”
” ….. utility customers have a right to know this fact.”
You are right.
So how do you get the MSM to tell everyone?
You meant to say “anyone”?
Well, they might have to tell the censors so that they know what isn’t allowed to be said, I suppose.
it’s verboten!
Utility companies are not unlike car manufacturers in this regard. They have been consistently assailed by crushing government edicts and litigious activist organizations for decades. But yet they are mute, like sheep going to the slaughter….No one really seems to know why. If both industries had grown a pair way back when, perhaps we would not be in these situations today.
So now we have major automakers who have made so many EVs that dealers are refusing shipments of due to the fact that they just aren’t selling like hotcakes. And the looming prospect of blackouts in severe weather due to utilities being bullied into closing reliable power stations.
The other part of your question is how does anyone get utility companies (and car makers, etc…) to not only make all of this known but to fight back? And they really don’t need the MSM to do this. Emails, newsletters, social media…all ways to let customers (and prospective customers) know what is going on and why.
I used to work for utilities. When your customers want something, even if it is ill-advised, and they are quite adamant about it, often they get it. Look at how many people believe that we are on a road to climate-induced destruction, and how few understand even the barest minimum facts about electricity or the electric grid. This explains why they want something (CO2 emission reductions) that is ultimately harmful (unreliable electricity).
The utilities are viewed, true or not, as knowingly marketing a product with harmful consequences. Think the tobacco companies of 50 years ago. Trying to explain that if you want reliable electricity and that the only way to get it is with reliable (coal, nuclear, natural gas) generators becomes a fools errand. So the utilities are in a position of giving the idiot child what he wants, even though they know it is a bad move, and hoping it doesn’t fail as badly as they think it will.
Interesting article, thanks!
If one of those giant batteries blew up it be a disaster.
…it would be…
it’s bound to happen eventually- and when it does, we’ll see the excuses- they’ll probably blame the explosion on climate change
MAGA White nationalists would be my guess.
or Brexit.. or the Russians
Or traditional Catholics who converse in Latin to cover their conspiring.
Battery storage facilities in California have already had a handful of fires.
These plants typically consist of numerous battery container modules that can be readily taken out of service and replaced. In their evolution, the spacing between modules has been increasing to reduce the spread of fire from one module to the next.
While I generally agree with the post I wish that people would provide a little more context when they say things like “A recent study (Fekete, et al.) crunched the numbers and determined that three months of electricity storage are needed, at a minimum, to make a renewables-only grid work.”
It’s true that the cost of storage would be prohibitive, but it seems to me that the three-months figure is based on the assumption that there’s no overbuilding. Depending on cost assumptions the cost-optimal configuration would involve a lot of overbuilding and much less storage. I did an admittedly optimistic back-of-the-envelope calculation based on a year’s Texas wind data and found that with enough wind turbines to average 2.2 times the average load the needed storage would be only 69 hours.
Again, that particular calculation was intentionally optimistic, so a realistic configuration in most places would require significantly more storage than I calculated. But it does suggest that folks like Francis Menton should make clear what their assumptions are.
How do you “over-build” without coal?
Yes, Joe. So often the skeptical/realist view is discredited by exaggerated claims and possibly correct speculations. I don’t think this article is guilty of that, but when the case is overwhelmingly in your favor, you would do well to underestimate the cost of the insane plans to dismantle western society.
The facts are on the realists’ side. No need for speculation with sketchy hypotheses piled on top like ketchup on a gourmet meal.
There is NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY. The slightly milder temperature and slightly higher plant food in the atmosphere (0.043% instead of 0.028%) is a PURELY BENEFICIAL effect of the use of fossil fuels. It continues to lead to record crop production.
It’s not just speculative claims either. There’s often plain wrong stuff such as the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist, or it violates the second law of thermodynamics, or fossil fuels didn’t increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and any number of half-baked one-dimensional theories that are just as idiotic as claiming that CO2 is the master control knob.
For the reasons I gave I believe the head post’s three months is indeed an overstatement–or is at least misleading because it omits an underlying assumption.
Generally speaking, though, I think it’s more often the alarmists who over-egg the pudding. As I’ve said elsewhere, alarmists’ arguments themselves are a big part of what makes me skeptical.
‘…the average load the needed storage would be only 69 hours.’
69 hrs vs. 3 months?
You should apply to Biden’s DoE for a large research grant – your chances of success are excellent!
So the problem with this sort of argument is not that 69 hours is ridiculously underestimated. It’s that we’re not comparing the total cost of responsible (real clean-burning & efficient) fossil fuel use against the total cost of ruinables and asking WHY?
Say it’s ‘only’ 60 hours when you over-build by just 2x and people accept frequent rolling blackouts during certain seasons in lieu of more investment. (I’m giving an even more optimistic scenario for ruinables to be ‘viable’ than Joe did).
What are the total costs of that system—the windmills and solar panels and batteries and massive build-out of the grid to the rural spots where the ruinables are, and to every home where suddenly everything is electrified? The environmental damage and loss of endangered species? The economic losses when factories shut down during power shortages? (Oh never mind that one, all the factories are in China or India where coal is used).
Compare that to the total costs of efficient use of fracked natural gas in combined cycle gas turbines along with base load nuclear and hybrid cars burning flexible fuels, all using existing infrastructure. Systems with 40-year and longer useful lifetimes versus 15- to 20-year replacement cycles.
Compare the emission ‘savings’ as well, even though the emissions are in reality beneficial. Just accept that the religious value of reduced emissions is justified for the moment. What does it all cost to ‘save’ oh-so-little CO2? (Don’t forget karlomonte’s comment—ruinables can’t build ruinables). They have to last a good long time to result in a net reduction of emissions after accounting for the coal burned in China helping the Uighur slaves build solar panels or the concrete and steel needed to put up bird shredders after clear-cutting the old growth forests to make space for them.
You don’t need to do the math. It should be intuitively OBVIOUS to anyone using his head for more than a hat rack. On the one side we have widespread poverty with all of a country’s economic output (and then some) frittered away for no reason. On the other side you have prosperity, steadily increasing agricultural output and possibly a continuation of a wholly beneficial mild warming trend.
All true, but I would go farther:
First, get rid of all the CO2 nonsense, as well as the Federals’ un-Constitutional ability to meddle with energy.
Second, we should be burning coal preferentially to gas for electricity base load generation. I say this because we have a lot of coal that can be burned very cleanly at utility-scale facilities and stored on-site. Gas, on the other hand, is ideal for residential space heat and for use as a chemical feedstock.
Sure, clean coal technology is totally viable and the extra CO2 is a bigger dividend for agriculture. But my premise was to suspend disbelief and accept the Climastrology doctrine. On their own terms it makes no sense.
I don’t think so. If you’d read my Naptown Numbers piece you’d have seen that even if we’re wildly optimistic and assume a future battery price of only $35/kWh the relatively small storage requirement I calculated would still make wind power too expensive.
No amount of overbuilding helps when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
Or, indeed, if the overbuilt systems rely on the exact same energy source – all overbuilding will then do is reduce the amount of energy produced as a whole. It would be counterproductive.
Yes, but mutatis mutandis you can shuffle the numbers between extra turbines or extra storage and come out at a least-worst cost in terms of energy, pollution and human man hours and still end up with an unviable ‘solution’.
At the moment storage is so expensive it makes no difference whether it’s 69 hours or 6 months. We cant even get anywhere near 69 hours. He are spending a lot to achieve 69 seconds.
It’s all just cat-belling. Doing sums on the number of costless fairy farts we need to capture to keep the grid alive…
…is not building a technologically competent solution
That image is s A.I. abuse. Consider yourself reported to ChatGTO.
The closing statement from https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/a-few-graphs-say-it-all-for-renewables/
Sun Tsu’s first art of war:
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” That is exactly what is happening as Western governments pursue self-harming Green Energy policies. There is no better way to damage Western societies than by rendering their power supplies unreliable and expensive. Cui bono Who Benefits ??
and
The late Professor Sir David MacKay:
“The dependence on Weather-Dependent “Renewable Energy” to power a developed economy is an Appalling Delusion”.
There’s so much delusion and I think it’s so dangerous for humanity that people allow themselves to have these delusions that they’re willing to not think carefully about the numbers and the realities, and the laws of physics and the realities of engineering… humanity really does need to pay attention to arithmetic, and the laws of physics.”
Arithmetic? Laws of physics? They are lost on politicians, to our incalculable cost.
The Russians failed to read Sun Tsu. The Chinese obviously know him well. They’re growing in power and influence and so far, they’re not fighting anyone.
There is a lot of CCP infighting, mostly Xi disappearing rivals.
I think Sun Tsu approved of that. 🙂
Those who refuse to see the truth deserve to suffer the consequences.
and those of us who do see the true will also suffer the consequences
Alas, their plan is that WE suffer the consequences and they live as kings
Agreed. But unfortunately it will first be the poor who will suffer from these environutter actions. And then there are those who are ignorant and gas-lit by media misinformation. If the lights go out in Baltimore – or DC, the utilities will get blamed. And the deluded and gaslit will believe it is the utilities fault.
But for those who push and support this CAGW scam, that would bring me great joy to see them shivering in cold, dark homes – or having to pay to stay in a motel (if they can afford it) until power is restored. And then having those homes broken into by rampaging criminal mobs emboldened by dark city nights….
The wealthy think they are immune to this sort of stuff, but eventually it will reach them. The royalty in the French Revolution also thought they were safe from angry mobs….
Catch it quick!
We hear all the time about the need for energy and how climate hysteria hurts the poor the most.
But the biosphere is more important. The attack on CO2 is an attack on every living thing because photosynthesis produces all the food. But it is also essential to human life. Today Dr. Mercola’s article is about CO2 and human health. His articles stay up only 48 hours, so go NOW to Mercola.com and read “The Underappreciated Role of Carbon Dioxide in Health,” which is also a story tip if WUWT downloads it in time to pursue it as such.
Interesting. I wonder what the optimum CO2 level range is for human health.
On the International Space Station, its maximum level has been set at just over 5000 ppm but typically its around 3000 ppm.
Just spitballing but it’s gotta be either zero or it has no significance as long as it’s substantially lower than the partial pressure of CO2 in our blood (so that there’s an adequate concentration gradient allowing for effective respiration)? I mean that we don’t need CO2 for anything that I’m aware of in our bodies. It’s a waste product of our metabolism. Apparently 3000ppm doesn’t impair us.
The Mercola video indicates that its biochemistry is under appreciated. Of course it’s a waste product of respiration but it is apparently also involved in cellular ionic transport.
Beginning with nitric oxide in the 1990’s, we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface in our understanding of the physiological roles that small molecules play in our biochemistry.
The last remaining coal-fired plant in New England Merrimack Station, in Bow New Hampshire is being sued by the Sierra Eco-Terrorist Organization because, in the rare instances it actually gets used (it’s considered a “peaker plant”), it (horrors) discharges some warm water into the river which might (horrors) harm some fish and maybe some other things, who knows. It only gets used occasionally, when demand is high or if there is a NG shortage. In any case, the plant is probably doomed anyway because in 3 years, it loses its $785k income for simply being available if needed. The regional electricity supplier, Everstupid, in their infinite wisdom is fully onboard the expensive and grid-killing energy train, and smacking their retarded lips at the prospect of offshore wind sometime in the future. We do live in interesting times.
It’s not much fun skiing on fresh powder anyway.
I take it that this plant increases snow at nearby ski resorts.
Anyone paying attention that has not left that entire region, has only themselves to blame. For not leaving that is.
I don’t know what causes people to think we can get this renewable with battery lack up to work. Once again- I ask some one show me the demonstration project( including the industrial sector) not just over priced subsidized residential load. This isn’t a week end camping trip- these are civilizations.
The idiots don’t just shut them down- the first thing they do is blow up the smokestack- just to make sure. Strange, but lots of dead factory buildings in New England, probably several hundred – just rotting away- and I see few where the smokestack was taken down. And when they blow up a power plant smokestack, they usually have a big party- with everyone cheering.
And virtue seeking politicians smilingly pressing the button.
New ones can be built pretty quick when it is a matter of life and death, which it eventually will be. So there is that.
If anyone here lives there, leave, now.
The real question should be:
When will the stuff start hitting the fan?
Exactly, I have been asking myself that for the last 2+ years. I can’t think of a better combination for destruction of modern society than what the current “ leadership” is doing. And you cannot keep injecting massive amounts of borrowed ( stolen) debt money into the economy indefinitely without all hell breaking loose at some point.
And here in the mid Atlantic USA just outside the politically festering DC swamp; we have had day after day of cloudy partly cloudy and long periods of stillness between short typical weather system frontal passage. Cloudy and still again currently with a forecast gale tonight. Our imaginary batts would be quite flat by now.
It already is, that isn’t the issue, it is:
“When will the stuff hitting the fan be undeniable by politicians and greens?’
Leo, I’m afraid that multiple cycles of SHTF, each one worse than the last, will be necessary before the politicians and the greens bow to reality.
Even then, even while our energy lifeboat is clearly sinking, some number of them will be telling us that we aren’t about to drown and that everything will be fine if we can just find the will and the money needed to push wind & solar quickly forward.
I’m sure big globs will inevitably and noticeably impact the blades, but in the meantime shit has been piling up slowly for a long time. Just look at prices for food and shelter and the number of homeless on the street.
We haven’t totally and all at once devolved into becoming Venezuela, but we are headed that way.
“Multiple utility operators have issued warnings over recent months that shutting down reliable energy sources without suitable backups will result in rolling blackouts and grid instability.”
***************
As I have noted here at WUWT once before, what is needed to head off brownouts and blackouts is federal government legislation which requires that priority be given on the grid to reliable base-load power sources which are not dependent on the weather. Weather-dependent power sources could be tapped into optionally by the utilities if an when they would choose to so for whatever reason.
I would call this legislation EGRASA (Electrical Grid Reliability and Stability Act). Added to this legislation could be a requirement that there must be a means to dispose of expired solar panels in an environmentally sound manner. Currently, as far as I know, there isn’t one. Same for wind turbines. Otherwise, don’t install them.
An even better way to prevent these pending blackouts and brownouts would be for the climate alarmist narrative to be discredited once and for all with the science to be presented to the American people and beyond that leads to the conclusion that there is no climate crisis. Trump didn’t do it during his first term in office, and I don’t know if he will with a second term next November if he wins.
We don’t need to worry about Iran, North Korea, China and Russia so much when we are slowly self- destructing from within.
California just announced they will delay the shut down of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power station until 2030. In a burst of common sense the regulators declared there is not enough renewable energy available to cover the power that would be eliminated. Good luck with providing 18,000 GWh of 24X7X365 electricity using wind and solar by 2030.
Uh oh! Is there a clearer sign that Gavin Nuisance is going to be the Demonrat candidate for president?
It’s not a sure thing at this point that Diablo Canyon can be kept open beyond 2025. Anti-nuclear activists in California cities and counties which purchase Diablo Canyon’s electricity are pushing hard to close Diablo regardless of the state’s announced intention to keep the plant in service. It will be 2026 before we know with certainty who won and who lost in this fight.
How many mid sized, diesel powered “temporary” generation stations has CA built on the QT so far?
And another thing- between the cloudy and still periods we have experienced here in mid Atlantic US- even when the wind comes back often from the NW W or SW ( occasional NE ester) but it is very up and down. Can go from almost still to 20 – 30 mph gust. And often literally up and down too! Turbulent air rolling sometimes the gusts come straight down and not just in thunderstorm conditions. I have spent many a day over the years of tacking and beating into choppy north west winds on the Chesapeake bay- trying to get home in my little sailboats.
TIP
The (paywalled) WSJ – Dec. 14
“The Sea-Monster-Sized Ship Disrupting Biden’s Wind-Energy Dreams”
The costly, delayed construction of the ship highlights a shortage of crucial
needs to build off-shore wind facilities.
Very nice Linnea.
With lots of blackouts refrigerated food will become a thing of the past.
None of us have lived without refrigeration let alone electric light. People aren’t going to just sit back and take it. The social and political consequences are going to be too crazy for anyone to know what’s on the other side of this.
A timely article by Roger Caiazza concerning this topic appeared yesterday on his blog:
NY Public Service Commission “Gap” Reality Disconnect (December 17th, 2023)
Here is the introduction to Roger’s article:
The fact is that New York State hasn’t got a clue how it can achieve the 2019 Climate Act’s emission reduction targets without imposing defacto energy rationing on its citizens.
There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate. The AGW hypothesis has been falsified by science. There is no climate reason to be shutting down coal fired power plants. What we really need are nuclear power plants. Only when there is sufficient nuclear power plants should any fossil fuel plants be shut down but kept as a backup should such backup be needed.
Facts! We don’t need no steenking facts interrupting our crusading-
‘National energy self-harm’ continues as politicians push accelerated renewables roll-out (msn.com)