GENERAL ASSIGNMENT REPORTER
While electrical data centers and clean technology facilities have increased rapidly within the United States, it appears the country is still running short on time to find a solution to its decreasing power grid, according to a new report.
Multiple states across the U.S. have now set off alarms due to concerns as their industrial power struggles to keep up with demands, according to The Washington Post. In Georgia, the anticipated electricity usage over the next decade is expected to surge to 17 times its recent levels, reaching an all-time high demand. The largest utility in Arizona has also projected that by the end of the decade, its transmission capacity will be exceeded if major upgrades are not performed, the outlet reported.
Additionally, North Virginia and Texas are also facing challenges with their electrical power needs. To accommodate all planned and under-construction data centers, both Texas and North Virginia would require the power equivalent to several large nuclear power plants, according to The Washington Post. (RELATED: ‘Mugged By Reality’: Biden Opened The Door For Chinese EVs To Flood The US Before Moving To Cork It Up, Experts Say)
“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission Jason Shaw told the outlet. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”
While clean energy appears to be at odds with the power grid, the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has implemented strict regulations that have significantly shaped the country’s power grid. The EPA previously attempted to propose a requirement that would have required existing coal-fired power plants to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2024. Additionally, new and existing natural gas power plants would be required to make cuts to their greenhouse gas emissions depending on their size and usage.
However, the EPA recently adjusted their proposal in order to decrease their scope, as several officials previously warned President Joe Biden that the aggressive regulations had serious practical and legal flaws. Concerns regarding the suggested plans questioned the regulations to natural gas power plants that would mandate expensive technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and blended hydrogen.
Many have issued warnings to the Biden Administration regarding its intense push to transition the electrical grid to complete clean energy. Last June, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Mark Christie spoke to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about the consequences America’s power grid could face if the U.S. continued to phase out fossil fuel infrastructure
“I think we’re heading for potentially very dire consequences, potentially catastrophic consequences in the United States in terms of the reliability of our grid, and I think that the basic reason is that we’re facing a shortfall of power supply,” Christie stated.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
You are a bunch of idiots. We in The UK did all the hard work for you.
No need for more crash test dummies, you have the results from the original test. Read the paper.
What do all those coloured dark blue have in common?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-electricity-by-country
Problem is only a few people are paying attention over here. Do expect reality to set in sooner or later.
Problem is that when “reality will set in”, climate change will be blamed and only a few people will understand the truth.
“Stupidity got us into this. Why can’t stupidity get us out?”
~ Will Rogers
Climate change won’t be blamed. “Deniers”, engineers, power companies, Trump and Republican politicians, and even the general public will be blamed for not fully supporting and funding the leftist “fixes” proposed to stop the “climate catastrophe.” You can bet AOC and her ilk won’t be blaming Michael Mann, Joe Biden or the climate change crazies.
I doubt those figures show the full cost. The connection fee is Australia is more than half the electricity cost for many households. The wholesale price is not rising much but the gap to retail isa increasing as all the extra grid stuff accumulates costs.
Its a lot worse than this. The problem is not so much what it costs to move to wind and solar, but that moving to wind and solar is impossible.
The latest idiocy on this in the UK iss to be announced on Tuesday. It has two parts.
The first part is that the wind farms they have built are in the far north of Scotland. These being far from the demand, which is in the South East of the country, and since there is no transmission network to get the power from Scotland to the South East, they frequently have to pay them not to generate. The bill for this is about £300 million a year, added to electricity bills.
So the next proposal, which is the regulator, Ofgen, making it up on the fly, is that the consumer should be charged more for power if they use power generated closer to them. This, the idea is, will lead to more wind farms being built close to cities in the south east and will lower the above constraint payments:
Look behind the curtain and the idea is to raise prices. But this is relatively sensible compared to the next idea.
So lets imagine its 6pm one day in January 200x when all these dreams have been implemented, and the coast off East Anglia is full of wind turbines and what used to be East Anglian farmland is covered with solar panels, and the country is on EVs for travel and heat pumps for home heating.
For a week now we have been in a dead calm caused by the usual winter blocking high, and it looks fit to continue for another few days. It being 6pm, there has been no solar for the last couple of hours. In fact, this being January, there has been minimal solar generation since November, and what there is has been around noon and only for an hour or so.
Everyone has come home, plugged in their EV, turned on their cooker and electric kettle, turned up their heat pump powered heating. Demand is now going to be around 100-125GW, up from about 45GW in the distant past.
What happens?
When you put it bluntly like this, the stupidity of it! They built generation plant where there is neither demand for power nor transmission capacity to get it somewhere there is demand. Then they pay the owners of the plant not to generate. And all political parties in the UK except Reform are perfectly happy with this madness.
We should all get in on this. Build wind farms somewhere there are no people, like maybe the North Pole. Then demand the British Government pay us not to run them.
Better still, why build them, since we are going to be paid not to operate them? No point really, having this expensive plant just sitting there. No, don’t build them. Just get paid. Then everyone should be happy.
I’m going to build a virtual wind farm in the middle of nowhere – you’ll be able to see a CGI of it on the company website – and ask to be paid for when I’m not generating. No costs, but lots of lovely income. Whoooppeeee!
I’ll run your Maintenance Department for a mere 10%! And don’t forget to set aside another 10% for the Big Guy!
“This paper shows that Scotland presents a prime example where generating firms have secured favourable deals but appear to have taken strategic advantage of infrastructure constraints and rules in their operation.The concentration of British wind generation in Scotland provides clear constraints on the grid and in all likelihood places particular wind farms at an advantageous position in exploiting these constraints”
“Our results are consistent with Scottish wind farms gaming the system”
‘Strategic behaviour by wind generators: An empirical investigation’ Mario Inti, Michael Watson Department of Economics, University of Bari, Italy, and University of Warwick, UK.
International Journal of Industrial Organisation 89 (2023) 102947 Elsevier
Nice!
Uzbekistan is the ONLY nation more miserable than Britain: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13156261/Uzbekistan-nation-miserable-Britain-Global-report-says-Dominican-Republic-tops-world-wellbeing-charts.html
What about North Korea?
I heard they were in an eco paradise…
Everyone is grass-fed!
In NK the populace will either indicate they are happy or they will be shot, which may “skew” the results somewhat.
Some of that arricle is not quite as clear as it could be. Let me re-write a bit of it:
Denmark
Electricity costs more in Denmark than nearly anywhere else in the world, because of their high dependence on wind.
Germany
Not far behind Denmark, Germany has the second-highest electricity cost in the world according to most sources, because of its high dependence on wind and solar.
United Kingdom
Residents of the UK pay on average $0.48 per kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed. Although not nearly as expensive as Denmark or Germany, the UK’s high prices can largely be attributed to their high dependence on wind.
Need I go on.
DisUnited Kingdom
No, you need not go on, my bills confirm it
All the costs not billed on the utility statement are non-the less real and make the electricity cost much higher than admitted.
The only real solution, if you want to reduce emissions from generation, is to replace any “To Be Retired” Coal and Gas facilities with zero emission Nuclear.
Zero Emissions
Dispatchable
Dependable 24/7
Capacity Factor over 90% (Diablo Canyon Unit 1 CF 99.8%)
Longevity (Diablo Canyon operating since 1985 – 40 years)
High density energy 2.2GW facilities on 12 acres (750 acres for security)
Demand will only increase with the transition to electrification of
Manufacturing
Trucking
Bussing
Shipping
Rail
Personal transportation
Home heating
Cooking
Flying (yeah right) aviation will have to remain liquid fueled by hydrocarbon, driving up the cost of fuel and making air travel unaffordable to all but the wealthy
Manufacturing, transport and heating will never be electrified, it simply can’t happen as a practical matter. They’re already struggling to keep the grid from falling apart due to the damage already done by retirement of dispatchable sources in favor of worse-than-useless wind and solar additions.
Cooking may see SOME electrification, but doubt that will be fully electrified either.
When the lights go out, I suggest that all citizens sue the sh*t out of the EPA and vote out every single politician regardless of party. They are all responsible for this mess – oh and be thankful if you are not bending to a new ruler who may speak Chinese or russian. .
A probably voting majority will always vote against your proposals, regardless of conditions.
When the lights go out, we’ll all have much more immediate problems, such as basic survival.
Remember that CO2 emissions don’t matter.
Just need to shut down heavy industry. Send it all to China where they only use blessed carbon.
US does not need to get their hands dirty making steel, cement, aluminium and the plethora of other energy intensive materials.
You forgot food production. Just make us completely dependent on geopolitical adversaries for everything. What could go wrong?
German Federal Audit Office Warns Germany’s Green Energy Transition Is Way Off Track
A damning special report just released by Germany’s Federal Audit Office on the implementation of the Energiewende (transition to green energy) concludes that the transition is lagging far behind its ambitious targets, both in terms of expanding renewable energies and building the necessary infrastructure.
Original version in EN
Well, when the result of the colossally stupid efforts to “transition” is more and more obviously the destruction of their economy, at some point the “efforts” to “transition” are going to grind to a halt simply as a practical matter…
Again and again calling proposed power sources “clean energy” when they most definitely are not “clean” in any reasonable sense of the word.
Clean coal is a label with a specific meaning but applied to the unreliable sources clean is just a blanket lie. Articles like this are not helpful as far as solutions go.
“America’s Leaders Have Taken Us To A Place Where We Could Literally Run Out of Electricity” This has been the political left’s intention all a long, drag America down so they can rule over the ruins.
The left are fellow travelers and have little to do with the problem, which is that soon there won’t be enough reliable electricity to maintain the current economy and life style and there certainly won’t be enough to expand it. Ergo no new electrical connections to homes or businesses will be possible or allowed. Existing electricity suppliers will raise rates without needing to expand infrastructure, a license to print money. An ongoing electrical connection will be the most valuable aspect of a piece of property.
Again, destruction of America and other western society’s energy production/distribution systems, agriculture and manufacturing has been the goal of the political left for decades. Do not give them cover by pretending otherwise. Climate changes, always has and always will. Humans are not causing it and cannot stop it. This is all a lie to drag down high energy, successful society and drive 3/4 of the human race into poverty, starvation and death. All so leftists can rule over what remains.
The success of the US is predicated on the health of the banking industry. Nothing could be more obvious, it’s an item in the Wall Street Journal every day. The leftists don’t have access to the trillions of dollars enpixelated by the Treasury dept. that keeps Larry Fink and his cousins in business. Wall Street will happily finance solar panels, wind turbines, hydrogen production, CO2 sequestration, battery factories, as long as government subsidies exist. Misdiagnosing this situation by focusing on the left as the impetus is an existential fallacy, much more dangerous than the fallacy of CAGW itself.
Wow, sidestepping reality entirely, way to go, buddy.
Maybe every one else on the earth is a leftist except you but the fact is that none of this could be happening if government and business wasn’t on board. As genuine leftist Bertholt Brecht said, “Money, money, that clinking clanking sound that makes the world go round”. Nothing is done unless money changes hands. In the case of “renewable” energy that money is going to leave the hands of the people to be deposited in the accounts of the corporations erecting wind turbines and solar panels and all the other paraphernalia of climate anxiety. None of these corporations are leftist enterprises, they’re hyper-capitalist government cronies.
Attempts to characterize any of the “climate” bullshit as capitalism based are false. Without government interference, no “capitalist” worthy of the title would ever build a “wind farm” or “solar farm.”
The construction of such worse-than-useless things is an organization of government trough feeding, not “capitalism.”
Without government interference, no “capitalist” worthy of the title would ever build a “wind farm” or “solar farm.”
Admittedly, the US government is a socialist, if not leftist, entity but it is the government, at least for the present and issues mandates that are created by its representatives to suit the purposes of the donors to their election finances. While the government regularly interferes with all business activity, in the case of renewable energy it initiates and subsidizes expensive and ineffective research, development and construction by capitalist entities like General Electric, NextEra Energy and Brookfield Renewable Corp., all listed on the NYSE. If the goal of leftists is to destroy American society and western civilization, funneling huge amounts of money to big corporations is a strange strategy.
The only reason those big corporations “invest” in such boondoggles as wind and solar, is to feed at the trough, it is not a function of “capitalism” because absent government mandates, subsidies and tax credits, none of it would be occurring.
Capitalism doesn’t build what doesn’t work, government interference in the market is the cause of all of it.
That should read “OUTCOME of government trough feeding.”
Autouncorrect strikes again.
Now you have moved to denying reality. Exactly how much do you get paid to defend the political left, sweety?
The cheapest, least effective means of denigrating an argument. WUWT should be ashamed to have you as a commenter. You’re an idiot.
You are denying reality, you are the idiot. Did you get your 10% on that comment, too? And 10% of what? Enlighten us, sweety.
Policymakers are clueless that ALL electricity came AFTER the discovery of oil !
ALL electrical generation from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar are ALL built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
Summary: Before the 1800’s none of today’s 6,000 PRODUCTS made from crude oil existed.
https://www.americaoutloud.news/policymakers-are-clueless-that-all-electricity-came-after-the-discovery-of-oil/
The success of human society is perhaps the cause of our future collapse. Once most problems are solved we begin to raise generations of people who have no idea how we got here, and who have no critical thinking skills when they make what are clearly critical decisions about the foundations of society.
Read Gunther Stent’s The Coming of the Golden Age.
Thanks for the recommendation.
This is a good example of ideology rather than science-based conclusions informing political leaders.
____________________________________________________________
When more and more people are thrown out of work,
unemployment results’ Calvin Coolidge
Good grief. All you have to do is look across the ocean. The disaster unfolding in Britain. Germany and Australia is all needed to understand the precipice countries are on to realize the foolishness of this green energy fraud.
Very nice Hailey.
This drives me nuts.
“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission Jason Shaw told the outlet. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”
What do you expect when you force dispatchable, affordable and constant energy to the side and force non dispatchable, expensive and intermittent energy to replace it. Don’t disrespect us with your lies.
Build more nuclear, and hydro and more high-efficiency, low-emission gas-fired generating stations for starters. Throw in a few solar and wind plants as experimental supplementary energy sources, but don’t waste money on them unless major gains in high-capacity battery storage are made. If worse comes to worse, re-activate upgraded coal plants because in the end the availability of consistent electricity will trump the associated emissions, especially since the big polluters have never been too concerned about them in the first place.
We’ve already had enough wind and solar “experiments.” They make the grid less reliable and more expensive. And ironically, more vulnerable to “extreme weather” that according to the climate pseudo-science is supposed to become more frequent and more severe (neither is true, but if you BELIEVE that it is, why would you construct an electric grid more susceptible to being severely damaged by it?!).
It is long past time to relegate wind and solar to remote, off-grid use and get on with building useful, dispatchable power plants.
Who put the Greenies in charge of a system as complex as our electrical grid? All these people do is rule that we need to be Net Zero by some arbitrary date and it is to magically happen? First off it will never happen with todays technology unless it is nuclear or hydrogen.
Second off, it will never happen with hydrogen…. do the maths; the losses are enormous you can’t win against the laws of physics.
Or hydrogen?! Get real – hydrogen is an energy SINK, not an energy source.
And so-called “green hydrogen” is a LIE because there aren’t any windmills or solar panels that are not made without essentially 100% of the energy inputs coming from coal, oil and gas.
CouldWill be worse. Could run out of petroleum and natural gas at the same time. Don’t look now, but they’re disabling everything else to coerce impossible electric.We need an update:
James A. Garfield: “He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.”
Henry Kissinger: “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
Today is is: “Who controls the energy controls the money and, hence, the world.”