CONTRIBUTOR
Considerable portions of the U.S. are facing heightened risks of blackouts over the summer months, according to a new report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).
Most of New England, Texas, the Midwest and the Southwest face “elevated risk” of electricity shortages this summer if demand peaks at levels above normal, according to NERC’s 2024 summer reliability report. While the specific challenges that each region may face this summer differ, several large swaths of the country could have to respond to blackout conditions if solar and wind power fail to produce as much power as expected during periods of tight supply and more extreme summer weather.
“NERC’s latest reliability assessment shows that our electricity grid is becoming increasingly reliant on weather-dependent sources of electricity, leaving one-third of the country at elevated risk of blackouts this summer,” Michelle Bloodworth, CEO of America’s Power, a pro-coal advocacy group, said of the NERC report and its findings. (RELATED: Biden’s Climate Agenda May Jeopardize Grid Reliability, New Report Suggests)
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which covers much of the Midwest, faces higher risks if solar and wind fail to deliver in key scenarios, NERC’s report states.
“MISO is expected to have sufficient resources, including firm imports, for normal summer peak demand. However, it can be challenging for MISO to meet above-normal peak demand if wind and solar resource output is lower than expected,” NERC’s report reads. “Wind generator performance during periods of high demand is a key factor in determining whether there is sufficient electricity supply on the system or if external (non-firm) supply assistance is required to maintain reliability.”
The report issued a similar warning about the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region, which covers nearly all of Texas. ERCOT narrowly avoided blackouts in the summer of 2023, when a prolonged heat wave set in over the state.
“As a result of continued vigorous growth in both loads and solar and wind resources, there is a risk of emergency conditions in the summer evening hours when solar generation begins to ramp down. Contributing to the elevated risk is a potential need, under certain grid conditions, to limit power transfers from South Texas into the San Antonio region,” the report states. “These grid conditions can occur when demand is high and wind and solar output is low in specific areas, straining the transmission system and necessitating South Texas generation curtailments and potential firm load shedding to avoid cascading outages.”
NERC has previously warned that huge slices of the country face higher risks of blackouts in more extreme seasonal conditions.
The Biden administration has spent and regulated aggressively to push the American power grid away from fossil fuels and toward intermittent generation from sources like solar and wind. Electricity demand is also projected to grow rapidly in the coming years, due in large part to Biden administration policies driving electric vehicle (EV) adoption, building electrification and new semiconductor manufacturing facilities, according to Grid Strategies LLC, a power sector consultancy.
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Gosh, who could have foreseen that if you rely on windmills and solar power the wind might not blow and the sun may not always shine when you need it? Colour me surprised!
Can you say dunkelflaute?
Haasenpfeffer?
Weather dependent sources are just that, weather dependent.
If the power grid collapses Trump wins ! and the red wave wave washes over America
All of their own making they must be sh#$ing bricks But they will get what they deserve a clean out is well overdue # sack the lot
Trump is a long shot to win, Democrats are going to do everything they did in 2020 and what ever they’ve come up with since then.
Wisconsin Watch
March 22nd, 2024
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers on Thursday vetoed Republican proposals that would have allowed election observers to get closer to poll workers and required a new post-election audit while signing a bill increasing the penalty for assaulting an election official.
The court case isn’t over yet
I hope you’re right. No court, particularly SCOTUS, wants to get any where near election fraud after the fact. If the Republicans really want to keep the Democrats from stealing elections, they need to legally challenge the latter’s transparent attempts to reduce electoral integrity before the fact.
Yes before the fact is really the only effect way. In most cases there is insufficient time after the election to correct illegal actions before the inauguration.
You are correct sir! Trump and the Republicans allowed Democrats to illegally change voting procedures in many states in 2020. They didn’t make enough challenges before the election. The RNC and the state Republican parties share the blame.
Given that the WSC is now in the hands of a committed activist Democrat majority the outcome is not in doubt.
Not counting the Second Coming, Trump is our only hope of saving America from total tyranny.
The second coming didn’t check the train schedule last time, nor at any previous time.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Depends on how many mail-in votes they need to steal the election.
Whether America’s grid collapses or not is wholly dependent on the ratio of reliable generation to weather dependent generation AND the available amount of reliable reserves when that weather dependent generation finds unfavorable summer weather
A hot high-pressure system with little wind at night won’t generate much wind and solar electricity.
Our politicians should not have put us in the position of being dependent on undependable windmills and solar.
The problem is obvious: There is too much unreliable windmill and solar generation attached to our grids.
The way to fix the problem is to reduce the number of unreliable windmill and solar generators and replace them with reliable power generation.
Just need a few more hail storms to get that done. Gaia will take care of us!
The grid won’t collapse because they’ll keep raising the price until people stop using it.
Of course, its called “rationing”, and that was the plan a long time ago. Get to the point where only the wealthy and the subsidized (favored voting demographic) can get power.
The side effect of this is that heavy industry is priced out of the market and is further uncompetitive with foreign manufacturing. Win-Win for the Destroyers.
When importing tens of millions of illiterate and economically destitute people into a country, and then destroy the only unskilled/low-skill jobs that industry can provide, then you get the end-game of civil unrest, violence and chaos.
As you may have noticed the preferred expression of the frustrated immigrant class is arson.
arson and stabbing people- they prefer knives, cheaper and easy to hide
Wrong. While I hate EVs, they could be a solution to intermittent power generation. EVs with two-way power flow could provide power when the grid is running short of power. The Ford 150 lightening already has that capability. GM is committed to offering that capability on all of its electric vehicles starting in 2025. The Toyota Prius became the back up generator after the Fukushima disaster. I am sure the pro-EV crowd will soon cite that as a reason for going all electric.
Don’t grids supply AC electricity?
So if drawing from a DC source such as an EV battery, wouldn’t users also require an inverter to convert DC to AC?
Ford says you do –
To use Home Power Management (and Intelligent Backup Power), in addition to the Ford F-150 Lightning vehicle, you will need the following hardware:
Important: Professional installation is required.
Why is the Home Integration System required?
The Home Integration System is required to enable the Bi-Directional Power transfer feature between your F-150 Lightning and your home. The Home Integration System includes an inverter that transforms the Direct Current (DC) electricity stored in your vehicle’s battery into the Alternating Current (AC) electricity that is used within your home.
People also ask
What is typical power inverter efficiency?
The efficiency of the inverter generally ranges from 95 to 98%. The efficiency may vary depending on the DC input power and voltage.
As low as 80% but that is not typical.
What do you mean ‘Wrong’? The only wrong thing I see is that you always misspell LIGHTNING.
The price rationing that JZ referenced is already occurring. Nothing ‘Wrong’ about that.
Who would in their right mind would permit the grid to suck power from their EV’s batteries?
Do they get credit for the electricity being taken out of the batter? What about wear and tear on the batteries? These batteries have a limited number of charge/discharge cycles before they wear out.
Beyond that, the peak summer demand occurs in the late afternoon when EVs are either in the employers parking lots, or they just arrived home and need charging.
If you do the basic arithmetic you’ll find that discharging EV batteries which on average will be half full offers only a limited amount of energy, and they then need to be recharged consuming 25%+ more compared with the discharge. It offers no real solution to the problem of grid intermittency and more persistent low renewables output. For the UK the Royal Society calculates over 100TWh of storage would be required. We have about 30 million vehicles: each might perhaps provide 20kWh of grid support being generous, which is just 600GWh of storage. Not even 1% of what is needed.
I agree with you about the roundtrip losses being very wasteful, and I totally reject the need for reducing CO2 emissions in the first place. But I don’t think the idea is to feed back into the grid to directly support other consumers to ‘save the planet’ out of the goodness of your heart.
Isn’t it more like you choose to run your house off your car or truck battery because your smart meter is programmed to do so if possible when exorbitant peak pricing is in effect?
Without both peak pricing and smart meters and probably also smart appliances to automate the process, it would never ‘make sense’. (Again, ignoring that the whole net zero exercise makes zero sense).
In the scenario that they can disincentivize using grid power through excessive pricing, it would result in lots of demand shedding. If for example, the cost spikes to $1000/kW-hr and most people program their smart meter to use the car battery at $10/KW-hr, then the grid might get by on hydro and nuclear baseload. And of course a lot of inconvenience would result. It’s a financial blackout without the actual blackout. Price rationing. The rich just pay, the poor go without.
However, and I’ll just repeat my caveat a third time, I am not advocating this! But if in some distant future where we’ve depleted fossil fuels, uranium, thorium, and fusion is still only 15-40 years in future as it always has been and always will be, if only weather-dependent power is available, then variable pricing and smart appliances would be a way to go.
Your climate control would allow ambient temperature to warm up in summer or get chilly in winter if the variable power price is too high. Your smart refrigerator would shift to very low power, allowing temperature to creep up within safe limits. Your dishwasher would pause mid-cycle along with your clothes washer and dryer. Your oven might allow the temperature to drop to a bare minimum and adjust the cooking time for you. The same smart appliances might intentionally overshoot when the power price becomes cheap or even negative, for example running the A/C full blast and making things a bit chilly. All the while your wifi, computer, and your LED lighting stays on in the room where you’re present.
From the grid point of view it makes no difference whether you supply your neighbour or use power from your vehicle yourself. In a renewables plus storage grid there is always either a surplus or deficit of generation against demand. When there is a surplus you have the option to store the surplus (or at least some of it) but the amount that is effectively added to the store is what can be redelivered – i.e. less the round trip loss. When there is a deficit you must draw down the store. If you do not, you are rationing supply, not meeting demand. It should be obvious in deficit periods that it makes no sense to run down part of the store to replenish another part (yet this is precisely what the CCC analyses effectively assume).
Now you may argue that you can run your washing machine later, but if you do that you are increasing demand later above what it would have been, so the subsequent surplus is smaller or the deficit larger. When your washing machine finally completes its cycle the amount in storage is the same as it would have been had storage been used to run it in the first place. You defer the reduction in storage briefly.
The real problem is that if you have a persistent long term average shortfall in supply you will run down your storage however you time shuffle demand in the very short term. That long term average shortfall period can stretch into years rather than just weeks, which is what the Royal Society finally realised, and what I modelled back in about 2018. You can reduce the risks by indulging in large scale overgeneration, with associated curtailment (your store will be full, and it will not be economic to capture all overgeneration anyway). Do that and the cost rises to pay for it all.
If there really is a persistent long term deficit then of course you’d be correct. The fundamental problem is to shift demand to follow supply instead of the normal process of matching generation to follow demand.
The reality in an overbuilt system would be that there would be periods of severe shortage and periods of severe excess. The total supply can be increased by overbuilding. The difficult bit is to shed the load when in deficit and absorb the excess usefully when the wind blows strongly at 2am.
What you’re leaving out is the need for financial incentives. The price signal can perform near miracles. Given negative pricing on surplus power I guarantee some entrepreneurs will find a way to soak up excess power to do useful work.
Given cripplingly high costs when supply is too low, I guarantee that smart appliances could be designed to defer some consumption to the times when you’re being paid to take excess power off the grid. Consider a hybrid refrigerator/icebox that produces ice when power is free then lets the ice melt to maintain temperature when power is expensive.
To make that work in heavy industry is a totally different ball of wax, though. A certain amount of baseload must exist to support that.
“which on average will be half full”
sez who?
If you charge your battery to 80% say (to keep its life) and let it run down to 20% then the average charge between charges will be 50% assuming reasonably even usage. If you have a few thousand people doing this, then they won’t all be at 20% simultaneously in normal usage. The instantaneous average will be around 50% across all of them. Some events may help to synchronise charging demand – cheap power for instance, but if that is available every night there is no reason to charge the same night as your neighbour. Running down batteries to supply V2G would of course require a greater demand afterwards.
This behaviour is actually reflected in the volumes in storage at filling stations which average close to 50%, and the remarkably even pattern of vehicle refuelling with only a slight dip at the weekend and a slight increase ahead of the weekend. Holidays do give rise to extra demand.
Worth pointing out that what happens if a shortage is anticipated (e.g. for motor fuel a tanker driver strike is announced) is that everyone tries to fill up, which creates a shortage anyway, and much sooner. Weather forecasts will allow people to anticipate a power shortage, so they will fill up their EVs and run the washing machine even though they only have a part load (requiring another load later), preventing centralised storage from being added to. EV owners will be reluctant to connect their cars to the grid for it to discharge them partially, preferring to keep mobile as long as possible.
-1 fr starting a post with bold “Wrong.“
“The Toyota Prius became the back up generator after the Fukushima disaster.”
Speaking of that, I would consider buying a used EV solely as a backup generator for my house. I could park it away from the house, so if it spontaneously combusts, it won’t burn my house down. And the way things are going in the EV market, I can probably get a used EV pretty cheap, maybe cheaper than a Generac system..
Some solution. Sacrifice mobility to ever so briefly keep the lights on.
From the NERC website:
”NERC mission is to assure effective and efficient reduction of risks to the reliability and security of the grid.” A warning report is neither.
”NERC develops and enforces reliability standards.” If NERC seriously enforced reliability standards, it would not have allowed grid renewable penetration to continue to increase.
Warning about the obvious means NERC isn’t serious.
Good point, but I’m certain that ‘reliability and security’ are also common goals for FERC, the Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) and all of the state and local regulatory commissions. Hence, this all becomes a ‘so what’ exercise when an ignorant electorate reliably votes for Leftists who take an ‘all of government’ approach to ‘save’ them from Climate Change.
”NERC mission is to assure effective and efficient reduction of risks to the reliability and security of the grid.” A warning report is neither.”
The solution is to reduce the amount of unreliable windmill and solar power generation on the grids, and replace them with reliable power generation.
This is the only way for NERC to accomplish its mission.
But remember, this is all for your own good…
Reducing your standard of living is always for your own good. That’s because there is no other way to spin it before it happens.
I have a backup generator that runs on natural gas. It probably produces more CO2 per KWH than the
fossil fuel plants the local utility runs.But it keeps the lights on when DTE doesn’t.
You think you can get gas when the grid is down?
Yes when I install one it’ll be propane with a big honking tank…
Not one more solar or wind farm should be hooked up to the grid. No energy source with such low output compared to nameplate should ever be connected to the grid. The grid is too important for that kind of crap shoot. All existing wind and solar generators should be withdrawn from the grid. Start a program to immediately begin building new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Update and improve existing fossil fuel and nuclear generators. If a plant isn’t worth updating then replace it with a new fossil fuel or nuclear plant. This is just common sense.
Preaching to the choir?
Alleluia!
And it shall rain for ever and ever.
“Not one more solar or wind farm should be hooked up to the grid.”
That’s my attitude, too.
Windmills and solar can’t do the job, as should be obvious to everyone by now, and are only economically viable because crazy politicians pay taxpayer money to them.
Let’s just stop all government subsidies to windmills and solar, and they will go away on their own. We’ll never hear from them again.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
You mean “only APPEAR economically viable.”
Absent the government’s foot on the scale, no utility would buy the haphazard garbage power they occasionally produce.
Last summer, the area electric utilities asked people to not use major appliances or charge electric vehicles during peak times. Missouri state law changed and many of those power companies are now charging time-based rates. Summer hasn’t hit yet and already many people are complaining about the large increases in their bills.
The Green wackies would love to see the grid crater…remember, these are the same people who want to “cull” a few billion of us. A grid failure would be a workable start.
Regulators and policy makers are never held accountable.
It should be criminal to mandate sporadic/unreliable electric energy sources!
Not hard.
Regulators, legislators, President, Governors—Admit your error and require continuously available on-site make-up capacity for weather/sun dependent generators— so they can be reliable and predictable electric sources for our precious, essential grid.
There–no inevitable blackouts acceptable.
Prevent life-threatening, job destroying blackouts.
Just DO IT!
“It should be criminal to mandate sporadic/unreliable electric energy sources!”
Yes, it should.
Our alarmist politicians have become detached from reality and are making very bad decisions as a result.
Did the Red state Blue state labels start in 2012 or do they go way back?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states
“Starting with the 2000 United States presidential election, the terms “red state” and “blue state” have referred to U.S. states whose voters vote predominantly for one party — the Republican Party in red states and the Democratic Party in blue states — in presidential and other statewide elections.”
end excerpt
The key word here is “:could”, but it might also be “maybe not”, but the alarmists are never at a loss to to dish up a worst case scenario, and the that’s the reason they’re consistently ignored.
Ensuring black outs is the whole point. They will be the direct result of extreme weather caused by human induced climate change not corrupt legislators.
Well, it’s not like we weren’t warned. This effing Greenie whack BS is gonna get people killed and the economy-what’s left of it-trashed.