From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Hugh Sharman
Major US grid operators are raising the alarm about the looming capacity crunch.
Power has the story:
“Six major U.S. grid operators have raised a unified alarm about an impending capacity crunch, warning that the pace and scale of explosive demand—including from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification—poses a precarious misalignment with accelerating generator retirements and transmission constraints.
At a March 25 hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, the nation’s top grid officials testified that the U.S. power system is under mounting strain—and that without urgent structural reforms, the ability to maintain reliable electric service could falter. Their message was unusually direct: demand is accelerating, supply is lagging, and current tools may not be enough to bridge the gap.
Read the full story here.
All of the ten regional grids seem to be facing the same problems of increasing demand and closure of dispatchable capacity. ERCOT, for instance, who run the grid in Texas, forecast that peak demand will increase from 86 GW to 106 GW by 2030.
PJM in the Mid-Atlantic and Mid West anticipate a rise in peak demand of 47% in the next 15 years, and California’s CAISO are looking at an increase of 33% in the next ten years.
The US still relies on gas and coal for half of its power:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_generation_mix/US48/US48
And just as in this country, the US is wholly reliant on gas to fill the gap when demand surges or wind and solar output falls:
Note that in this seven day period alone, wind output ranged from 32 GW to 90 GW. This gives the lie to the claim that the wind is always blowing somewhere. In 2023 the US had wind capacity of 148 GW, running at an average of 33%, so that 32 GW suggests utilisation of about 20%. No doubt there will be weeks when it is much less still.
Solar power meanwhile is little more than an irrelevance.
Taking a closer look at Texas, we find that coal power capacity has dropped by 7.5 GW in the last decade, partly offset by an increase of 4.3 GW of gas. However consumption per capita has grown by 12% in the same period:
Texas needed most of that gas power during February’s cold snap, when wind and solar power dropped away:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64764
The same situation is being played out across the country. Even in sunny California they need gas to fire up to meet demand when the sun goes down both in summer and in winter. (Note the barely measurable contribution from battery storage.)
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/regional/REG-CAL
The US grid has been neglected for many years now, all in the naive belief that reliable coal and gas generation can be replaced with wind and solar. This has been exacerbated by anti fossil fuel regulations, which have prematurely shut down coal plants and discouraged investment in new gas plant.
The looming crunch may be even worse than the grid operators think.
Obiden did not care bupkis about reliability of the grid, and it shows. They did want to push wind and solar, and disfavor coal and gas.
Unfortunately, undoing that sort of mischief will take legislation, and enough Democrats are either sucking up to True Believers, or are True Believers themselves to block any change.
You can afford not to care much when you have 1000s of gallons of propane in a tank for your generator.
This is a problem that is easily fixed with gas, coal, hydro and nuclear electric generation.
Easily, but not quickly. There are logistics problems when virtually everyone wants new power plants at the same time.
I keep saying.. siting these power plants, especially the SMRs if they are allowed to be developed, seems to me to be a necessary part of the solution set.
Maybe there aren’t any feasible solutions to this problem that include different sizes and placement of these SMRs around our densest use areas, but off the top of my head, I’d think that when you plug in all of the resources and constraints and run an optimization routine, we’d likely be surprised what these SMRs could do to both the costs and speed of implementation if we sited them intelligently and… included both the cost of the grid upgrades and power plant construction into the equations.
You will be amazed how fast this happens. Only roadblock is environistas filing frivolous lawsuits. That shit is coming to a screeching halt. Long past time to aggressively go after those enemies of the human race.
for the love of god, why is no one listening to these guys. grid operators are the canary in the coal mine.
There are too many people, many in positions of power, who’s paychecks rely on “these guys” being ignored.
For the most part ‘these guys’ supervise the planning and operation of the grid, which consists of transmission systems that are typically owned and operated by public utilities. The latter, of course, are figuratively in thrall to their respective state regulatory commissions, too many of which are batshit crazy in their opposition to conventional generation resources.
You have hit the nail on the head. The grid operators and public utilities have to do what the regulators and state officials want them to do. Most of the PJM territory is run by democrats. They want lots of wind and solar and no coal.
The grid operators have been sounding the alarm for a long time. It’s just that nobody is listening.
Adding wind and solar to the grid is the problem.
Removing wind and solar from the grid is the solution.
Retiring reliable electricity generation for unreliable wind and solar is a really stupid idea, and now we start to see the consequences in higher electricity prices and unreliable electric grids.
CO2 isn’t the problem. CO2-phobes are the problem.
“Removing wind and solar from the grid is the solution.” Oh, the lawyers will love that. And if wind plus solar plus batteries are to be removed from the grid, we’d better get going on building new coal, gas and nuclear generators, plus increasing the transmission capacity. Increased demand is coming real soon now.
And because that increased demand can’t be met- the price for electricity will skyrocket, exactly as President Obama declared years ago. We’ve all seen that video.
Presumably they don’t have the sort of well-paid, full-time PR staff the renewables industry has, or the budget to run a communications strategy to compete with them.
In many cases, the individual states are in charge of the power supply since they control the purse strings. In my home state of Virginia, for example, there is a law on the books interestingly called the “Virginia Clean Economy Act” that mandates 100% renewables in the state by 2050. (The biggest utility, Dominion Energy, has a 2045 deadline.) Democrats have a slight majority of both houses of the legislature, so the law is unlikely to change anytime soon.
The utilities are being squeezed between that law and the actions of the federal government. There are a few off-ramps in the law, but they require various risky approvals by the powers-that-be.
It’s not the end of the beginning and if not corrected, it is definitely the beginning of the end of America.
Greenland for data/AI centers. Just open the widows and voila cool air.
For water-cooled high capacity CPU’s, lots of near-freezing cold water from melting glaciers too!
Maybe. (unless I missed your sarc. then … nevermind). It’s much closer to our friends in Russia and you have to get the power in (hydrothermal? nuke?) and the data out. As our other friends in the Euro area are learning, cables can be cut. UK ramping up cable monitoring and security and discovering interesting new Russian and Chinese toys near their cables. Or like Norway, your neighbors can just get tired of you mooching their resources and cut you off. We still don’t know, or they aren’t telling us, how many non-friendlies were let in by the biden admin, but probably still easier to protect critical infrastructure within the lower 48 boundary.
Better to stop playing at “green” energy, and build more nuke power and new ultra super critical steam plants fired by coal in the contiguous US
‘As our other friends in the Euro area are learning, cables can be cut.’
Er, ok, maybe we could have a quiet word with the people who cut them.
Not just US most developed countries that tried the net zero path are struggling. In Australia we have the stupid situation the government is giving us free credits on power bills as relief on high cost power… … you can’t keep that up forever.
Kemi Badenoch, Conservative Party (centre-right) leader in the UK has said it is Impossible for the UK to meet its net zero target by 2050. OK, that’s a big step forward, but she still has a long way to go because she still won’t abandon the Net Zero nonsense.
She’s an idiot.
Youse guys just need to try harder on this Net Zero stuff. But not to worry, we’ll be right behind youse once our sainted Left figures out how to defenestrate Trump.
It won’t be for lack of trying, will it.
Democrats are just anti-Trump. Whatever he is for, they are against.
Democrats are governed by emotion, not reason. And this last Trump presidential victory has driven the Democrats off the Deep End. They aren’t rational. They are now at a 21 percent approval rating, the lowest in their history. And the reason is obvious: They are stark-raving mad.
The Democrats are anti-Trump which makes them anti-American.
The Democrats are anti-American which makes them anti-Trump.
Trump still acts and thinks like he did when he was a Democrat.
Yes, Trump has been consistent in his positions all his life. He’s been against other nations imposing tariffs on the United States for decades.
Btw, I’m a registered Democrat. I registered Democrat because when I turned 18, most political offices in Oklahoma were held by conservative Democrats.
But I’ve never supported the radical Democrat position and have never voted for a radical Democrat.
So are you going to impugn me, too, for being a registered Democrat, like you do Trump. Are you going to insinuate that I support radical Democrat ideas, the way you do Trump?
You would be wrong on both counts.
She must be related to Boris Badenoff
I’ve seen her referred to asKemi Badenough.
That settles the argument?
You’d be surprised the number of leftists who do believe, you can keep that up forever.
I have nothing but contempt for these grid operators. They would have known for years that the crunch was coming, and these lily-livered wimps said nothing until Donald Trump made it safe for them to speak. OK, Joe Biden’s lot made their environment so toxic that it was tough to speak out, but they could have spoken out together. If six of them can get together and speak out now, they could have spoken out before.
Yes, the power utility CEO’s are both corrupt and also cowards. On the other hand, during Biden’s regime, if you weren’t sitting at the table, you were on the menu.
An unfortunately true statement
It has been this way forever. Now, though, the deregulated and decentralized system is such that no one is responsible for keeping the lights on. Electricity is a commodity, not a service.
Don’t confuse the utility CEOs (generation in the main) with the Independent System Operators (ISOs – transmission, in the main).
Most all the major generators happily accepted huge government subsides to install expensive wind/solar capacity. Of course since they’re guaranteed a profit, increased costs mean increased profits. I think they knew full well that the unreliables would eventually destabilize their grids, but it was still an attractive trade-off. Now they can look forward to another round of adding expensive reliable dispatchable generation (nuclear, gas, coal) to meet future demand and restabilize the grid. Oh, and the increased costs plus guaranteed profits will be paid by the consumers.
This is not entirely true for PJM. They were complaining during Biden and maybe as far back as Trump I. Specifically, they were warning about the closing of several coal plants in Maryland, due to idiot politicians and Sierra Club lawfare, and the need for reliable replacement power. Maryland, which seemed to think offshore wind was the answer, has somewhat come to it’s senses and just passed legislation requiring requests for reliable power be solicited by the state (including gas).
I suspect it simply comes down to budgets, they just don’t have the resources to take on the wind/solar shills when the entire renewables industry depends upon the public believing that it’s possible to power a 21st century economy with 12th century technology.
Load, demand, capacity, and reserves are pretty simple to figure out. Somehow we’ve just been speeding along towards the painting of the green energy future of tomorrow painted on the rock wall in the road like Wiley E Coyote in a Tesla S.
Paradigm lost
Paradise has yet to be gained
Increased UK defence spending
The Ministry of Defence is hiring an ‘Army Climate Change and Sustainability Officer’
https://order-order.com/2025/04/08/ministry-of-defence-hiring-army-climate-change-officer-for-36530/
Well they need somebody to make sure the electric tanks can operate when needed 🙂
You mean the UK military didn’t have a climate change officer until now?
Somebody was falling down on the job.
It’s too bad the UK military doesn’t have a man running it like U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegspeth, who literally scoffs at climate change. There is no climate change officer in the U.S. military.
There shouldn’t be one in the UK military, either. Entertaining fantasies like CO2-caused climate change is counterproductive to defending one’s nation. The military needs to focus on reality to be successful.
The UK doesn’t need a climate change officer in the military. They have King Charles to push for climate change policies government wide.
Good point!
Advocates of fractal computing technology claim their approach to building computational architectures reduces power demand for data centers to a small fraction of what current SQL-based data center technologies consume. If their claims are credible, and if fractal computing technology becomes widely adopted, then an explosion of power demand from data centers won’t happen.
Addressing electrical infrastructure shortfalls is a long lead problem. Betting on an unproven technology to avoid action now is exceptionally risky, IMHO too risky given the consequences of fractal failure.
Tim, an argument is being made by advocates of fractal computing that the additional power needed to support a quick expansion of SQL-based data center capacity simply won’t be there when the time comes it is needed.
Their marketing strategy assumes that when the big power crunch comes to pass, they will be the ones who supply the computing technology needed for new data centers to get past the power availability limitation.
And if fractal computing fails to supplant traditional SQL-based computing? Well, anyone pursuing a disruptive technology pays their money and takes their chances.
Agreed, I’m all for letting the market sort it out.
What about “quantum computing” . . . with its promise to require only a single electron (OK, maybe a total of three to provide statistical error correction) to represent a single bit of information?
/sarc
The fractal architecture people have applications which are now in production operation. The biggest question I ask about fractal has to do with how well these applications handle heavy-duty concurrency; i.e., when a lot of data updating and a lot of data reporting is happening all at the same instant in time inside of a time-critical environment. I have not seen much useful discussion about that aspect of fractal computing on the Net.
It looks like most of those generation figures were for existing electricity usage only. Electricity Generation is only a small portion of our FF energy demand, it’s also used for Transportation, Heating, Cooking, Shipping and Air Travel (the Lion’s share of FF energy usage). Converting these energy requirements into Electricity will increase Electric Demand some 400+%, something neither Wind nor Solar can accommodate and something current levels of mining too will not allow.
Why is battery storage listed as a power source? Seems like parking garage listed as an auto manufacturer.
Ditto pumped storage. Seems like they should allocate the energy so stored in these ‘sources’ to their respective ‘prime movers’.
Along the way data centers are sopping up all the affordable power in those remaining corners of the country. That power would have come in handy with re-shoring of goods manufacturing and competitive jobs. Oh well, the U.S. never had anything other than grade F for energy policy anyway.
Trump is encouraging Data Centers to build their own, stand-alone electricity production.
He says the EPA is streamlining the process from years for approval, down to months.
The only practical solution is adding CCGT. Is about twice as fast to bring on line, and less expensive than next best UHE supercritical coal. Nuclear takes too long and presently costs too much.
Yep. In November 2024 the UK experienced an extended period of 5 days of dunkelflaute and the only thing that prevented widespread blackouts was CCGT.
Gas is still ~30% of our annual generation, so CCGT prevents blackouts every day.
Regarding the above article’s rightfully-noted concerns, actions by US President Trump in the last week have overtaken these. The international trade wars he has initiated and intends to fully prosecute will likely decrease US (indeed world) demands on electrical power for at least two years into the future.
This comment is not meant to detract from Paul Homewood’s article, which in his typical style is extremely well-written, concise, and filled with excellent referenced data!
There is no question that the US should take this opportunity to upgrade its electrical distribution grids . . . if only it had the money to do so!
“Regarding the above article’s rightfully-noted concerns, actions by US President Trump in the last week have overtaken these. The international trade wars he has initiated and intends to fully prosecute will likely decrease US (indeed world) demands on electrical power for at least two years into the future.”
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
There are going to be a lot of people who are predicting disaster over Trump’s tariff gambit, eating crow, before it’s all over.
The Stock Market is in the green today, and not one deal has been finalized yet.
Trump is just trying to fix the world all at once, and it’s a little too much for some people to take in.
I, for one, don’t appreciate Donald Trump playing games of “cards” (hint: Zelenskyy meeting reference) or chess (your reference to “gambit”) risking the US economy and the US citizens’ retirement savings, let alone world economies.
Hmmmm . . . whatever happened to “America first”? . . . and one can observe that the world’s reaction to his “fixing” via a trade war is pretty much along its similar reactions to Trump declaring that (a) Canada should be our 51st state, and (b) that the US must control/own Greenland, d@mn what Denmark has to say about the matter!
BTW, as of the time of this updated post (10:46 am Pacific time), the NYSE is in negative trading since market open and the DJIA and S&P 500 are nosediving toward negative territory for yet another day. It is foolish to look at any moment, even few days, as an indication of the “wisdom” of Administration policies.
Wall Street is worried that their investments in companies that import most of their product will cease to perform as they have with production moved overseas. It will be difficult to pick new winners as production moves back to the U.S. They are retrenching by selling possible losers. A correction is also going on. Don’t be a fear monger. It will work out.
It would take more than 5 years to move android production to the US. The supply chains for all the parts are in Asia.
Plus, who in the US has their goal to work on a manufacturing assembly line?
Not as many as those currently working on assembly line for American companies overseas, I’d bet.
I would say that Donald Trump is trying to fix America’s relationship with the rest of the world all at once, not that he is trying to fix the world all at once. With Marxists entrenched in power in so many places, and with every Marxist doing everything they possibly can to make Donald Trump fail, that is still a big ask.
As for the stockmarket, there is nothing the stockmarket likes more than an over-spending government. Counter-intuitively, the stockmarket can rise with incompetent government and fall with competent government.
Trump wants to lower the income tax rates of the rich and replace the money the taxing of the rich brought in with tariff revenue that the poor and middle-class will mostly pay, since they are the main consumers of the cheap goods made overseas.
“Trump wants to lower the income tax rates of the rich”
Here’s what Trump wants: He wants his previous temporary tax cuts made permanent. In other words, tax cuts that are already in effect, will stay in effect. Doing this does not put one extra penny in the pockets of the rich. Not doing this would raise taxes on every taxpayer by over four TRILLION dollars.
Trump also wants to lower taxes on tips, and on social security, and on overtime work. None of these tax cuts will benefit the rich.
You are about as misinformed as it gets. Or you are a propagandist. I haven’t figured out which yet.
The government didn’t want the economy to fall into recession so it did extra spending during the pandemic.
You got something right for once.
. . . thereby postponing the ultimate day-of-reckoning and worsening its ultimate devastation.
Federal debt is now at $36.7 TRILLION and rising at a rate of about $3 million every minute, or about $1.5 TRILLION per year..
Anyone really think that the US will tackle its growing debt via increased tariffs (a BIG claim from the current mis-Administration)? Here, from https://www.bankrate.com/taxes/trump-tariffs-explained :
“The first Trump administration collected $89.1 billion in tariffs, according to estimates from the Tax Foundation. The Biden administration — which maintained most of Trump’s levies and slapped additional ones on items from China — collected almost double that amount ($144.3 billion). Still, over the past 70 years, tariffs have never accounted for more than 2 percent of total federal revenue, according to the Congressional Research Service.”
In fiscal year 2024, the U.S. federal government collected approximately $4.9 trillion in revenue (https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/government-revenue ). So if we optimistically assume Trump’s trade war will triple income from tariffs, from 2% to 6%, of all revenue, that will only amount to about 0.04*4.9 = $0.196 trillion = $196 billion in additional revenue, based on sustaining the same level of foreign imports in the face of steeply increased tariffs on 2025 imports to the US (not at all likely).
So, best case possible, the Trump Trade Wars would only offset 0.196/1.5 = 13% of the current annual growth rate in the US federal debt. IOW, the trade wars will do NOTHING to reduce the Federal debt.
You can choose to believe Donald Trump’s lies or you can believe the straightforward math and documented history.
Well, Trump says that as of today, the United States External Revenue Service is collecting two Billion dollars a day in tariff payments.
So 2 X 365 = 730 billion dollars per year. That’s almost as much as the U.S. pays to service its national interest payments.
And that figure is just the 10 percent Trump is charging now, subject to change.
Of course, the way to retire the debt is to have a booming economy, which Trump is going to produce in short order.
During Trump’s first term, he imposed tariffs on China that brought in billions of dollars. Trump famously said: Other presidents hadn’t got 10 cents from China.
China retaliated against Trump’s tariffs by cutting back on farm products bought from the United States. Trump fixed that little problem by taking 23 billion dollars from Chinese tariffs and giving it to the farmers to make up for their lost income. Thank you very much!
So if Trump had to produce 23 billion dollars for the farmers today, it would take him about 12 days, at two billion dollars per day. to acquire that amount from the tariffs he is currently collecting.
The economy is going to boom. Biden harmed the economy very badly and every week we see more employees laid off and companies declaring bankruptcy. This tells us that Biden’s stupid economic policies have slowed the United States economy.
How much? We don’t know. But Trump’s efforts may allow us to avoid a recession altogether, with his reduction of regulations and his bringing in something like seven TRILLION dollars in investments.
By the time Trump’s term is over, the United States economy will be booming like nobody has ever seen before.
Your first—and by far, biggest—mistake is believing what Trump says has any semblance of truth.
You second mistake was not bothering to do a quick Web search, requiring only about one minute or so, to independently investigate the matter.
Your third mistake was not reading—more likely, not understanding—the facts I presented in my post above to which you commented.
Here, I’ll try again to help you out:
Based on the previously cited and referenced fact that in fiscal year 2024, the U.S. federal government collected approximately $4.9 trillion in revenue, Trump’s/your assertion of a total of $730 billion coming into the Treasury just from tariffs on imports to the US would amount to 0.73/4.9 = 0.15, equivalent to a whopping 15% of all annual US revenue.
However, the current Trump administration itself, via this US Treasury website:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/government-revenue/
states that the current revenue stream from “customs duties” (aka tariffs) is about $85 billion or 1.87% of total U.S. Federal Government revenue.
So, this current Treasury data is consistent with my previously cited and referenced quote from bankrate.com: “Still, over the past 70 years, tariffs have never accounted for more than 2 percent of total federal revenue, according to the Congressional Research Service.”
[note that this statement is verified over at least the period from 2015 to 2024 by an interactive chart presented at the above-cited fiscaldata.treasury.gov website]
See the difference between what Trump says and what is true?
With this as a start, I need not spend any additional time responding to the rest of your, err, comments.
Hmmmm . . . you have an interesting take on Marxism and its extent in today’s world.
According to author Wouter Stekelenburg:
“Typically, Marxists see free trade as a way to pit domestic workers against foreign workers. For example, the rising living standards of western workers from 1850 on, is explained as a bribe to favor capitalism, which is paid with the gains from exploiting workers in colonies and developing countries. That makes international trade an obstacle to international communism, and hence something Marxists oppose.”
[my bold emphasis added]
It is quite funny that you believe “Marxists in power” would ever condone their countries being involved in international trade at all, with or without tariffs, with or without a trade balance with the US . . . to say nothing of them wanting “to make Donald Trump fail”.
“It is quite funny that you believe “Marxists in power” would ever condone their countries being involved in international trade at all”
Really? Russia and China are not marxist? Russia and China don’t participate in international trade?
And some idiot gave you an upvote for you statement.
Why don’t you hurl all of your ad hominem attacks to me instead of some unknown reader who exercises his/her right to upvote or downvote on any WUWT comment?
And FYI, both Russia and PRC are most correctly characterized as Marxist-Leninist states* . . . and that is in name only.
Marx critiqued the capitalist system’s wage structure, arguing that it leads to exploitation of workers and the creation of surplus value that benefits the bourgeoisie.
Does anyone seriously believe that all workers in either Russia or China are paid exactly the same wage . . . that those countries don’t have wage structures?
Moreover, what’s all this talk about goods from Russia and China being cheaper than the US due to differences in the cost of labor between those countries??? True Marxists should be finding ways to make sure their countries’ uniform hourly labor wage (hah!) at least matched the minimum wage in the US, that is if they wanted to trade with the US while staying true to Marxism.
With their choices to participate in international trade (with the acceptance that the working classes in different nations don’t have equal pay, let alone equal living standards), they are intentionally violating one of the fundamental principles of Marxism.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party
“I, for one, don’t appreciate Donald Trump playing games of “cards” (hint: Zelenskyy meeting reference) or chess (your reference to “gambit”) risking the US economy and the US citizens’ retirement savings, let alone world economies.”
That’s right, you don’t have an appreciation for it. My bet is Trump is smarter than all these Chicken Little experts. I don’t think it is going to be very long before I’m proven correct.
“Hmmmm . . . whatever happened to “America first”?”
Well, stopping wars in Ukraine and Gaza and preventing Mad Mullah religious fanatics from acquiring nuclear weapons is definitely in the interests of the United States.
“BTW, as of the time of this updated post (10:46 am Pacific time), the NYSE is in negative trading since market open”
What stock market ticker are you looking at? The DOW was up 1300 points yesterday. It only started dropping after Trump announced a 104 percent tariff on China in retaliation for China raising tariffs on the U.S. Traders say, when in doubt, sell!
Wait until Trump makes a deal or two with a few nations, and lets’ see what that Stock Market does.
Trump is the smartest guy around. You guys will figure that out one of these days. And it won’t be long,either. So whine while you can.
Wait until Trump makes a deal or two with a few nations
I’ve been reading about that happening very recently – is the reporting inaccurate or premature? It seems that you’re saying that has yet to happen, so just trying to clarify
Effective 1:18 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, April 4, 2025, Trump blinked first.
Hmmmm . . . I haven’t seen on the news that Trump has accomplished—or is even close to accomplishing—any of those things. But, admittedly, I haven’t seen the news since about two hours ago.
I’m glad to see that you used past-tense there. The peak lasted only a couple of minutes and the markets (overall) closed in negative territory for the day.
Sorry, I expect to die of old age before that occurs.
So you say. Duly noted.
You have seen the news that Trump is trying to stop these wars, haven’t you? It takes two to tango, you know. I suspect that if Putin continues to pursue the Ukraine war, that Trump is going to slap serious trade restrictions on Putin, restrictions Putin can’t handle because his economy is already in trouble. Cutting his oil sales won’t help his situation. And Trump will cut them if that becomes necessary.
Did you see the Stock Market yesterday? It went up over 3000 points, closing above 2,900 points.
Which just goes to show that the Stock Market selloff was based on fear and anxiety and momentum rather than on economics.
I think Trump will have a deal with Japan and South Korea in a matter of days. I hope you will be alive to see it.
Lights out 1999, Gray out 2000.
If you weren’t there, this is the bumper sticker I had on the back of my F-150 promoting the recall of California governor Gray Davis, who was replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The good news is that CCGT can be built fast.
The bad news for me is I wanted to build nuke plants.
I worked for NV Energy, which served the Las Vegas and Reno areas. While NV Energy is a utility company and not a grid operator, I can tell you these guys are very political and will change their positions to whichever way the wind is blowing, so to speak.
They knew this day was coming. They don’t care as long as they can pass on the costs of capital expenditures to the customers.
These graphs just confirm what I have been observing for some time. Solar generation only serves to make the operation of the gas backup generation more difficult as it has to ramp up very rapidly in the afternoon to pick up increasing load as solar drops out.
Solar is a burden on the grid, not an asset. Wind is only slightly better.
Solar operators should have to pay to dispose of their enrgy into the grid.
Renewable capacity is effecively useless.
“the nation’s top grid officials testified that the U.S. power system is under mounting strain”
They didn’t help any by playing along with the green energy scam. They should have been screaming this years ago.
Very nice Paul. Looking at the circular chart solar provides 5% of our power, wind provides 17%, natural gas 34%, nuclear 19% and coal 16%. The solution to our problem is so simple it takes my breath away. We increase the coal production enough to eliminate the need for solar that would bring coal back in line with where it historically was. We increase nuclear enough to eliminate the need for wind. I know you probably run into a rats nest just adding percentages but let’s do it for demonstration purposes. Add solar’s 5% to coals 16% and coal now has 21%. Add wind’s 17% to nuclear’s 19% and nuclear has 36%. Natural gas is at 34% and hydro is at 7%. 21+36+34+7=98. Increase all or some of the four sources and we are at 100%. All of them but hydro can be increased without much trouble. Without the interference of wind and solar they can all run at their most efficient capacity which is better for each system and lots better for the grid.
One more thing, we would have nice mix of energy, not relying too heavily on one source.
This problem is hardly alone facing this potential shortfall. Canada now generates about 60% of its electricity from hydro with British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec providing the most. Yet Manitoba Hydro, which exports most of its power to Saskatchewan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, has announced that in order to meet steadily increasing demand, it plans to add another 500 MW to its current 6100 MW, and the addition is most likely to be provided by natural gas generation, not wind or solar, which has already demonstrated that it can’t make up such a shortfall. Naturally there have been howls of protest from the green dreamers who lament the apparent fact that the province won’t meet its emissions reduction targets. Except when winter temperatures plunge to minus 30C=22 below F. and don’t rise higher than minus 20=4 below during the day, residents want a dependable consistent electricity supply and don’t care in the least about what supposed effect it has on the environment. No doubt US citizens are of the sentiments, something the climate alarmists evidently can’t comprehend.
Without heating and warm clothes Canada is too cold during the winter for people to live in.
It must be spring. No the sky will not fall this summer.
Maybe the governor will have to close some state building a few days.
If you are worried your A/C will be turned off I suggest you find the nearest location of your power company offices. Take a book and go for a read in their lobby.
That was my advice when I worked for SMUD.
All the while they’re adding hungry AI centres as well-
Study finds increased EV sales leading to higher emissions
I have been looking at the utilities’ integrated resource plans (IRPs) since 2019 anyway. They are delivered every other year and show what the utility envisions for generating assets, transmission line, demand, you name it out maybe 20 years into the future. Roger Caiazza and Beta Blocker have both expressed their assessment that these are just political documents, but I think they provide a good road map to fantasyland and how much money will be spent along the way.
Each successive IRP is evolving in a direction of sanity but very slowly. This 2025 IRP from our utility now says they expect to operate cloal plans into the indefinite future, yet they plan to hobble a couple with CCUS, convert a couple more to natural gas, and the inclusion of wind/solar causes unbelieveable ramping during the day. They are killing these precious plants.
Now even though there is increasing evidence of sanity, and the insanity was largely driven by politicians listening to evironmentalists, and then regulators (go back and see how we got into this mess — it’s informative), many/most of the utility executives are true believers too.
I just wrote my response to our utility’s IRP. The plan is 350+ pages in each of two volumes. My response is 10 pages, the shortest of the last 3, and I even take apart their reserve calculations to show they are dangerously optimistic, and make no sense in some places. Where, for instance, can one add MW and MWhr and get a sensible result that doesn’t depend on time?