Posted on 05/31/2022 12:38:01 PM PDT by blam
Authored by Robert Bryce, host of the Power Hungry Podcast, executive producer of the documentary, “Juice: How Electricity Explains the World,” and the author of six books, including most recently, “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.”
America’s electric grid is being mismanaged and consumers will pay a heavy price for that mismanagement…
More evidence of that came with the recent closure of the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan. The 811-megawatt nuclear plant was shut down on the same day that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) issued a report saying the U.S. electric grid doesn’t have enough generation capacity and that blackouts are almost certain to occur across the country this summer.
Closing nuclear power plants while keeping coal-fired plants open is just crazy. Plain insanity.
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) May 30, 2022
In particular, NERC noted that the Midwest is facing a capacity shortfall that could lead to a “high risk of energy emergencies during peak summer conditions.” Palisades was located in the heart of the Midwest, immediately adjacent to the area served by the Mid-continent Independent System Operator (MISO), the region that NERC identified as being particularly short on juice. NERC said the MISO region has 3,200 megawatts less generation capacity this summer than it did in 2021. Despite this loss of generation capacity, NERC expects demand in the region to increase by about 1.7 percent this summer and warned that “extreme temperatures, higher generation outages, or low wind conditions” will mean that MISO will have a “higher risk” of “load-shedding to maintain system reliability” — the industry’s preferred term for rolling blackouts.
In a phone interview, Meredith Angwin, author of the 2020 book, “Shorting The Grid,” told me, “It is shocking to me how people can pretend this isn’t a problem. NERC just said the Midwest is headed for trouble this summer because the region doesn’t have enough reliable generation — and yet, they are closing Palisades. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Palisades was a zero-carbon workhorse. As Tim Cavanaugh of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy explained recently, Palisades was producing about 7 terawatt-hours of juice per year. That’s more energy than is generated by all the wind turbines in Michigan. It’s a key comparison because the backlash against the wind industry has been fierce in Michigan. Among the latest examples, last month the town board in Fulton Township voted unanimously to reject a project proposed by Chicago-based Invenergy that would put several dozen wind turbines in and around the township.
As I reported last month, the planned closure of Palisades was known for years and several politicians, including Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, have said they wanted to prevent the closure. On April 20, Whitmer said, “Keeping Palisades open is a top priority.” She hoped to tap some of the $6 billion available in the Department of Energy’s Civil Nuclear Credit Program, created through the bipartisan infrastructure bill that President Biden signed into law in November. In a letter to the Department of Energy, Whitmer said stopping the closure of Palisades would “allow us to shore up Michigan’s energy supply to prevent price spikes on working families and small businesses.”
But, since the plant was closed on May 20 — 11 days earlier than expected because of a mechanical problem — Whitmer’s office has not issued any statements. Nor has there been any public statement from the Biden administration about trying to rescue the plant, whose decommissioning could take two decades. Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, repeatedly has called climate change “an existential threat.” If he believes that’s true, why hasn’t Kerry raised a stink about the Palisades closure?
There’s no doubt that the plant’s closure will result in more greenhouse gas emissions. When nuclear plants close in the United States, they are replaced by gas-fired generation. That happened in New York after the closure of the Indian Point Energy Center, and in Vermont after the premature shuttering of Vermont Yankee. The closure of such plans increases electricity costs because generators must burn more natural gas to produce power and gas prices are soaring.
Just like last year’s premature closure of the Indian Point, the loss of Palisades, which has been operating safely since 1971, is an inexcusable government failure. By any relevant metric — climate action, energy security, or resilience — the loss of Palisades is a blunder that could have and should have been avoided because it will further weaken our electric grid. The grid is the Mother Network for all of our critical systems: health care, GPS, communications, traffic lights, water, and wastewater treatment. Essayist and podcaster Emmet Penney had it right when he declared last year that “there is no such thing as a wealthy society with a weak electrical grid.”
In short, the closure of the Palisades Power Plant will increase emissions, reduce energy affordability, and hurt the resilience and reliability of America’s electric grid. That’s a lousy quadfecta.
They want to deprive the country of all energy sources.
Electric generation from gas will go so high that people cannot afford it.
They deserve it and have done a lot to insure they live like cave people 🤪
Have fun, suckers
I wonder if the run of the mill useful idiot Dems will ever figure out that they’re being used and made to suffer like the deplorables.
When shortages develop, Democrats will blame the power companies and Republicans, and demand an immediate takeover of the electrical grid by the federal government.
Yeah, be WE don’t deserve it.
Democrat Party is the party of shortages.
It’s a feature, not a bug, as far as the Democrat Party is concerned.
Exactly. This is all by design.
Perfect time to buy an electric car and save money!!!
Just kidding.
Now you know why I put a ton of solar onto my house a year ago and I’m upgrading it.
Natural gas flows aplenty in my red state which is the number 2 producer in the country - the only reason for shortages is STUPIDITY 🤪
Is there any industry that isn’t cutting supply?
Now it’s electrical supply. I don’t think you can blame lack of labor for this one.
I can easily switch to Off-Grid living.
But I don’t think most eco-nut Earth worshiping
city dwellers can.
They won’t be missed.
They will be when their computers go dark.
Not to worry, we (Michigan) have lots and lots of windmills in the Ithaca and Claire areas to take up the slack...
The grid is not being mis-managed. These changes are 100% deliberate to cause as much strife for Americans as possible.
Didn't we hire Republicans to fight for us and this country? Where are they? The only thing they fight is Trump.
In Soviet Union, you wait for electricity;
In USA electricity waits for you!
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Under Bernie, AOC and BiXiden the USA is turning into a soviet union.
The grid is not being mis-managed. These changes are 100% deliberate to cause as much strife for Americans as possible.
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WHo is behind all this though?
While it can help utility suppliers to have low supply, because it’s a basic economic truism that all other things being equal (particularly demand), a drop in supply means a rise in prices. But if you aren’t the one providing the supply, then you are missing out on the profit. So why do it?
What is worse is that all other things aren’t equal. Not to mention public utilities are often heavily regulated, the Biden admin likes the idea of using executive orders to combat “price gouging”.
Something about all this doesn’t make sense, unless it’s malice in one form or another. The gestalt of all the supply problems put together are greater than mere negligence.
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