Posted on 05/08/2025 7:44:36 PM PDT by george76
President Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is warning that the United States is at risk of major widespread blackouts similar to the power cuts that recently shut down most of Spain and Portugal..
Burgum said the blackouts in Europe were caused by over-subsidizing intermittent renewable energy sources.
However, he warns that America is now “dangerously close” to suffering from similar “rolling blackouts and grid failure.”
Speaking to David Freeberg on “The All-In Podcast,” Burgum admitted that the artificial intelligence (AI) “arms race” with China keeps him “awake at night” due to the amount of electricity that the technology requires.
“We just saw in Spain, they were celebrating on April 12th of this past month that they’d shut down their last coal plant,” Burgum explains.
“A week after that, they were celebrating the fact that they had their first day of 100% renewables on their system.
“Then, the next week, they were a global news story because people were trapped in subways, all airline flights canceled, hospitals were panicking with a lack of power because they had a rolling blackout and grid failure.”
Burgum attributed the devastating blackouts to a fundamental flaw in relying solely on intermittent power sources like solar and wind.
“It just defies physics,” the Interior secretary noted.
...
“You can’t run an electrical grid with just intermittent power.
“You cannot run with something that is based on intermittent, which is the definition of solar or wind, because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and the wind doesn’t blow every day.”
Burgum then said that the U.S. is teetering on the edge of a similar fate due to misguided energy policies embraced by the Biden administration.
“We became dangerously close to that right now,”
...
We’ve got parts of our country that are at risk for those same kind of—what I’ll call the Biden brownouts and blackouts—to happen.”
Burgum criticized the over-subsidization of unreliable green energy and the stringent regulations on stable base load power sources like coal and nuclear.
He argues that these measures, driven by the goal to “save the planet,” are jeopardizing national energy security.
“All we’re doing is potentially putting our own country at risk,”
...
He continued by urging a reevaluation of energy policies to ensure a reliable grid capable of supporting the Trump administration’s technological and economic ambitions, especially in the face of China’s rapid energy expansion.
...
Spain faced severe blackouts just weeks after celebrating the closure of its last coal plant and a day of 100% renewable energy.
The grid, reliant on intermittent solar and wind, collapsed.
The blackouts led to people being trapped in subways, canceled flights, and hospitals in chaos.
Hell, I was stranded at a Super 8 hotel during a snow and ice storm in Lancaster, Pa. in January 2000, and experienced rolling blackouts due to the persistent below zero weather the whole Northeast was experiencing. It had started with freezing rain outside of Richmond, Virginia the day before I got to Lancaster. My old VW wouldn’t start after my first night in Lancaster, but it didn’t matter because Route 81 was completely closed, so I had no where to go but sit in my hotel room for two extra days.
Texas got hit with a hard freeze in 2021. A lot of us lost power because of reliance on renewables. At the peak of the outage, nearly 10 million people were in the dark, lacking warmth and the ability to cook food. The freeze also caused water pipes to burst and boil water advisories were issued most of the State. Wind and solar don’t work when the temps are in the single digits, cloudy skies and no wind.
Bkmk
Easy fix. We just all start driving electric cars.
SO?
Just fix it dude.
There was another thread on this a couple of days ago. There was a map showing which electric districts were most vulnerable. One of them was the district that runs from Manitoba to Louisiana. I did a little reading about it, and found that they have shut down 3 GW over the last year and expect much higher prices and maybe even rolling blackouts, depending on the weather.
They’ve got lots of wind farms there, though.
The Germans actually have a word for this: Dunkelflaute — "dark doldrums". Green Energy
doesn't work when this happens. These weather systems really slam Germany because hard because
they have no plan B. They bulldozed all their nuclear and coal plants. You can't depend on fickle mother nature.
Gaia is an unfaithful wife.
Because I just don’t know, why does AI require so much electricity? Isn’t just on a computer?
It seems that the farting unicorn herd is still on back-order... Or did someone in Biden’s administration divert the funds to a going-out-of-power office party?
Yes and no. Yes, AI is done with computers. But the computers in question are extremely power-hungry. The reason for that is a combination of the number of operations per second (which is in the trillions) and the type of chips required to do those operations (typically GPU, graphics processing units) and other AI-specific chips. They are by nature very power hungry.
While it's possible to do a small amount of slow, easy AI on a normal computer, the stuff you think of as AI on the internet is thousands of times faster and hungrier.
I’m glad we’ve got that generator sitting in the garage.
“Parts” of our country. OK, I feel better now.
Had ‘they’ dredged the built up sediments before removing the dams, they wouldn’t have killed the Klamath.
The EV mandate will fix this problem. /s
“Speaking to David Freeberg on “The All-In Podcast,” Burgum admitted that the artificial intelligence (AI) “arms race” with China keeps him “awake at night” due to the amount of electricity that the technology requires.”
It is a very serious concern. AI or A/C? Which would you rather have? Because we are not going to be able to have both.
“While it’s possible to do a small amount of slow, easy AI on a normal computer, the stuff you think of as AI on the internet is thousands of times faster and hungrier.”
This is going to be just as bad as the mandated EV issue was going to be. The load was going to be unsustainable. We would have to trade human comfort to feed the EVs. Now we have just dodged the bullet on that problem and have traded that problem for another one just as bad.
Humanity will be forced to choose between AI or A/C comfort. We will not be able to feed both at the same time. But I suppose it will not matter because by the time humanity gets to that point AI will have reduced our general intelligence level to that of a lower Primate anyhow.
It looks like once again in man’s history Monasteries will be needed to preserve what was left of human intelligence, knowledge, and history for future generations down the road. We are once again entering a period where the elite will control all of the data and knowledge to rule over the serfs.
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. ~ Aldous Huxley
“One of them was the district that runs from Manitoba to Louisiana.”
The grid map on Wikipedia does not reflect that. It does show the entire American West is connected with British Colombia and Alberta, which suprised me.
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