HT & Stereo System Fuel Shortage Coming According to Grid Operators
US Faces Electricity Shortages Heading Into Summer, as Grid Operators Warn of Limits of Green Energy
With more than 25 years of executive experience in the utility industry, people tend to listen when MISO CEO John Bear talks about energy.
And the message he’s sending about electricity shortages as Americans head into summer is clear.
“I am concerned about it,” Bear told The Wall Street Journal in an article exploring why power-grid operators are worried that electricity supplies may struggle to keep up with rising energy demands.
Bear is not some lone prophet foretelling doom.
From California to Texas to the Midwest, the Journal spoke to grid operators warning that conditions are ripe for outages, as plants pivot to new renewable energy sources.
These concerns are not unfounded. Evidence shows America’s power grid is increasingly unreliable and struggling to keep up with demand, and operators are bracing for rolling blackouts that could be arriving as soon as this year during heat waves and cold snaps.
Politicians and policy wonks often speak of “quitting” fossil fuels, as if they are a filthy habit or a narcotic like crack. But the reality is humans could not survive without coal, natural gas, and oil.
Despite their impressive growth, renewable energy sources—solar, wind, hydro and biomass combined—account for just 20 percent of US utility-scale electricity generation.
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, provide 61 percent of utility-scale electricity generation in the country. They heat and cool our homes, run our appliances, and feed the Teslas we drive.
While there is a great deal of excitement around the potential of renewable energy, one cannot simply replace a coal plant with a wind or solar farm and expect things will go just fine. These are intermittent energy sources, for one, but their construction and expansion has also been hit with delays for a variety of reasons, including inflation and supply chain bottlenecks.
“Every market around the world is trying to deal with the same issue,” Brad Jones, interim chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told the Journal. “We’re all trying to find ways to utilize as much of our renewable resources as possible…and at the same time make sure that we have enough dispatchable generation to manage reliability.”
The shift from filthy coal to clean energy has not always been smooth.
Last year, for example, Hawaiian officials were stunned to learn the coal plant they had killed had been replaced with a massive battery powered by oil, which one public official described as “going from cigarettes to crack.”
It’s true that fossil fuels come with tradeoffs. They can be messy and they emit greenhouse gasses. But the idea that “green” energies do not come with similar environmental tradeoffs is simply not true.
That electric car your neighbor just bought probably isn’t as green as he thinks. It takes tens of thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions to produce those fancy Tesla batteries, research shows.
Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist, argues that renewable energy has the potential to be just as destructive to the environment as fossil fuels. While the phrase “clean energy” might conjure up images of beaming sunshine, rainbows, and gales of wind, the reality is far different.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Hickel noted the transition to renewable energy sources exacts a serious toll on the environment; it requires massive amounts of energy, not to mention the extraction of minerals and metals at great environmental and social costs.
A little-noticed World Bank study examined just the amount of material it would take to get to a “zero emission” economy.
“[The] results are staggering,” Hicekl noted, extrapolating using some basic arithmetic, “34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.”
It’s easy, of course, not to think about such matters, just like it’s easy to not think about the fact that there’s a good chance the lithium-ion battery powering your EV was made with cobalt mined by a child in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the vast majority of the world’s cobalt is mined.
These are unpleasant realities, but they are realities nevertheless, and they remind us of an important economic adage popularized by economist Thomas Sowell: there are no solutions, there are only trade offs. (In economics, this idea is sometimes expressed as opportunity cost. It’s the idea that you must sacrifice something to obtain a product or service or experience, even if it’s simply your time or attention.)
When it comes to fossil fuels, many Americans tend to ignore their benefits and focus on their costs. When it comes to green energy, however, many of the same people do the opposite; they focus on the benefits and ignore the costs.
To be fair, in some ways it’s easy to forget just how fortunate we are to have fossil fuels. They are provided to us on a daily basis through the invisible miracle of the market, which sees them provided in seemingly infinite amounts, often (though not always) at relatively little cost.
If John Bear’s concerns prove founded, however, Americans may soon get a rather rude reminder this summer about the importance of fossil fuels.
“As we move forward, we need to know that when you put a solar panel or a wind turbine up, it’s not the same as a thermal resource,” Bear told the Journal.
This is good advice. Let’s hope the right people hear it.
Some of these comments are purile and bilious. To approximate what Twain wrote “Get your facts straight and then distort as much as you please.”
For 250 miles+/- down the road it costs $25 to charge my EV and $70 to gas up. I don’t drive like I used to have to. Still that’s 1k vs 2.8k for 10k miles. That leaves more money for stereo equipment I don’t need. |
@ghdprenticeI'm embarrassed to live in the state of HI, with the power plant just recently converted to the crack-cocaine of energy sources - from coal to oil... Although, both have to be shipped in here, and I suspect easier to ship oil than coal... As both arrive here on boat after crossing an ocean, the total energy costs of energy here are truly explosive. During the past two decades, especially the last five, the weather has massively transformed here, and the heat waves and humidity are getting pretty brutal as the trade winds are failing. 20 years ago the trades (winds cooling the islands & protecting us from hurricanes) have stopped only for 2-3 days a year, and the past years we have several month stretches, entire summers and falls without them! I have had a keen interest in climatology and climate changes from early on, and have followed the peer-reviewed scientific literature from the 1990s. The geological records indicate that we are currently experiencing the most drastic temperature increase period the Earth ever went through. The closest we had was shortly after the extinction of dinosaurs, 64 million years ago when Earth turned into a hot sauna in the span of 4000 years. At that time the ocean temperature at the arctic warmed up to 20 degrees Celsius, and the equatorial ocean temperature was warm enough to prevent swimming. I guess the next century's Titanic story will be people perishing by heat stroke in the water, instead of freezing to death... as sadly, the current warming is an order of magnitude faster than that cataclysmic one. Research on the conveyor belts has very scary results. The Atlantic conveyor belt cools the equatorial region and warms colder regions. It makes both Central America and New York and Northern Europe habitable... It has already slowed remarkably to critical speeds. The models of the two leading expert research teams both show that with very high probability we are already past the point of no return. They do not dare to spell out the consequences, just state, loosely quoted: "we hope our models are wrong, but we checked each others data a dozen times, tried a different model, and the prediction is the same". The Atlantic conveyor belt will shut down in the decades to come, and we can't do anything about it.. even stopping all emmissions to zero right now would not reverse the process.
As a scientist, I dearly hope that my fellow academia members are all DEAD WRONG, and we can keep on chanting "Atlantis is not sinking" and bumping up fuel and energy consumption......... at least for a few more decades at best before the planet starts shutting down the heritage of Homo sapiens for good. (Sad.) I was so much against energy and resource wasting, air conditioning my whole life - I could not justify using energy for such purpose: warm the planet to keep me cool... but I had to install AC three years ago, as the environment became unlivable without AC. Curiously though, the split AC uses less energy than the fans the AC replaced!!! I also added serious insulation to my home as well, and that drastically reduced the need for cooling. (So much, that I basically need the AC to dehumidify - as humidity gets to intolerable levels.) Yet, 99% of Hawaii homes have virtually non-existent heat insulation, and everyone is blowing their AC at 200% creating arctic cold instead of simply cool... If we had all acted sensibly, at least start making steps in the right direction... Human resourcefulness is surprising though,,, especially when it's about our survival. I suspect that the decades of 2030-2040 will see the vast majority of every nations GDP being used to save ourselves from extinction. I believe we can do it. Actually, our children and grandchildren will do it! And curse our generation in their every waking hour.
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Even though I disagree, Thank you for a reasonable response. I hope you understand that there are thousands of scientists who disagree with your assertions. The ones that do disagree get little or no press nor any grant $$$. Its funny how we ask questions about the $$$ that an audio seller make on a product that he recommends but we never ask the same from scientists though most of them cound not have a job without grant $$$ from the Bid Corps and Govt which also gets $$$ from these big corps Oh yeah, and Brandon is totally responsible for expensive gas in the US and around the world. How stupid to think he has any control over gas prices,
I see why you have that name. Your statement shows your lack of understanding of govt itself. Exec orders, EPA rules, legislation & tax rules all have an effect Brandon campaigned on closing down fossil fuels. The first thing he did was shut down oil pipelines. Gas prices increased by over $1 within 9 months That was before Ukraine.. He stopped drilling on fed lands. He has proposed 12-134 power plants per month to be closed. If he has no effect why even propose? You are just plainly wrong. |
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