kouts Today, Tomorrow, Blackouts Forever! // (John Hinderaker)
The Tennessee Valley Authority was a success story of the New Deal. Or at least that was what it was long believed. They could keep the lights on. Now, Tennessee is experiencing rolling blackouts . Clay Travis is rightfully shocked, as Tennessee, one of our best-run states, is sliding toward third-world status.
Nashville’s mayor has asked the @titans for a postponement of kickoff in order to conserve energy. What kind of banana republic has our national energy policy become so that this could ever happen? https://t.co/12QGvNSSsj
Clay Travis (@ClayTravis December 24, 2022
Via InstaPundit.
It’s not just Tennessee. Bill Glahn reports
This year, many eastern Americans received a surprise Christmas gift: rolling blackouts in cold weather.
This email was sent to me by Appalachian Power Company on Christmas Eve. It serves approximately one million customers in eastern Tennessee, West Virginia, West Virginia and western Virginia.
The email refers to PJM, the Pennsylvania New Jersey and Maryland power grid. This actually serves a small area of America from northern Illinois to eastern North Carolina.
Rolling blackouts were avoided by customers in the region, but those further south did not have that luxury. North Carolina blackouts on Christmas Eve affected approximately 550,000 customers, but that number dropped to around 2000 on Christmas Day. This is a local news report.
According to the company, the rolling blackouts were temporary outages meant to protect Duke Energy customers against more prolonged outages due to extreme temperatures in much of the eastern U.S.
Many customers were still upset that outages could last for hours.
Not only that, but also the Midwestern and Mid-Southern States served by the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operators (MISO) are at grave risk of blackouts in the coming winter.
Grid monitors warn that the electricity grid that serves Minnesota and 14 states, the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator, (MISO), is at high risk of blackouts. This threat will only get worse over five years, as coal, nuclear and natural gas generation leave the system faster that replacement resources are connecting.
After decades of reliable energy and grid stability, why are we suddenly talking blackouts? The answer is simple. Reliable coal and nuclear power plants across America are being retired and replaced by “green” solar and wind energy. This is absurd because an intermittent energy source (wind or solar) that only works half the time or rarely can’t replace reliable 24/7 electricity, regardless of how many billions we spend.
Kevin Roche illustrates the point using MISO data from a week ago. Kevin’s main focus is Minnesota, where data would look even worse. This applies to all of MISO, even the southern states.
Here are some takeaways
* Solar power is completely and utterly worthless.
* Wind turbines can produce electricity. The problem is that you don’t know when. They also produce less electricity when we are most in need, such as at night or when it is cold outside. No matter how many billions of dollars we spend on wind turbines to solve the problem, the wind will not blow if it isn’t blowing.
* Despite all the talk about “green energy”, the truth is that natural gas and coal-fossil fuels-keep the lights on and heat the homes. If we build plants, nuclear can also do this if they aren’t shutting them down. The rest is BS.
There is no doubt that conservatives are winning the energy argument. The question is how many lives are lost, how much we will all be inconvenienced and how many trillions of dollar will be wasted before voters demand a reliable, first world energy system, just like their parents had.
