Power grids are finally balanced affairs that were never designed for the haphazard occasional delivery of wind and solar. Maintaining voltage and frequency within critical defined tolerances is a cinch with conventional generators, like nuclear, gas and coal-fired plants, which deliver the goods, around-the-clock and irrespective of the weather.
Around 20 years ago, deranged zealots hijacked energy policy and they have no appreciation of any of the simple facts above.
Rather, as with any cult, they simply cling to their founding myth, ignoring any unhelpful fact, deriding those who might point to reality as dangerous heretics.
But, as Robert Louis Stevenson pointed out, sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences. Reality bites, often with a vengeance.
And so it is in the USA, where its Environment Protection Agency has set out to destroy every last coal-fired power plant in the country, despite the obvious and inevitable result: total collapse of America’s power grid.
Robert Bryce provides the details below.
FERC Warns Congress Electricity Grid Facing ‘Catastrophic’ Failure
Principa Scientific International
Robert Bryce
29 May 2023
On May 4, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission delivered stark warnings to the members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
The agency’s acting chairman, Willie Phillips, told the senators:
“We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system.”
FERC Commissioner Mark Christie echoed Phillips’ warning, saying the U.S. electric grid is “heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability.”
His colleague, Commissioner James Danly, averred that there is a “looming reliability crisis in our electricity markets.”
The commissioners pointed to several factors for the reliability crisis, including numerous coal plants that are being retired prematurely, insufficient pipeline capacity to assure natural gas can be delivered to power plants, insufficient high-voltage transmission capacity, and distortions in the electricity market caused by massive federal subsidies for weather-dependent renewables.
On the last point, Danly told the senators:
“FERC has allowed the markets to fall prey to the price distorting and warping effects of subsidies and public policies that have driven the advancement of large quantities of intermittent renewable resources onto the electric system.”
In his written testimony, Danly went further, saying “Most of these market-distorting forces originate with subsidies — both state and federal — and from public policies that are otherwise designed to promote the deployment of non-dispatchable wind and solar assets or to drive fossil-fuel generators out of business as quickly as possible.”
Danly continued:
“The subsidies available to renewable generators are so lucrative that, when participating in procurement auctions, they are able to offer at a price of zero instead of their actual cost.
The market signal thereby created is that these new resources can be built for free, and thus the cost of power is also free. This, of course, is untrue, and the inevitable consequence is market-wide price suppression.
The price suppression deprives other market participants of much-needed revenue, leading to the premature retirement of the dispatchable generators which have to offer into the market at their true costs in order to remain viable.”
During questioning of the FERC commissioners, the chairman of Senate ENR, Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, asked all of the commissioners a simple question: can the electric grid as it exists today be reliable without coal-fired generation?
All of the commissioners said no, with Christie saying “We need to keep coal for the foreseeable future.”
Exactly one week after that May 4 hearing, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposed rule that could force the closure of every coal-fired power plant in America as well as most of the natural gas plants if they cannot cut their emissions by 90 percent.
Here’s how Politico reported on it:
The new rule will require “most fossil fuel power plants to slash their greenhouse gas pollution 90% between 2035 and 2040 — or shut down.”
Thus, at the same time, FERC commissioners are warning of catastrophic failures on the U.S. electric grid, the EPA under President Joe Biden wants to implement rules that could — repeat, could — force the closure of 90 percent of the hydrocarbon-fueled power plants in the country.
That would be catastrophic.
Last year, hydrocarbon-fueled power plants in the U.S. generated 2,518 terawatt-hours of energy, which was about 59 percent of all the juice produced in the country. (Coal plants produced about 829 terawatt-hours and gas-fired generators produced 1,689 terawatt-hours.)
If we take 90 percent of the 2,518 terawatt-hours produced from coal and gas plants, we get 2,266 terawatt-hours of electricity per year.
As can be seen in the graphic above, the 2,266 terawatt-hours of energy that we generate from hydrocarbons every year is more than 10 times the amount of juice now being produced by all of the solar panels in the country.
It’s also more than five times more than what’s being produced by wind turbines, and nearly three times more than what’s being generated by all of our nuclear plants.
The EPA’s proposed rule hinges on the dubious claim that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is ready for prime time.
Politico reporter Alex Guillén explained that to “justify the size of those cuts, the agency says fossil fuel plants could capture their greenhouse gas emissions before they hit the atmosphere — a long-debated technology that no power plant in the U.S. uses now.”
Principa Scientific International
STOP THESE THINGS 
Reblogged this on whatyareckon and commented:
These climate scammers are mad and should be put into an asylum to stop their madness on the rest of us!!!
Once the mind blowing stupidity of Governments – state and federal – began to place the least number of citizens concerns ahead of the greatest number of citizens concerns, including scientifically knowledgeable people’s concerns – moving to legislate to stop the majority of people even speaking about the dangers and instead forging ahead with indoctrination of our children to believe the misdirected desire to ensure the future of our society means they to have to turn their backs on what their parents and even teachers can speak off without being taunted and made to appear foolish/stupid because they have the temerity to see things differently.
Time is showing Governments and their ‘paymasters,’ we are going destroying our environments quicker than any other generation in the full knowledge what they are doing is failing their people.
But they will not stop because they have signed off our nations ability to take things easier and to follow our own path. They have sold us out for a place in the international spotlight.
Oh how they will fall and crumble when the lights go out and transport comes to a standstill and we head back to the days of horse and buggy with locally grown food stuffs being the only things available, clothes having to last for several years, TV and Internet so too expensive for ‘the people’ to utilise.
Gone will be those overseas and interstate holidays.
Perhaps one of the good things that will come out of this will be where possible people will return to hearth and wood stove for heating and cooking – but oh stop that cannot happen because it will mean far too much pollution – raw is better though isn’t it!!!
If politicians were doing the job they are meant to they would look after the majorities needs and help those less able to join the majority.
Rather than splitting the nation into groups of goodies and baddies with the baddies being those who see the dangers, lets see our politicians accept there is a better way to meet our energy needs AND ensure the world can support its people and meet its obligations to the environment. Lets hope Politicians accept the destruction of our lands from polluting Turbines and solar panels, whether re their construction, operation and/or ‘re-use/recycling, none of which is safe for the environment or human health and advancement.
WE CAN ONLY HOPE as nothing else seems to penetrate their armadillo brain cells.
“As can be seen in the graphic above, the 2,266 terawatt-hours of energy that we generate from hydrocarbons every year is more than 10 times the amount of juice now being produced by all of the solar panels in the country.”
I wonder if that amount of “juice” produced by solar panels is electricity being actually used or if this is just a number of what is being created when the sun is shining on these panels. Solar is not only intermittant energy due to the climate it’s intermittant from not being able to be used by the grid 100% of the time. Thus for example the grid may be able to use it say 10% of the time, thus that amount actually used by the grid when calculating also the fact that during the night none is produced at all, may be 1%. Some of my analysis of the Arizona power grid in studying the Chevelon Canyon Butte and West Camp Wind projects covering 150 whopping square miles surrounding Indian and civilian territory came to that conclusion of it being a mere 1% making such projects a complete waste our our $$$ energy for subsidies and concluding that they are basically pipelines to our money for portfolios. For example Pattern Energy has a portfolio of these wind and solar farms and is owned since 2020 by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. So if you are in the USA and support feeding your taxes to wind and solar know that your money is helping keep pensions full of your money in another country while you get what is basically movie sets in return and theatrical performances of fake clean energy that is always 100% dependent on Earth based fuels.
It’s beyond my ken how so many can see the RE ripoff yet fail to see the same in compulsory superannuation that’s beyond saving for a rainy day. With trial introduction early 1950’s PM Bob Hawke made it general in the great 1980’s swindle. Justifying it for domestic infrastructure building that didn’t happen. A big Canadian pension fund is invested in AU, ours even went to refurbishment of St Pancreas station London. It doesn’t end. It’s profitability is shuffled around the world. How much, & where does unclaimed super go?
Pointless asking politicians as theirs are the only incomes guaranteed.
Most of those same deranged zealots have no idea of how much cancer is caused by electricity from common industrial strength electricity such as ubiquitous 3 phase motors & the abundance of other transmitting sources. Since motor vehicles started becoming computerised years ago, error creation became apparent to more of the public without realising the extent of the source.
The warning signs on those transformer boxes scattered throughout suburbia have little to do with electrocution but they don’t say Do Not Linger. Just as there are no warning signs at uranium/pitchblende sites throughout the country. Were they so marked, campers would be afraid to pitch a tent in many places. Let alone pocket a bright shiny black stone as a keepsake that resulted in a bloke loosing his leg.
Subsidies increased substantially from 1945 attracting more public predators, well before RE.
The only question I have is this…”which will be the next western country to have enforced rolling blackouts – or even worse – a total system blackout”?
It is only a matter of time.
Also, will the public in these countries continue to turn the other cheek?
Vive la Revolution anyone?