Climate alarmists claim to have all the answers even to highly technical questions concerning the electrical grid despite the fact that their predictions of catastrophic global warming have never happened and there is every reason to believe they never will. Their “answers” to avert this scare disaster are monumentally expensive and useless. One of the many practical problems is that alarmist proposed policies will result in increasingly unstable electrical grids which will have an increasing probability of failure resulting in blackouts. This has already been demonstrated by the results of the early alarmist adopters, such as in South Australia.
The Importance of Preserving the Reliability of the Electrical Grid
The electrical grid is one of the most useful inventions of the modern world. It brings electrical power to each home and business and allows instant access to it for an affordable price to meet a large variety of uses. Yet the alarmists are advocating impairing it in ways that will greatly reduce its usefulness and value.
Those interested in the South Australian horror stories can read about them on JoAnne Nova’s website, starting perhaps with this post. But there are beginning to be serious problems here in the US as the percentage of “renewable” sources continues to increase. Disaster has been averted so far, but only by taking unusual actions that could easily have failed. Yet the “environmentalists,” aided by their mainstream media allies and the left wing of the Democratic Party, continue to push policies that sooner or later will result in electrical grid disasters that will seriously inconvenience if not hurt the general public.
Everyone knows what happens after a major storm: millions of households and businesses are without power for an uncertain period of time. Ordinary life comes to a sudden halt and everyone’s concerns change to when the food in the refrigerator will spoil or when the heat and air conditioning will come back on. That’s how important the electrical grid has become, yet the climate alarmists are forever advocating policies that further endanger it. They make the dubious claim that this will avoid increases in carbon dioxide levels. Such increases have little or nothing to do with human activities and everything to do with preserving and improving the environment.
An importamt current example is provided by the increasing shortage of resilient electrical sources in the Northeastern states of the US. Particularly in this area increasing numbers of coal-fired and nuclear power plants are being “retired” even though there is no technical reason to do so. This is being encouraged by the blue New England state governments and the utilities, which are finding them increasingly uneconomic to operate because of heavily subsidized wind sources.
The Potential for Disaster as “Environmental” Requirements Are Increased on the Grid
But what too few people are asking is what happens during major adverse weather events such as the Northeast experienced this past winter. The current trend is to increasingly rely on natural gas-fired power plants and reducing coal and nuclear sources. But what if there are not sufficient supplies of natural gas to make this possible in particular areas, primarily because the states involved will not approve added pipelines to bring increased supplies of natural gas to the plants? Coal and nuclear plants have their fuel “stored” on site, but this is much more difficult for natural gas plants. In the recent winter this was solved at times by buying Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) and using fuel oil, but what if these do not happen to be available at the times and places needed? Or what if Russia decides to hold the US for ransom for critically needed supplies?
This is just one example of the increasing problems facing the US electrical grid. It is becoming increasingly obvious that it will take a major disaster in which many innocent people are seriously inconvenienced or even die before the nonsense promoted by the climate alarmists and their allies concerning the increasing use of “renewable” sources of energy is exposed for what it is–nonsense. And the alarmists are likely to try to blame someone else for the future failings of their policies, just as they have in South Australia. I regret that such a disaster will apparently be needed to bring people to their senses, but that seems to be reality. The likely disasters are most likely to be caused by the “environmentalists” and their allies, not by alleged increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels caused by human activities.
via Carlin Economics and Science
March 30, 2018 at 09:06PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 