From CFACT

By David Wojick

Westerners are independent people. This independence is even reflected in the West’s electric power grid. There are two major American grids, called respectively the Eastern and Western Interconnections. The north-south dividing line is roughly just east of Colorado. Texas, which never got over being a separate country for nine years, has its own grid.

The Eastern Interconnection is divided up among, and run by, a group of central planning agencies. Some are called Regional Transmission Operators (RTOs), while others are Independent System Operators (ISOs), but it is all the same thing. The Western Interconnection has no such controllers except California, a world unto itself, has an ISO.

But there is a movement afoot to create an RTO to run the Western Interconnection. The reason is a well known fantasy: namely wanting to run the grid on wind and solar. That we all freeze on windless winter nights is irrelevant to these folks.

There are a number of players in the game, but the most visible is the Western States Transmission Initiative (WSTI). Last year, WSTI issued a report saying the West needs a whopping 15,600 miles of new high voltage transmission lines at an estimated cost of about $75 billion. They also say a regional, that is central, planning approach is the only way to get it.

You might ask why we need all this stuff, given that everybody already has all the electricity they need? These folks say it is the wrong kind of electricity. They want to pave the prairies with solar panels, line the ridges with wind towers, then ship the juice to the far away cities. This will take a lot of new Western transmission lines.

This wind and solar fantasy is not new, and it had been making steady progress until recently when it was blindsided by an opposite fantasy called artificial intelligence or AI. This fantasy says that AI is going to run our lives and it will take an enormous amount of electricity to do that. The code phrase is “data centers,” but they should be called AI processing centers. It is not the data that uses all that electricity; it is the monster computers running the AI systems.

Moreover, this new river of electricity has to be reliably available around the clock, which rules out wind and solar. Individual people who worry about keeping the lights on are easily ignored. But when it is Amazon, Microsoft, and Google worried about keeping their billion-dollar data centers running, they get heard.

The data center people have no use for intermittent wind and solar. They are talking gas, small nuclear, even coal, since the President is all for it. They are especially not interested in wind and solar from hundreds of miles away. In fact, they are talking about co-locating data centers with power plants, backed up by the grid, since no power plant runs all the time.

Suddenly, the electric power planning world is a scene of chaos and confusion. The wind and solar folks are acting like this data center push is just a speed bump, but it is a head-on collision. Serious proposals to build reliable generation are springing up everywhere.

It looks like the West may yet be saved from wind and solar inundation and thousands of miles of massive power lines. Of course, this collision is nationwide, but it stands out in the West because there is a lot more sun and wind than people.

But the AI craze is also an overblown bubble that may burst. In the meantime, let’s resurrect reliability in America. Build dispatchable generation where it is needed, not in some distant desert.

Note: an earlier version of this article appeared in Range Magazine which celebrates the cowboy spirit in all of us.