34 Comments

It's possible, even likely, someone will be hurt by this blind pursuit of nirvana or idealistic goals but..... nobody will be held accountable personally. Their wages will not be garnished; no claw-back for an error in judgment. Perhaps throwing the "leadership" to the lions when they are so undeniably wrong will force a much healthier approach.

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They prefer to burn oil compared to a modern natural gas facility and then they still have the power go out.

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Gotta love it, amirite?

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How did wind power in Texas do the last several days?? And how did nuclear power do in Austin on January 31, 2023??

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Not great during the peak yesterday morning and better this morning. Why do you keep asking about Austin last year? Everyone knows that distribution systems can go down, our articles are based on the lack of generation capacity.

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If the grid is so easily disrupted then someone that needs electricity 24/7 needs to take matters into their own hands. I have family member in south Louisiana and the individual is elderly and her family got her a whole home generator. So she is literally a mile or two from the most important natural gas infrastructure in the country and she couldn’t depend on cheap electricity from a natural gas power plant…or nuclear or coal or even a bunch of hamsters turning a wheel.

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Great piece, fellas! Seems a recurring theme in the energy transition is higher costs, unfulfilled expectations, and lack of knowledge about energy/power markets. And great hubris on behalf of policymakers that push their ideology above any rational analysis. It really irritates me.

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It’s why we enjoy embarrassing the guilty so much

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If only they felt embarrassment and corrected their approach when confronted with truth and facts...

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Thank you for posting this! No one likes an "I told you so" But, I did write on my blog in 2020 that Hawaii provides a "Glimpse into theFuture of the Green New deal" Here is my link: http://dickstormprobizblog.org/2020/06/03/hawaii-a-gimpse-into-the-future-of-the-green-new-deal/

I suspect next week with the coming cold weather there will be rolling Blackouts in PJM and MISO due to the premature shutdowns of coal plants and inadequate maintenance of existing plants.

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Thanks Dick! We are monitoring that situation too. Gradually then all at once.

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Excellent read! Thank you! Yes, your analysis is spot on. We always need a margin of safety in a grid and when a state keeps pulling reliable plants offline, eventually something will break.

And there is a cost to NOT using coal. Yet, I doubt anyone will put that ‘cost’ into the social cost of carbon calculations used to justify getting rid of coal plants.

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We like to talk about the social cost of blackouts. We use a value of lost load metric but unfortunately we couldn’t do that for this piece because Hawaiian electric declined to tell us the extent of the capacity shortfall.

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Power plants didn’t fail in January 2023 in Austin…ice caused tree branches to fall on power lines and hundreds of thousands lost power. The grid is inherently unstable….either get a whole home generator now or buy an EV that can power one’s home for several days.

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Having a whole house generator shouldn’t be necessary. Have enough thermal plants to meet peak load plus a margin of safety and we won’t need the extra layer of redundancy

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I guess you aren’t familiar with what happened in Austin with the ice storm and then a few months later in East Texas/NW Louisiana with a wind storm in June. The grid is inherently unstable because tree branches can undermine the grid by bringing down power lines leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without power. And guess what led to record natural gas prices?? Hurricane Katrina and so natural gas production is impacted by weather events.

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I swear the green left thinks utility batteries are like Duracells, just pop in a new copper top when it's dead. The fact that you have to generate the power to charge them seems completely lost in the conversation

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They come preloaded with coal fired power from China 😆

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What do you expect from people who don't understand that you have to generate wealth before you can redistribute it?

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Industrial-scale batteries have the same problem as other low energy density forms like wind and solar. They gobble up hundreds or thousands of acres of real estate to provide power for a couple hours.

I heard industrial batteries referred to as “baseload” recently and had to laugh.

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BASELOAD* but only for up to three hours at a time

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The space shuttle had lots of successful launches, until it didn’t. It amazes me how people become so blind to future catastrophic possibilities like this, but I guess it shouldn’t be surprising given human history...

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“Reliable but pricey” sounds like “fiery but mostly peaceful.” No worries though...when it gets too expensive to heat or cool one’s single family house, the answer will be to move into a WEF Schwabhaus--i.e., a “sustainable” 500 sq ft unit reminiscent of a Soviet apartment or brutalist UK estate.

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I didn't realize real estate in Hawaii was so cheap, and scenery so trivial, that they can afford to cover the place with wind turbines, solar panels and huge battery storage.

Some people just don't care about the environment.

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Lol, definitely enjoying Tom Selleck’s mustache... how could you not!

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Excellent!

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It is only going to get worse. I do power generation for a living, and this stupid transition was an epic fail before it started. You can sometimes bend the laws of thermodynamics, but you cannot break them. No matter how many windmills and solar panels you have.

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If renewable energy & infrastructure where truly effective & cost competitive, with base load fossil fuel plants, then every disconnected electrical-which means every island or island nation grid would have intermittent powering their economics, & guess what not one does. None of the Caribbean nations or territories, not Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Japan, Philippines, etc. Why not? It's the perfect situation. I'll tell you why, it's because it does not work. Most if not all of the states or countries that have isolated grid uses Oil or LNG. The only countries that can have intermittent power on their grids are the ones that are interconnected which can allow for balancing the grid with load shedding. This is why a country like Denmark which has a lot of renewables on it's grid "appears" to work, because the are a net import of electricity from neighboring countries or when baseload demand drops as the case with Germany.

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What’s alarmingly clear is that the push to the Green economy is going to cost big, be unreliable with no fossil fuel reserves on standby

and quality of everyone’s lives, elites and politicians excepted , is going to diminish substantially. Oh Happy Days ahead.....

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Basic question from a novice: how does a residential electric utility customer (a ratepayer) know that they're experiencing a "rolling blackout"? Are they always announced in advance and identified as such? Or do customers just experience outages that are perhaps announced on local news sources (such as "x residents in y area without power...expected to restore at (some hours later)"), and perhaps a text msg from utility?

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The specifics will depend on where you are, but grid operators will likely have a system in place to notify customers. Any event usually starts with conservation requests, followed by notices to hold on tight. From my experience during the Texas blackouts in 2021, there were warnings and notices, but we didn't realize we were in a rolling outage until we woke up freezing in the middle of the night. By then there was enough reporting on it to understand what was happening. We never found out for sure why our area was hit so badly (our power came back for a very short period of time minutes every 4-6 hours) other than guessing we weren't in a critical zone. We had family closer to Dallas who experienced almost no outages at all.

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I was more wondering if blackouts due to insufficient generation/capacity is something utilities try to hide/masquerade in any way, or something that is revealed only after the fact by investigation. We're always notified that power "went out" somewhere in the area, but it's rarely attributed to any concrete cause (lines down, etc) -- it's just something that happened and then never hear anything else about it. And where I live you'd have to do some digging to find out if it happened on a broader scale.

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Most outages are going to be distribution line problems due to weather etc. The utilities have a hard time hiding it when there aren’t enough reliable power plants because they generally put out a call asking people to use less power.

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