There are lessons to be drawn from the recent near-buckling of the U.S. energy grid under the stress of the winter, rumours of whose demise have been greatly exaggerated. And on RealClearWire Terry L. Headley wrote words of simultaneous praise and caution worth noting: “The modern American electric grid has become adept at avoiding disaster. Operators have more tools than ever: demand response, emergency imports, market signaling, conservation messaging, and sophisticated forecasting. What they do not have – at least not in sufficient quantity – is inexpensive, fuel-secure generation that can run whenever it is needed, regardless of weather.” Which he illustrates not by referring to power sources that aren’t able to run when needed but to natural gas. Not because it isn’t reliable, but because with so many people relying on it, prices sometimes spike making it expensive just when it’s most needed. Whereas, Headley points out, this didn’t use to happen when coal played a major role in the power grid.
Headley explains:
“When coal still dominated the grid, winter pricing behaved differently. Coal plants stored months of fuel on site. They did not compete with residential heating for delivery. They did not depend on pipeline pressure or wellhead performance. When cold arrived, they simply ran…. It is worth asking a simple, uncomfortable question: If coal still dominated the electric grid the way it once did, would this cold snap even matter? From a consumer perspective, the answer is largely no.”
Or as the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board notes in more pointed language:
“Thank Heaven for Coal Power in the Cold/ The energy source Biden tried to shut down rode to the deep-freeze rescue of the electric grid this weekend.”
Indeed. And could this actual situation be more different than the fantasies we were told, on the basis of which the grid is undergoing this fabled “green energy transition” from reliable and affordable to manky and gouging?
There comes a point where, you might expect, the people who created this situation would have something to say that didn’t involve how clever they were. Instead, humility evidently being as passe as snow or issues having two sides, the New York Times “Opinion Today” for January 28 offered us:
“It’s very cold. Just wait for the grid to fail. ‘The United States needs more energy to get through the cold snaps of the future. The question is where it will come from.’ – Robinson Meyer, contributing Opinion writer”
Meyer is also, in case you’ve been too busy with a life to track such things in detail, the founding editor of Heatmap Daily whose foibles often furnish grist for our non-wind mill. And if you believe he’s been beating the drums for more energy to get through, well, of course they’re “cold snaps”, winter having perished due to global warming, you really have been too busy. But anyone now saying hey, we need power because winter ain’t dead yet when it’s blindingly obvious needs to point to earlier similar declarations or risk being accused of peddling hindsight as insight.
As Headley observes, the U.S. grid is subject to fairly well-understood, one might even say predictable, problems because of what fanaticism has done to it in recent decades, including that business about price spikes, which are:
“exactly what happens during prolonged cold snaps. Residential heating takes priority. Storage withdrawals accelerate. Pipelines run near their limits. Power generators bid defensively to secure fuel. The result is predictable: spot gas prices spike at constrained hubs, wholesale electric prices follow, and utilities quietly rack up higher procurement costs. No blackout. No drama. Just higher bills. And high electric bills extract a quiet but relentless toll. They are not merely an inconvenience; they function as a regressive tax on households least able to absorb them and a hidden drag on the broader economy.”
Suddenly after years of pushing costly and useless renewables they are concerned about cost. It’s all fun and games from your tenured faculty position or government- and foundation-funded NGO. But in the real world it’s a slow, relentless, insidious disaster:
“For communities, persistently high power costs accelerate decline. Retail districts dim. Investment slows. Population loss follows opportunity. Utility shutoffs rise, charitable assistance is stretched thin, and local governments face growing pressure to subsidize basic services that were once affordable.”
Rather vindicating Conquest’s Second Law that large organisations typically run as if controlled by a secret cabal of their enemies, all these results and the policies that create them come from inside the house, from progressives forever touting their concern for the common person including “affordability”.
As Robert Bryce writes of New York state, “Electricity Bills Are Out Of Control Because Of Andrew Cuomo & ‘Green’ Madness”. And while not everyone is willing to say that it’s the fault of the people who did it, and their bad ideas (for instance closing nuclear plants because boo radiation or something), they’re increasingly willing to admit that it’s happening and it matters. Indeed, another Heatmap item complains that:
“Utilities Asked for a Lot More Money From Ratepayers Last Year/ A new PowerLines report puts the total requested increases at $31 billion – more than double the number from 2024.”
And they admit that it’s bad, even politician-bad:
“These rising costs have become increasingly politically contentious, with state and local politicians using electricity markets and utilities as punching bags. Newly elected New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill’s first two actions in office, for instance, were both aimed at effecting a rate freeze proposal that was at the center of her campaign.”
The problem is that when politicians lunge for short-term relief, and credit with voters, by refusing to allow producers to cover their costs, shortages get worse not better and real costs rise even if you hide them with subsidies and rules. Indeed, they tend to rise faster, because the laws of supply and demand are not something a legislature can repeal. And alas Heatmap does not delve into the awkward question of why power costs are rising.
Headley does, and it’s not pretty or a credit to politicians:
When the weather turns hostile, renewables become supplements, not solutions. That doesn’t mean renewables are useless. It means they are conditional. And conditional resources cannot set the reliability floor of a winter grid. Yet they increasingly shape the cost structure of the system. Renewable mandates, tax credits, and priority dispatch suppress energy prices when conditions are favorable, discouraging investment in dispatchable generation. But when conditions are unfavorable – when cold sets in and demand spikes – those same policies leave the grid leaning heavily on gas, with fewer alternatives available to keep prices in check.”
It’s especially infuriating to read in Bloomberg that:
“Capacity additions have been far slower in the US after power demand appeared to plateau decades ago. Now, the country is struggling to meet the needs of power-hungry data sectors following the rapid development of AI, leaving electricity markets very tight, said Samantha Dart, the co-head of global commodities research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.”
Power demand appeared to plateau? Who said that? Not the people opposing the green energy transition. The people peddling it, who now seem keen to disavow responsibility.
You can understand why. The “Energy Bad Boys” note how close the grid came to failure in “Winter Storm Fern”, and it’s not good being knocked over by a fern. It was especially close in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator area that went to Energy Emergency Alert 2 on Jan. 24 and:
“One reason for the EEA2 was likely that the wind decided not to show up for work during the storm, as wind speeds cratered due to the cold weather.”
As they then sneered:
“Of course, people like Jesse Jenkins took to Twitter to defend wind and solar during the storm, arguing that ‘different resources play different roles at different times’ as an attempt to obfuscate the fact that his preferred resources were doing badly when it mattered most. Richard Meyer of the American Gas Association had the perfect reply. If we build our energy systems to manage peak demands, then we would be foolish not to observe how each resource performs during those peaks.”
Say. There’s a plan. As is, they note, the U.S. Department of Energy’s emergency order to keep three of the dreaded coal plants running in MISO land.
Here is Milliband's UK, electricity prices have a significant suplemental charge tacked on to the general inflationary price rises, "To support the expansion of green energy generation capacity!" One of the reasons we have possibly the highest energy prices on the planet.