Oh those idiot greenies.
The climate lobby wants to force all homes and buildings to shift to electric heating even though it is less efficient than gas furnaces in frigid weather. When temperatures fall below freezing, heat pumps consume more and more power. With a generation fleet that is more nat gas heavy than ever before, we are using twice as much gas to heat homes through electricity as we do with gas furnaces, former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Pat Wood told Bloomberg.
Population growth in the Sun Belt has increased the strain on the grid even as large numbers of coal and nuclear plants that provide baseload power have shut down owing to competition from heavily subsidized renewables and cheap natural gas. The Texas grid has become especially dependent on wind and gas.
Natural gas is usually a reliable power source that can ramp up when demand increases or wind power flags. But in very cold temperatures pipes can freeze and gas is diverted for heating. On Friday morning, wind power and temperatures in Texas both plunged. As electric demand hit a winter record, gas power generation doubled.
Worries about a gas shortage spurred the U.S. Department of Energy on Saturday to declare a grid emergency in Texas and ease emissions standards to allow gas plants to burn oil if necessary. Don t tell hapless Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, but oil comes to the grid s rescue during extreme weather not lithiumion batteries, which can tdischarge power for more than a few hours.
New England leaned on oil to generate 40% of its power this weekend even as its grid operator pleaded with customers to conserve power. New York s embargo on gas pipelines limits supply to New England, which depends on gas for heating and increasingly electricity as coal and nuclear plants have closed. But the region can t import enough liquefied natural gas in a pinch.
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While there wasnot a single cause for the power shortages, government policies to boost renewables snowballed and created problems that cascaded through the grid. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned about these system wide grid vulnerabilities in a report last month, as did a study commissioned by the Trump Department of Energy in 2017.
The climate lobby dismisses such warnings and blamed the weekend power outages on the bomb cyclone supposedly caused by climate change. But storms happened before climate change became the default political explanation for everything. The Christmas emergency was a near run disaster, and unless the political class wakes up, next time may be worse.
WSJ 12/27/2022
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