Progressive Speak Can’t Hide Increasingly Ghastly Grid

America’s power grid is increasingly unreliable, WSJ says, and “likely to get worse before it gets better” as a rising number of outages are latest stresses on an aging power system, a changing climate & a power-plant fleet going green too fast. How ghastly is it?

A WSJ review of federal data shows the alarming trend: “In 2000, there were fewer than two dozen major disruptions … in 2020, the number surpassed 180. Utility customers on average experienced just over 8 hours of power interruptions in 2020, more than double the amount in 2013. The data doesn’t include 2021, but those numbers are certain to follow the trend after a freak freeze in Texas, a major hurricane in New Orleans, wildfires in California and a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest left millions in the dark for days.”

The timing couldn’t be worse as the Covid pandemic forced millions to work from home and use its reliance on ever-proliferating electrical gadgetry while the grid itself is “undergoing the largest transformation in its history … the pace of change, hastened by market forces and long-term efforts to reduce carbon emissions, has raised concerns that power plants will retire more quickly than they can be replaced, creating [still more] strain on the grid at a time when other factors are converging to weaken it.” Hmm. That sounds a lot like progressive speak for “we’re fudging up the conversion to alternative forms of energy and naively insisting all uses of fossil fuels are the devil’s invention.

Davd Soul