By Stop These Things
If your idea of progress means never having power when you need it most, and never being able to afford it when you do get it, then the grand wind and solar transition is for you.
Guaranteed to deliver a power pricing and supply calamity, every time, heavily subsidised wind and solar are said to be the “future”.
Vanessa Mendoza and Troy Senik take a look at what that wind and sun ‘powered’ future means for you.
Related: Here’s What Our Climate Overlords Fail To Understand About Fossil Fuels
In the year 2000, there were fewer than two dozen major power disruptions in the United States. In 2020, there were 180. How did our electricity get so much less reliable?
A number of factors are at work in the growing instability of the grid. For one thing, much of our electricity infrastructure is aging — over 70 percent of power lines are approaching the end of their lifecycle. For another, extreme weather events pose a significant danger given how much of the country’s electricity infrastructure is above ground.
One more significant part of the problem: the way we’re using renewable energy.
Because wind and solar power can’t provide electricity all of the time, they have to be backstopped by conventional energy sources. But as states around the nation require more renewables, the result is a grid that can’t always reliably keep the lights on. In 2022, the organization that monitors the grid warned that most of the country is going to be at an elevated risk for blackouts over the next five years.
Is America destined for a future of energy instability? The answer will depend on the choices we make going forward.
Full article …
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