Can We Meet Our Greenhouse Gas Emissions Goals or Are We Going to Freeze in the Dark?

Well folks, we might be in trouble.  We may be running out of electricity.  I know… I know.  Electricity happens when I turn the switch on, and it has come on so far so why the gloom and doom. 

Well, this week in Texas where the temperature has been running over 100 degrees, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) issued a warning to residents that there could be blackouts coming and asked Texans to turn-up their thermostats and not run major appliances from 2 p.m. to 8 pm.  ERCOT repeated the requests again Wednesday asking for reduced energy consumption from 2 pm to 9 pm and narrowly avoided black outs although some customers did lose power.  This follows up statements by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. (FERC) in May that warned of similar outages throughout roughly two-thirds of the United States this summer. Mark Christie, a FERC Commissioner stated that “We are headed toward a reliability crisis.  Utilities are moving too quickly towards wind and solar, which fluctuate in their power output, and away from fossil fuel power plants.  We’re just not ready yet.”  FERC members can be counted among the green new deal acolytes, and one suspects this warning was more of a “we told you so” to cover their butts statement than a change of heart on energy policy.

So why do we care?  When the power goes out, we are extremely annoyed as it interrupts our favorite shows, knocks us off Tik Tok, and we are required to play flashlight freeze tag with our kids until the power comes back on, but what if the power doesn’t come back on?   We have let our unquestioned reliance on electricity put ourselves at risk.  To survive, we need to keep from freezing in the winter and having a heat stroke in the summer.  As a result of modern building codes, most homes no longer have fireplaces which were omnipresent in the olden days, pre-1980’s society. Without fireplaces, even if we were prescient enough to stock up on a cord of wood, we can’t save ourselves in the case of a long term or perhaps even short-term electrical outages.  Similarly, back in the day, we went to our wells or the river with our water buckets.  Now municipal water systems and private wells have electric pumps which, if they fail, … no water. Our smokehouses and root cellars are gone. We have no ice man to keep our food from spoiling. Electricity has given us the freedom to abandon these old practices that we used to have in order to survive. Instead, we are betting our lives and security on the continued availability of electricity.  That bet may not be so good anymore.

This reliance on continual electricity has not previously been a problem since our electrical systems have been engineered with multiple redundancies to handle not only failure of various energy systems but increased demand when circumstances (i.e. heat, cold, charging EV’s, and watching the Super Bowl etc.) place unusual demands on the system. Over the years, we have created a system of reliable energy sources to supply our power plants.  The most reliable are coal and nuclear.  These fuel sources for power plants are located on site and not subject to interruption.  These plants are available at all times, except for maintenance, and have been the backbone of our reliable energy system. The next reliable is natural gas.  It too can be on all the time, but the fuel is delivered to the power plant in pipelines. When the pipeline infrastructure breaks, no gas, no electricity. Over the last 10 years or so, utility companies have replaced reliable coal fired power plants with mostly reliable gas plants since with the advent of fracking, natural gas became plentiful, cheap with about ½ the emissions of coal.

Then all fossil fuels became bad.  The government moved to drive coal from the country to be replaced by solar and relatively new wind technology.  I say relatively for wind since we all have seen the cute little windmills in the Netherlands which were abandoned after World War I for cheaper electricity, and gasoline, the last time wind power didn’t make any sense.  The problem that arises is while nuclear, coal and for the most part natural gas are available all the time, wind and solar are not.

The wind does not blow all the time. Solar does not work at night.  Don’t question this, it’s science man.  A wind farm is productive on average 24% of the theoretical maximum capacity of the farm.   I couldn’t figure out the same statistic for solar farms because there were so many propaganda sites saying how cool it was, but let’s say for our purposes, it operates 50% of the time (day/night), minus when there are too many clouds, and uh also minus when snow covers the panels, and yeah maybe minus if the panels get too dirty so ..let’s say “less” than 50% to be kind to the solar industry.  But what about all those great batteries you say?  Well, to get a perspective of where we are at currently, a smart guy who knows told me if all the electricity went out in the United States, and we used every bit of our battery power, we could last for 17 minutes. 

But back to Texas. In February 2021, the state went dark for an extended amount of time when energy sources of all types went down.  As it got colder and colder, people turned up their heat to stay warm, Of course, solar and wind of which Texas has a substantial capacity failed immediately, no surprise, but then the usually reliable gas infrastructure, pipelines etc. froze taking gas fired electric plants off the grid.  With increased demand and decreased number of reliable coal and nuclear power plants, the state went black, and the people froze.  The cries from the Greens were better grid, better grid, but during the freeze, it was cold everywhere and other locations had their own supply problems.

Over the last few years, we have closed reliable nuclear and coal fired power plants and have replaced them with unreliable solar and wind farms.  It’s like turning in your old car for a new one that only starts 25% of the time.  Despite conservation and efficiency efforts, demand for electricity is going up, not down.  We have placed more demands on our system with our new subsidized electric vehicles, appliances and heat pumps.  We have more powerful computing system needs.  We are installing 5G infrastructure and a million other things that require more electricity while at the same time diminishing reliable electric production capacity. 

Colorado has announced that 80% of the utility sector will be carbon free by 2030 and zero carbon by 2050.  If we run out of power, we will get it from the “grid”, but everyone else on the grid is going zero carbon too. So, with Joe Biden vowing to eliminate (transition) the fossil fuel industry, who are these fools who are going build and operate coal or gas fired power plants that have excess power close enough to save us?

There is probably nothing we can do to save ourselves from rolling black outs this summer, except to buy a generator with a lot of diesel fuel or move to Canada, but perhaps we can urge our representatives and utility companies that they should backoff on their zero carbon plans. We can’t tell if the worldwide carbon dioxide reduction movement will work.  (Actually, I know, but that is for another time.)  What we do know is that going zero carbon in the utility sector now without a reliable carbon or nuclear supply of power would be a disaster and the people will suffer.