{"id":264096,"date":"2023-06-27T12:16:17","date_gmt":"2023-06-27T10:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=264096"},"modified":"2023-06-27T12:16:20","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T10:16:20","slug":"planned-for-failure-shutdown-coal-fired-power-plants-get-ready-for-blackouts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=264096","title":{"rendered":"Planned For Failure: Shutdown Coal-Fired Power Plants & Get Ready For\u00a0Blackouts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From STOP THESE THINGS<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Power grids are finally balanced affairs that were never designed for the haphazard occasional delivery of wind and solar. Maintaining voltage and frequency within critical defined tolerances is a cinch with conventional generators, like nuclear, gas and coal-fired plants, which deliver the goods, around-the-clock and irrespective of the weather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around 20 years ago, deranged zealots hijacked energy policy and they have no appreciation of any of the simple facts above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather, as with any cult, they simply cling to their founding myth, ignoring any unhelpful fact, deriding those who might point to reality as dangerous heretics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, as Robert Louis Stevenson pointed out, sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences. Reality bites, often with a vengeance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so it is in the USA, where its Environment Protection Agency has set out to destroy every last coal-fired power plant in the country, despite the obvious and inevitable result: total collapse of America\u2019s power grid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robert Bryce provides the details below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FERC Warns Congress Electricity Grid Facing \u2018Catastrophic\u2019 Failure<\/strong>
Principa Scientific International
Robert Bryce
29 May 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On May 4, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission delivered stark warnings to the members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The agency\u2019s acting chairman, Willie Phillips, told the senators:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation\u2019s electric system.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FERC Commissioner Mark Christie echoed Phillips\u2019 warning, saying the U.S. electric grid is \u201cheading for a very catastrophic situation<\/a> in terms of reliability.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His colleague, Commissioner James Danly, averred that there is a \u201clooming reliability crisis<\/a> in our electricity markets.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The commissioners pointed to several factors for the reliability crisis, including numerous coal plants<\/a> that are being retired prematurely, insufficient pipeline capacity<\/a> to assure natural gas can be delivered to power plants, insufficient high-voltage transmission capacity, and distortions in the electricity market caused by massive federal subsidies<\/a> for weather-dependent renewables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the last point, Danly told the senators:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFERC has allowed the markets to fall prey to the price distorting and warping effects of subsidies and public policies that have driven the advancement of large quantities of intermittent renewable resources onto the electric system.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his written testimony<\/a>, Danly went further, saying \u201cMost of these market-distorting forces originate with subsidies \u2014 both state and federal \u2014 and from public policies that are otherwise designed to promote the deployment of non-dispatchable wind and solar assets or to drive fossil-fuel generators out of business as quickly as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Danly continued:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe subsidies available to renewable generators are so lucrative that, when participating in procurement auctions, they are able to offer at a price of zero instead of their actual cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The market signal thereby created is that these new resources can be built for free, and thus the cost of power is also free. This, of course, is untrue, and the inevitable consequence is market-wide price suppression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The price suppression deprives other market participants of much-needed revenue, leading to the premature retirement of the dispatchable generators which have to offer into the market at their true costs in order to remain viable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During questioning of the FERC commissioners, the chairman of Senate ENR, Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, asked all of the commissioners a simple question: can the electric grid as it exists today be reliable without coal-fired generation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of the commissioners said no, with Christie saying \u201cWe need to keep coal for the foreseeable future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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