President Biden and his appointees frequently talk about a clean energy future in which carbon-emitting fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are all replaced by windmills and rainbows. But that future is a lot colder and darker than they admit.
Four million Texans found themselves without power this past week. Frozen windmills are not exclusively to blame, as some have suggested, but Texans are nevertheless getting a small taste of what it is like to live with unreliable power. For some of them, it is an unpleasant reminder of what it was like before they got out of California.
Both Texas’s windmills and its gas pipelines can be winterized for the future, but no one can make the wind blow harder at times of peak demand.
In California, where the adoption of renewable energy has been a more consciously ideological choice, consumers pay between 60% and 100% more for their electricity than the national average. But worse than the cost is what consumers get in exchange for paying more. California has the nation’s least reliable electrical grid, with more than twice as many outages as any other state, including Texas and New York, between 2009 and 2018. Last September, one of the state’s utility companies was reduced to begging customers to set their air conditioning to 78 degrees or higher and turn off all large appliances. Rolling blackouts are simply an accepted part of life there, even though it’s 2021.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/t...s-and-nuclear-power/ar-BB1dOCln?ocid=msedgntp
Four million Texans found themselves without power this past week. Frozen windmills are not exclusively to blame, as some have suggested, but Texans are nevertheless getting a small taste of what it is like to live with unreliable power. For some of them, it is an unpleasant reminder of what it was like before they got out of California.
Both Texas’s windmills and its gas pipelines can be winterized for the future, but no one can make the wind blow harder at times of peak demand.
In California, where the adoption of renewable energy has been a more consciously ideological choice, consumers pay between 60% and 100% more for their electricity than the national average. But worse than the cost is what consumers get in exchange for paying more. California has the nation’s least reliable electrical grid, with more than twice as many outages as any other state, including Texas and New York, between 2009 and 2018. Last September, one of the state’s utility companies was reduced to begging customers to set their air conditioning to 78 degrees or higher and turn off all large appliances. Rolling blackouts are simply an accepted part of life there, even though it’s 2021.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/t...s-and-nuclear-power/ar-BB1dOCln?ocid=msedgntp