On Friday, multiple U.S. power companies issued an emergency request to customers to turn down their thermostats due to extreme cold and wind straining the power grid. The requests lasted until Christmas Eve on Saturday and were said to be a result of “unprecedented” demand for power during last week’s storm and cold weather.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which supplies power to more than 10 million customers and boasts that the power they deliver is “nearly 60 percent carbon-free,” was forced to use “planned intermittent interruptions” during the crisis to keep the system working.
“Due to the extreme cold and high winds, we have lost some generation,” said TVA Chief Operating Officer Don Moul.
Roughly two-thirds of the lower 48 states were affected by extreme cold and more than 315,000 homes and businesses lost power for a time due to intermittent blackouts. Energy suppliers blamed the circumstances on “a significant equipment failure.”
In an email to customers, WE Energies, which serves a large portion of Wisconsin, asked customers to “immediately lower their thermostats.”
“We Energies is urging customers to reduce their natural gas use by immediately lowering their thermostats to 60 to 62 degrees. The move will allow customers to stay safe, warm and help avoid a significant natural gas outage,” the email stated.
“This request comes after one of the interstate pipeline suppliers who provides natural gas to We Energies experienced a significant equipment failure that is limiting the amount of fuel they are sending We Energies.”
Pennsylvania-based energy provider PJM Interconnection, which serves customers in Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C., told customers to prepare for the possibility of rolling blackouts.
“It’ll be short-lived, we’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but it is a real possibility,” said Mike Bryson, PJM’s senior vice president for operations.
Texas, which faced winter blackouts last winter that killed 246 people according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, was again in an emergency situation due to the extreme cold and wind. However, large blackouts were avoided when the Electric Reliability Council of Texas requested an emergency order from the federal government, which allowed energy suppliers to turn on dormant coal and natural-gas plants to meet power needs.
So, in Texas, at least, it was fossil fuels to the rescue.
As Paul Homewood from Not a Lot of People Know That explains, “Texas has 35 GW of wind capacity, but output was running below 5 GW throughout Saturday, and down to 2 GW for much of the day. This certainly was not due to lack of wind, quite the opposite in fact. Whether wind power collapsed because of the winds being too strong, or because of freezing up, I do not know. But either way it was a weather related issue.”
So the wind plants were producing energy at less than 15 percent of capacity — in extremely windy conditions. Why, especially after a winter where the wind plants in Texas were much maligned due to their failure a year ago, did they again perform so poorly?
Could it be that so-called renewable energy sources are not the panacea that climate hysterics have made them out to be? This makes two years in a row that Texas wind generation has severely underperformed in a crisis situation.
President Biden and the climate lobby want “carbon free” electricity in America by 2035. How many Americans will have to freeze to death in order for them to get their wish? As this mini-crisis continues to demonstrate, the only reliable sources of power generation remain fossil fuels and nuclear power. At best, wind and solar power are secondary sources of power, and not suitable as primary sources of electricity generation.
Still, this is the future that climate hysterics and proponents of the “Great Reset” dream of — a world where electricity is a luxury instead of a necessity; a world where “rolling blackouts” are common, perhaps even scheduled so that the proletariat can plan their lives around them. They long for a world where a central authority controls your thermostat and how much hot water you can use for your shower.
