Underpowered Civilization

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Underpowered Civilization

The communists running Cuba have demonstrated this year that they can’t quite keep the lights on. There’s nothing in their governing philosophy that keeps power plants and the electric infrastructure maintained and energized. Hence, a few failures here and there have left the island in the dark time and again.

There’s also not a lot in the green ideology obsessed with climate change that keeps the electric system viable anywhere else. But the ideology’s hostility to the sources of power generation that work means that the ideology is pushing hard in the direction of shortages and blackouts. The grid operator for the mid-Atlantic states recently warned a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission panel that ongoing efforts to shutter so many thermal power plants will soon risk leaving tens of millions shivering in the dark.

[Aftab Khan, executive vice president of operations at PJM Interconnection] told attendees at the conference that the hastened retirement of traditional baseload fuel generation—coal, natural gas and nuclear—and the impact of government policies will cut into the grid’s supply significantly. “Approximately 40,000 MW of generation will retire between 2022 and 2030, which is approximately 21 percent of PJM’s current 192,000 MW installed generation capacity.”

This rather foolish state of planning is in response to environmentalist pressures: let there be no doubt. The result will be less reliable electricity, not to mention drastically rising electricity rates once expensive unreliable sources like wind and solar are added to the grid, where they elevate costs in tandem with green hopes and dreams.

Power outages are always most likely on the hottest days of summer and the coldest days of winter, when indoor/outdoor temperature differentials mean that energy demand is at its highest, when every on-demand power plant is running full-tilt. Having too few reliable thermal power plants on hand will lead to foreseeable outcomes. And there will be too few power plants if all the planned data centers are added to the PJM grid in the next 15 years. The data centers’ demand for electricity by 2039 is estimated to account for 16 percent of the whole.

Data centers cannot be permitted to skip a beat, much less fail. They will therefore have priority for electricity under any circumstances. Whatever they have to pay for that priority they can pass along to their data subscribers.

It’s unfortunate that no one running for office and too few reporting on it are curious about such details. This would seem to be an issue worthy of public debate, rather than something implemented by the administrative state on everyone’s behalf without the average citizen’s input.

As the green policies have been implemented over everyone’s heads, our residential rates have jumped in recent years as West Virginia’s more populous neighboring states and federal regulators have forced viable coal power plants to shut down. Our residential rates on average are a jot over 15 cents per kilowatt-hour now. By restricting supply while demand rises, we can all look forward to California-like rates of double that in the near future.

Meanwhile, our global competitors *cough*China*cough* are doing all they can to make electricity as cheap and abundant as conceivable. No amount of import tariffs is going to make up for that type of industrial-economic self-gelding.