Sunday, July 27, 2014

Late 70's there was a song called "Freeze a Yankee":

now looks like they're going to do it to themselves.
In a hell-bent campaign to rid itself of any form of dirty, messy “non-renewable” energy, New England has been closing down coal and oil plants for the last decade. In 2000, 18 percent of New England’s electricity came from coal and 22 percent from oil. Today it’s 3 percent coal and 1 percent oil. Meanwhile, natural gas — the fuel that everybody loves until you have to drill for it — has risen from 15 percent to a starkly vulnerable 52 percent, just behind California.

There’s only one problem. New England doesn’t have the pipelines to bring in the gas. Nor is anyone going to allowed to build it, either. Connecticut and Massachusetts are only a short distance from eastern Pennsylvania, where fracking for natural gas has leapfrogged the Keystone State into third place for overall energy production. Yet a proposal by Sempra Energy of Houston to expand its existing pipeline from Stony Point, New York, has already met fierce resistance from people who want nothing more to do with fossil fuels and construction is highly unlikely.
You might remember hearing that, during the nasty part of last winter, the grid in that region was right on the edge; turns out it was worse than 'on the edge', and with this idiocy...
And that’s just the beginning. New England is now limping along with 33,000 megawatts of electrical capacity, which barely meets its needs. At one auction last winter, the New England Independent Systems Operator, which manages the grid, came up 145 megawatts short — an almost unheard of occurrence. Yet in the next two years the region will be closing down 1/10th of its capacity in a bid to rid itself of anything that does not win favor with environmentalists. First to go will be the last of four coal plants at Salem Harbor, which can no longer meet the EPA’s new regulatory requirements. Next Brayton Point, the largest remaining coal plant, will be retired for the same reason. Finally, a continual barrage of protests and legislative attacks has persuaded Mississippi-based Entergy to close the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Station and “let the Yankees freeze in the dark,” as they used to say in Texas and Louisiana. The reactor provided 75 percent of Vermont’s electricity and 4 percent of the power for the region, carbon-free.
Friggin' amazing, isn't it?  They're actively trying to destroy industry and get people killed in the name of 'green energy'.  Apparently they weren't paying attention to what happened in Germany when they got rid of their nuke plants, and Scotland as well.

Or don't care; they may actually be that stupid.

5 comments:

Titan Mk6B said...

Not that I know a lot about the national grid but I wonder what will happen here when they come up so short that the lights go out up there.

Firehand said...

Like you, don't know enough to say. I doubt there's any way to move power from central US to there, though.

Though the politicians and greenies up there would damn sure demand it: "This is NYC/Boston/Whatever, we're more important than those peasants out west!"

Windy Wilson said...

There is a way to push power around on the grid to meet demand, I think it's called "wheeling". It was in the news some 10 years ago in California when people got busted for manipulating the cost of energy in the Enron scandal, and Governor Gray Davis got recalled and we got the other actor as governator.
I think it would be limited in some way by capacity of the high voltage wires used to move the electricity around the country.

Cormac said...

I wonder how long before they start screaming to have a few of the subs in Groton plugged into the grid...

Firehand said...

Bad wording on my part, should have put it as Windy did: I doubt enough line capacity to move the amounts needed to there.

That would be interesting, wouldn't it? "I don't care what's happening somewhere else, we're freezing HERE! Run a cable to that sub fast!"