Modern society is heavily dependent on electric power. Our power systems were designed by competent engineers and operated by skilled staff, so until fairly recently people have generally been able to count on having electricity in their homes and businesses on demand, even during periods of extreme weather. Historically, the U.S. power grid has proven remarkably resilient.

Sadly, as political considerations have increasingly trumped basic physics and engineering, electric power failures have become more common in the past couple of decades in the United States. The decline in the reliability of the electric power system is directly attributable to politicians requiring and incentivizing the replacement of weather-independent sources of electric power (coal, natural gas, and nuclear) with intermittent, variable wind and solar power.

Contrary to the claims of politicians and profiteering utilities, the increase in wind and solar power was not driven by market forces. Through mandates, subsidies, tax credits, and regulations, politicians brought America’s power system to the brink of failure in a single generation. The U.S. electricity grid is quickly reaching a tipping point as ever-more green energy is forcibly incorporated and increasing numbers of reliable power plants are taken offline.

This crisis is the result of laws and policies designed to prevent climate change, not climate change itself. Absent political interference in the electric power grid, climate change would not threaten power reliability. The supply and use of coal, natural gas, and nuclear fuel are largely unaffected by climate.

A large-scale power grid consists of two segments: baseload power and peaking power. Baseload power is the minimum amount of energy needed for the grid to function properly while delivering power to every user who needs it during a normal day. The grid requires a consistent flow of power. Coal, nuclear, hydropower (in some areas), and to a lesser extent natural gas satisfied the nation’s baseload demand for the past century because they operate fulltime with onsite backup, usually in the form of diesel boilers, to provide power during routine maintenance or breakdowns.

Peaking power is the additional power needed when the system is faced with unusual amounts of demand, such as July and August in the South when air-conditioner use soars along with summer temperatures. Demand also increases during the cold winters in northern states. Natural gas has commonly served to provide peaking power because natural gas plants can be built to scale. Fuel can usually be delivered as needed, and power can be cycled on and off quickly based on demand.

Neither wind nor solar can be relied on for either baseload or peaking power. Wind turbines generate power only when the wind blows between certain speeds, and the power they generate fluctuates constantly along with wind gusts. Solar panels provide no power at night or when covered by snow, ice, or soot, and only reduced power on cloudy days and during storms. Except on completely cloudless days with clear skies, the power generated by solar panels fluctuates second by second with the passage of clouds.

Designing a power system that depends on the weather cooperating is idiotic. Over the past two decades, however, that is the electric power system politicians in the United States and other developed countries have increasingly forced on the public.

In most states, lawmakers require a set minimum amount of power come from wind or solar power, regardless of the costs and the reliability problems it creates. On top of that, federal, state, and local subsidies have encouraged wind and solar to continue growing beyond the minimum amount set by states.

With taxpayers and ratepayers often being forced to pick up more than 50 percent of the cost, wind and solar generators make a profit while selling electricity into the power grid below what it costs them to produce and deliver to users. As a result, dozens of coal-fueled power plants, accounting for tens of thousands of megawatts of reliable baseload electric power capacity, have closed across the country.

Texans experienced the downside of renewable energy in mid-February when more than eight million people lost power during a bitter cold spell. In early June, more than a month before Texas’ peak power demand normally occurs, the state’s energy regulator issued warnings of pending failures, asking people to cut back on power use.

In the aftermath of the February blackouts, which resulted in more than 150 preventable deaths, the Texas legislature fiddled while the power grid fizzled. Instead of confronting the fundamental cause of increasingly common power shortfalls—the government’s continuing tax support for wind and solar power—the legislature tinkered around the edges, changing who could serve on the state’s Electric Reliability Council.

In California, the state most reliant on wind and solar power, rolling blackouts have been the norm every summer over the past decade. If the Biden administration has its way and shuts reliable baseload fossil fuel power sources for electricity and replaces them with wind and solar, California-style blackouts will become a regular feature across the United States.

Looking abroad, Australia and Germany serve as instructive examples of the perils of overreliance on renewable energy sources. Both countries have abundant coal resources but have suffered repeated blackouts and brownouts in recent years, and even more threats of the same, as they replaced fossil fuel-powered, weather-independent power plants in favor of wind and solar.

Since 2000, when Germany launched Energiewende (German for “energy transition”) replacing coal and nuclear plants with wind and solar facilities, the average cost of electricity for German ratepayers has more than doubled. In 2019, German households paid “34 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 22 cents per kilowatt-hour in France and 13 cents in the United States, according to data from IEEE Spectrum,” reports the Techstartups blog.

In Germany, power blackouts, rolling brownouts, and restrictions on electricity use to prevent blackouts and brownouts have become all too common, in winter and summer alike. As Pierre Gosselin writes at No Tricks Zone,

Before the days of climate alarmism and hysteria, the job of deciding how to best produce electricity was left to power generation engineers and experts—people who actually understood it. The result: Germany had one of the most stable and reliable power grids worldwide,

Then in the 1990s, environmental activists, politicians, climate alarmists and pseudo-experts decided they could do a better job at generating power in Germany. … Fast forward to today: The result of all the government meddling is becoming glaringly clear: the country now finds itself on the verge of blackouts due to grid instability, has the highest electricity prices in the world, relies more on imports and is not even close to meeting its emissions targets.

Germany’s rickety and moody power grid now threatens the entire European power grid stability, as we recently witnessed.

Commenting on the decline of Germany’s modern electric power system, a post at Stop These Things in January stated,

Power rationing is the only thing that’s preventing a total collapse of Germany’s grid; during the first week of January the country narrowly avoided widespread blackouts following the total collapse in wind and solar output.

But, if you relegate engineers to the status of well-meaning idiots, and supplant them with green ideologues with gender studies degrees, get ready for chaos. Which is precisely where ‘green’ energy obsessed Germany now finds itself.

These remarks apply just as aptly to the electric power situation in California and increasingly in Texas. Unless politicians take note of the realities that make a modern power grid work—which means halting the replacement of baseload fossil fuel and nuclear power plants with intermittent wind and solar power—outages, brownouts, and electricity rationing will soon become the rule, not the exception, across the entire United States.

Weather, like wind and solar power, is fickle. No large-scale electric power system should ever rely on wind and solar power for a substantial portion of its supply. As Germany, California, and Texas demonstrate, to do so is to court catastrophic, life-threatening failures.

SOURCES: Catallaxy Files; Techstartups; Boston Herald; Texas Scorecard; No Tricks Zone; Stop These Things; Energy Professionals

This article was originally published on Heartland.org. Used with permission.

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash.