Electricity providers must not beg the government to destroy them more slowly.
“I’m not saying now’s the time to double down” on fossil fuels, pleads Lanny Nickel, chief operating officer of Southwest Power Pool, which helps provide electricity to 14 states. “I’m just saying now’s the time to slow down on the removal of [those] assets from our footprint.”
The assets Nickel means are oil, gas, coal.
Like others in the business of keeping the lights on, Nickel knows that if and when the percentage of fossil fuels in the utility industry “footprint” is coercively reduced to point oh one percent or whatever, wind and sunshine will not be taking up the slack.
We’ll suffer, instead, from lots more brownouts and blackouts.
Nickel understands this.
But begging regulators and politicians to go slower won’t discourage them. They’ll just gloat about how they’re making the utility executives sweat.
We should in fact be doubling down on fossil fuels, because these are the only always-reliable sources of electricity.
Should solar and other sources of electricity become cheaper and more reliable, people won’t have to be compelled to increasingly turn to them. The transition would happen naturally, in the normal course of progress.
And the notion that government will be able to fine-tune global weather if only we are forcibly deprived of our means of coping with the ups and downs of the weather is a willful delusion.
Electricity providers must not beg the government to destroy them more slowly, sure. But more importantly, the government should not be destroying them — and us — in the name of the religion of Climate Change at all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Slow Murder Is Still Murder”
The closest thing to an “always-reliable” source of electricity would be nuclear. After that, hydro. Followed by solar. Whether wind or fossil fuels bottom out the list probably depends on the state of the infrastructure required to transport the fossil fuels to generation facilities.
“Always Reliable” must include nuclear along with coal, gas and oil.
Hasn’t California’s experience with renewable energy been enough to show us that the green energy push is a farce? CA has a relatively mild climate and yet its people have to endure rolling blackouts. Don’t forget the push to electric vehicles. How will utilities provide the power needed to charge all those batteries? We need all of the above. That means nuclear, coal, oil and natural gas. As our population grows, the need will grow. As of now, renewables are a niche product but they can’t meet the widespread demand for reliable power. When engineers develop a car battery that can go 500 miles on one charge and can be fully charged in under ten minutes, let them come back.
More expensive and less dependable energy will result in more deaths of folks that cannot afford to be without and that cannot tolerate the loss; the poor, the old, the infirm.