When the Grid Freezes: Brutal Energy Reality and the Cost of Wishful Thinking
Here’s an equation for you: cold weather that alarmists failed to predict plus an energy system they wrecked equals misery and danger. Who says math isn’t fun?
Uh that’d be people living with the ensuing nightmare, and possibly the activists scrambling to disconnect the variables lest it cause talk. Or disconnect the heater.
The New York Times “Climate Forward” has the brilliant thought that if the politicians and zealots have made the grid unable to keep you warm in a storm, you should turn off the heating and get paid.
But there really is no denying first that this storm underlines how vulnerable we are to weather if the power isn’t reliable, and second that winter ain’t dead yet.
And the good news is, some of the usual suspects aren’t denying it.
As Philip K. Dick rightly said:
“Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.”
Including that cold is more dangerous than heat globally to humans, a tropical species. As for instance in this story from ABC News:
“About 4,000 buildings in Kyiv remained without heating Wednesday, and nearly 60 percent of the Ukrainian capital was without power, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, after days of Russian bombardment of Ukraine’s power grid.
With temperatures falling as low as minus 20 C (minus 4 F) in Kyiv, Ukraine is seeing one of the coldest winters in years, deepening the hardship of Ukrainians almost four years after Russia launched a full-scale invasion.”
Russia doesn’t make its most pointed attacks on Ukraine’s grid in summer to shut down the AC. It waits for winter.
Reality also includes the fact that, despite what we were told, cold winters are not something relegated to history books about, say, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. We’re having one now.
And it includes that when the cold weather comes, even without Vladimir Putin shooting at it, the grid can be in trouble in winter even in the United States, fabulously wealthy by historical standards.
And thus Bloomberg Green fretted on Jan. 24 that “Warning signs are already flashing for the grid” while Heatmap wrote two days later:
“The Grid Survived the Storm. Now Comes the Cold.”
As Inside Climate News notes, after blaming the storm on, what else, warming:
“More than a foot of snow fell across the U.S. from Arkansas to Massachusetts, with some places seeing nearly two feet. Ice blanketed much of the South, bringing down tree limbs and knocking out power from Texas to North Carolina.
At least 20 people were killed during the storm, and thousands are navigating power loss, dangerous travel conditions and freezing temperatures. More than 600,000 homes and businesses were without power as of Monday afternoon.”
Now comb their archives for predictions that decades of relentless heating and the Orange Bad Man in the White House will cover Arkansas in snow. But once it happens, they fearlessly predict it, invoking the ‘scientists’ who say:
“Scientists agree that human-caused warming has changed the way air and energy move around the planet in complex and interrelated ways that influence outbreaks of extreme winter weather. The current cold wave is not happening in isolation, but in a fundamentally altered climate system.
At a basic level, the oceans are warmer and the atmosphere holds more moisture than 50 or 100 years ago. Both fuel stronger storms, including nor’easters, which have intensified significantly in recent decades, according to a 2024 study.”
And they fearlessly blame Trump for cold putting lives at risk:
“A sprawling winter storm that left hundreds of thousands without power, grounded thousands of flights and disrupted travel across the eastern half of the U.S. could be the first real test of the second Trump administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The president has said that he wants to eliminate FEMA, and the agency has lost thousands of employees since his second term began. Emergency-management experts have braced for the moment that a weakened FEMA would face a multi-state disaster.”
At the risk of seeming indelicate, even vulgar, what about all those blue states that bet their citizens’ furnace on wind and solar and are now experiencing blue fingers, toes and noses?
How odd. Not a word do they say.
As Ryan Maue put it bluntly:
“Report: Texas renewables ghosted the state during extreme weekend cold. ‘Wind, solar, and batteries fell from briefly supplying ~63 percent of generation to ~seven percent within roughly 48 hours.’ Grid is up + demand met by coal/gas/nuclear”.
And Matthew Wielicki even more bluntly wrote “Renewables fail right when you need them most!” above a split-screen photo of solar panels covered in snow and a helicopter de-icing the blades of a wind turbine.
The latter in particular is worth a thousand words on which energy you call on in a crisis, since the helicopter is definitely burning high-octane petroleum fuel.
See more here climatediscussionnexus.com
Header image: Birmingham Mail