Blizzard Exposes The Perils Of Attempting To ‘Electrify Everything’
The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.
That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels.
But attempting to electrify everything would concentrate our energy risks on an electricity grid that is already breaking under the surge in demand caused by the crazy cold weather. Across America, countless people don’t have electricity. I’m one of them. Our power here in central Austin went out at about 3 am. I am writing this under a blanket, have multiple layers of clothes on, and am nervously watching my laptop’s battery indicator.
This blizzard proves that attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if — or rather, when — a widespread or extended blackout occurs.
This blizzard proves that we have not been taking our energy security seriously enough. The concept of energy security has many aspects. But the most fundamental one is that we all have enough reliable and affordable energy (of whatever type) so that we don’t freeze to death during cold spells like the one now wreaking havoc across the continent.
This blizzard proves that during extreme weather winter, solar panels and wind turbines are of little or no value to the electric grid.
This blizzard proves that our natural gas grid is part of our critical infrastructure and that we shut it down at our peril. The natural gas network is essential because it can deliver big surges in energy supplies during periods of peak demand. In January 2019, U.S. natural gas demand set a record of 145 billion cubic feet per day. That record will be smashed during this blizzard, and daily volumes will exceed 150 Bcf. That is an enormous amount of energy. In fact, on the coldest days of winter, the amount of energy delivered by the gas grid is roughly three times as great as the energy consumed during the hottest days of the summer.
During peak cold events like this one, the gas grid delivers about 80 Bcf/d to homes and businesses. In energy equivalent terms, that’s roughly 83 trillion Btu, or the energy output of about 1 terawatt of electric generation capacity for 24 hours. Put another way, to equal the 80 Bcf/d of gas delivered during cold snaps, the U.S. would need an electric grid as large as all existing generation in the country, which is currently about 1.2 terawatts.
Thanks to excellent geology, a century of gas production, and a fully developed transmission and distribution grid, the domestic natural gas sector can deliver surges of the fuel that are, in fact, lifesaving. That is due, in large part, to the fact that we can store vast amounts of gas and only tiny quantities of electricity. In short, our electric grid simply cannot deliver the massive amounts of energy needed during the winter to keep us from freezing to death. That means we need to keep burning natural gas. If you prefer to rely on batteries, be my guest.
It’s essential to note that the blizzard and blackouts that are paralyzing the country are occurring at roughly the same time that some of America’s most famous activists and politicians are saying we should quit using all hydrocarbons and dozens of cities across the country are imposing bans on the use of natural gas.
On January 22, Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and arguably America’s most famous environmentalist, published an article in the New Yorker in which he said if there is a “basic rule of thumb for dealing with the climate crisis, it would be: stop burning things” including natural gas. McKibben says we should shift our energy needs to solar and wind energy.
Six days later, on January 28, in his state of the city address, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared that New York City will “renounce fossil fuels fully” and “ban fossil fuel connections in the city by the end of this decade, literally ensuring that our only choice is renewable energy.”
As I showed in a report last year for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, dozens of communities in California have banned or restricted the use of natural gas. According to the Sierra Club, 42 California communities have now imposed bans. So has the city of Seattle. In Massachusetts, about a dozen towns have partnered with the Rocky Mountain Institute, which recently got a $10 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund, to advocate for the right to ban the use of natural gas in homes and commercial buildings.
In addition to being bad for energy security, these bans are a form of regressive tax on the poor and the middle class because they compel consumers to use electricity, which costs four times more than natural gas on an energy equivalent basis. Despite these very cold facts, it is certain that the efforts to ban natural gas and electrify everything will continue.
I am pro-electricity and electrification. Over the past year, I’ve published a book (A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations) and co-produced a documentary (Juice: How Electricity Explains the World) that spotlights electricity and why we need many terawatts of new generation capacity to bring the 3 billion people in the world who are now living in energy poverty out of the dark and into the bright lights of modernity. But more than being pro-electricity, I am pro-human. The ongoing blizzard is proving our vulnerability to extreme weather events and it is showing that we can’t rely on electricity alone.
Events like the September 11 attacks, Superstorm Sandy, and the coronavirus proved that we need to must make our society more resilient to threats of all kinds. A robust natural gas grid helps our resilience. Electrifying everything will do the opposite.
About the author: Robert Bryce is the host of the Power Hungry Podcast. An author and journalist, Bryce has been writing about energy, politics, and the environment for more than 30 years. He has published six books in which he has covered numerous topics including Enron’s bankruptcy, the rise of Texas, corn ethanol, digital drilling rigs, renewables, batteries, nuclear energy, and the future of the electric grid. He is a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.
More at www.forbes.com
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Power Grab
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I am in my seventh decade of life. I have lived within about 100 miles of where I currently all that time.
Last night I learned that–for the first time in my life–residents of the “power pool” where I live are being asked to reduce our usage of electricity so we can (possibly) stave off the need to do rolling blackouts during the coldest weather event I have ever experienced in my life.
All the years the True Believers of CAGW have been spouting their nonsense, I have wondered how far they would get in destroying our energy infrastructure. I wondered if I would live long to see their ideas proven to be the insanely bad ideas they are. I have wondered how well wind turbines and solar panels would serve our needs in the dead of a severe winter.
I hope everyone is paying attention!
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Alam
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Melanie Phillips commenting today about this said “the only sure renewable is climate madness”. I would make it more general and say it is human madness.
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RT
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Check out this https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/15/texas-frozen-wind-power-outages-ensue-electricity-now-at-unheard-of-9000-per-megawatt-hour/ Genius at work. How not to power the modern world. Just ask the UK, Germany, Australia. One heck of a Solar Minimum winter. All to save us from the non-crisis of CO2. Yet China has more coal plants built in the last year than exist in the rest of the world for capacity.
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Bevan Dockery
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Why is China building coal fired power stations at a great rate while the rest of the World is closing them down? Because they known that CO2 induced global warming is a hoax. The UN IPCC was set up to cripple the capitalist economies by demonising fossil fuel because cheap power from fossil fuel was the source of their success.
CO2 has not, does not and cannot cause global warming through the Greenhouse Effect, namely back radiation, in the same way as a household thermos flask does not cause heating of its contents through back radiation. It contradicts the Laws of Thermodynamics.
52% of the incoming Sun’s radiation is in the infrared. If there was a Greenhouse Effect then the Sun’s infrared would have been back radiated out into space before it could warm the Earth’s surface. The Earth would have got colder with increasing CO2 concentration if there was a Greenhouse Effect. It has not happened. The UN has promulgated the greatest hoax in the history of mankind and our Governments have fallen for it.
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very old white guy
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just one more hoax along with the whu who flu and the election.
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Dev
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It seems that a resurrection of the topic of “Russian Abiogenic theory of hydrocarbon synthesis” is now long over due.
HC fuel scarcity is the true kingpin in the reasoning or justification behind all these political crisis that emanate from the parasite class.
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Carbon Bigfoot
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What we need is a base load coal plant (intermediate) and nuclear power plant (long term). Natural Gas is great to back up coal and nuclear for maintenance but a GRID based upon NG is not reliable. When you have to rely upon under sized capacity pipelines to deliver the fuel which are always a problem in the winter due to freeze-up and normal maintenance, or unless you have extensive storage capacity you risk unplanned interruptions. By comparison Coal is easily stock piled at the Generator Site. Nuclear rods are easily stock piled at the plant.
Those of you have never worked in the Nat.Gas Industry don’t understand that capacity is limited to the numbers of generators that need to be sequenced to meet the demand and unit maintenance. And although the burners (generators) have great turn-down ratio of 10 t0 1 the control system for all these devices is an integration nightmare. Just ask windmill/solar operators what their back-up NG generators require.
If it were up to me I would utilized modular thorium reactors located at Industrial Sites and in Suburban Locations to power residences. That reduces/eliminates the threat of a major Grid outage being catastrophic.
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Andy Rowlands
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This is what happens when you rely far too much on Unreliables, and they freeze up.
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Andrew Pilkington
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Well Germany certainly got a kick in their Renewables, didn’t they.
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RT
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Here is the esteemed communist mayor of NYC.https://michaelsavage.com/recognize-this-guy/
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