Save America’s grid!
By David Wojick |November 29th, 2022|Energy|53 Comments
It is no secret that America’s electric power grid is becoming unreliable. The secret is whose fault it is. Not knowing who to blame makes it hard to fix.
If I could get a show of hands I bet that almost no one has heard of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They are called NERC which rhymes with jerk. They are a private corporation endowed with federal authority to keep America’s lights on. NERC makes and enforces the regulations governing grid reliability in America. The looming threat of numerous blackouts is their fault. They have obviously failed to maintain reliability, which is their specific mission.
The grid is sick and getting sicker.
The reason for this growing unreliability is well established. It is the mad rush to replace reliable coals and nuclear power plants with weather dependent wind and solar power. This simply does not work and we are beginning to pay the price of folly. We must constrain and manage the penetration of renewables to maintain reliability. Given that battery costs are impossibly large, even assuming fantastic cost reductions, powering the grid with wind and solar is itself impossible. Reliability requires sufficient backup generation.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/30/save-americas-grid/
