America’s electricity supply is facing a daunting future.
A recent report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation places most of the country at high or elevated risk of electricity capacity shortfalls over the next decade.
That means more blackouts and brownouts. But thankfully, individual states are springing into action to protect their electricity grids.
The cause of the emerging grid problems is quite simple.
Reliable energy sources are being retired and replaced with less reliable, intermittent sources. Exacerbating the problem could be disruptions to natural gas supplies, which would fuel much of America’s remaining reliable electricity-producing plants.
The grid will be thrown out of balance between what American families and businesses demand and what the grid can supply. When that happens, blackouts and brownouts will occur.
The electricity grid’s multifront war begins with the Biden administration’s extreme green agenda.
The administration is forcing American families and businesses to use less reliable and more expensive wind and solar while simultaneously denying them access to affordable and clean coal, oil, and natural gas.
Thanks to the Biden administration, not only is building a new coal plant all but impossible, but perfectly good ones are being taken offline.
Now that the war on coal is all but complete, Biden is turning his army of bureaucrats on natural gas. Make no mistake: His recent decision to halt pending approvals of liquefied natural gas exports is but the first salvo.
We’ve seen this strategy play out before when environmentalists successfully stopped a major coal export terminal from being built in Washington state.
The playbook is clear: Ruin the economics of “undesirable” industries with policy, regulation and propaganda, while simultaneously using taxpayer money and mandates to bolster artificially the prospects of preferred energy sources.
The effect of these policies is already being felt. America’s electricity consumers have suffered increased power disruptions and higher prices in recent years, and many fear that it will get worse.
Then, the grid is facing threats from other sources, such as the sun.
We don’t often think about how weather on the sun could affect the grid, but it can. And while rare, a high-intensity geomagnetic storm on the sun could cause major disruptions here on Earth. In fact, it has happened before.
In 1859, in what is referred to as the Carrington Event, the sun sent a blast of electrically charged particles 91 million miles in our direction. The result was that telegraph systems around the world began to fail.
Just imagine what such an event would be like in today’s digitized world.
In addition, America’s enemies could detonate a nuclear weapon 30 miles or higher above Earth to create an electromagnetic pulse that would bombard the United States with the same sort of charged particles that could be produced by a major solar flare. The effect of such an attack, however, could be even worse.
We have experience with this as well, and we did it to ourselves, though not on purpose. The United States government conducted a nuclear weapons test 250 miles above the Earth’s surface in 1962 in an experiment called Starfish Prime that resulted in streetlights going dark and communications going silent in parts of Hawaii.
The grid is also facing increased physical threats and cyberattacks.
Thankfully, however, state legislatures across the country are springing into action.
Legislators in Kansas, for example, recently introduced House Bill 2620, which would not allow a power plant to be closed unless it is being replaced by something that preserves reliability and protects ratepayers.
A similar measure, Legislative Bill 1370, was recently introduced in Nebraska that would require that electricity suppliers first certify that any replacement electricity generation be capable of producing and dispatching at least as much electricity as the plant being replaced and that adequate transmission infrastructure is in place to support the new facility.
Utah is considering a bill that would allow power plants scheduled for decommissioning to be purchased at fair market value. This innovative approach ensures that valuable power-producing assets remain online even if existing owners choose to abandon them.
Similar efforts are taking place across the country in other states, including Missouri, Arkansas, and Arizona. These are commonsense efforts to fight back against the senseless policies being pushed out of Washington.
The Founders of our country understood that state governments are essential to protecting their residents from an overzealous federal government, and that is precisely what lawmakers across the country are doing.
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