Biden's Dark Summer: Power-Grid Operators Warn Electricity Shortage Coming Amid Green Energy Transition
President Joe Biden’s tenure so far has been characterized by various shortages all across the country. Fertilizer, baby formula and labor are just a few of the goods and services in short supply this week, and the list seems to grow by the day.
As the country approaches the hottest months of the year, power grid operators are warning that electricity may be the next victim of Biden’s incompetence.
According to The Wall Street Journal, California, Texas and Indiana are a few of the states facing potential power outages this summer. One of the largest contributors to this latest Biden fiasco is the left’s push for green energy.
The Biden administration has been strongly advocating for the destruction of traditional fuel sources. On the campaign trail in 2019, Biden promised supporters he would “end fossil fuel.”
As has become custom with the Biden administration, the president failed to devise a plan for this massive switch to renewable energy. Instead, he simply advocated for shutting down traditional power plants as soon as possible.
The problem is that, while traditional plants are shutting down, they are doing so “more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage,” WSJ reported. As a result, experts see the potential for massive outages across the country.
There are multiple problems with relying heavily on renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. For one thing, they only work in certain meteorological conditions.
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While fossil fuel-based power plants are able to work 24/7 to produce electricity, wind and solar power cannot produce electricity for large swaths of the day. In order to store the electricity these sources do produce, large batteries are required, which brings us to our next problem.
WSJ reported there is “a large amount of battery storage is under development,” but many areas have not been able to complete the build-out because of “supply-chain challenges and inflation.” These are two other crises fueled by Biden’s incompetence.
Biden has approved an unprecedented amount of spending since taking office, and this has undoubtedly contributed to rising inflation. He has also been largely unsuccessful in his efforts to fix supply-chain issues, despite promising to do so for many months.
Both these crises are raging under Biden’s leadership, and they are now making it difficult to complete the build-out of renewable energy sources in a timely manner, which could lead to yet another crisis.
“Every market around the world is trying to deal with the same issue,” Electric Reliability Council of Texas Interim Chief Executive Brad Jones told WSJ.
“We’re all trying to find ways to utilize as much of our renewable resources as possible … and at the same time make sure that we have enough dispatchable generation to manage reliability.”
Of course, the Biden administration could have avoided this potential disaster by ensuring sufficient renewable sources could be built before shutting down traditional power plants. But Biden went full speed ahead with his “end fossil fuel” narrative without considering the consequences.
As California faces potential blackouts this summer, California Independent System Operator COO Mark Rothleder slowly came to this realization.
“We need to make sure that we have sufficient new resources in place and operational before we let some of these retirements go,” Rothleder said. “Otherwise, we are putting ourselves potentially at risk of having insufficient capacity.”
This seems like basic deductive reasoning, but the Biden administration has demonstrated an inability to understand it. Americans can only hope this realization has not come too late.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
