Extreme heat means 2/3 of North America could suffer blackouts this summer

Everything is caused by regulation in one way or another. But your statements don't represent the reality of the report that was released: https://www.nerc.com/news/Headlines%20DL/2023%20SOR%20announ...

Links to detailed analyses can be found in the link above.

Key notes:

"... overall, the North American bulk power system (BPS) remains highly reliable and resilient. However, extreme weather events continue to pose the greatest risk to its reliability and stability"

"Today’s BPS transmission system is continuing to show improvements in reliability and resilience, despite more common and extreme weather trends. However, higher overall outage rates for coal and gas generation, as well as some utility-scale solar generation not operating as necessary for reliability, indicate that there is still significant work to be accomplished"

"In 2022, conventional generation experienced its highest level of unavailability (8.5%) overall since NERC began gathering GADS data in 2013 as measured by the weighted equivalent forced outage rate. Figure 3 shows consistently increasing outage rates for coal over the observed five years, correlating with higher numbers of startups and maintenance outages."

Yes, there are issues to contend with when implementing new power sources. But those issues are nothing compared to the lack of investment in infrastructure more generally.

Would we ever move if we weren’t forced or would we just get to a different emergency after putting off necessary changes?

My point being is that the other option wasn’t to do a gradual, planned rollout, given the political realities

Saying that this is regulation / environmentalist caused is only looking at half of the picture.

You could just as easily say that this is caused by greed and the desire for more profits. Wind power is extremely cheap (almost half the cost per megawatt hour compared to fossil fuel). So utilities are actually making more money when they sell their customers wind power. Where is the profit margin going? Not back into the infrastructure, that's for sure.

In every major outage the true cause is utility companies not investing back into making sure that their infrastructure is resilient. That includes resiliency against wind power going offline, such as building battery storage, gravity power storage, etc.

So let's treat this like the environmental emergency it is and put some real resources and effort behind it. Growing up I was told we were the best at building things when we really want to.

We can "force the timeline" on the machinery and infrastructure that we control, or nature will force the timeline on the environmental factors we can't control. All the extreme weather is showing the latter is already happening.

No, it's not. This is regulated industry insiders complaining about the impact of regulations on them--of course they're going to forecast doom and gloom.

Actually reading the details of the report, I don't think the power plant emissions regulations is actually a major impact; it seems that the lower efficiencies of power plants during extreme heat waves is having more of an impact on potential shortfalls rather than emissions cutoff. Except maybe for Texas, but Texas in general looks extremely screwed regardless.

There are no workers for the the desired amount of money (and a lack in the trades). The US has

- The Baby Boomers reaching Medicare + Social Security eligibility age.

- An Intransitive stance on immigration, leading to fewer workers, and especially an inability to hire trained workers

- Migrated from trades education ~30 years ago in favor of college preparatory

- Historically low unemployment (likely from the other factors)

- A very difficult to navigate minimum wage, costs of goods trap; where the dog food store near me is hiring at $15/hr; while a nearby alterations place was looking for a trained head seamstress for $10/hr, and grocery chains and Amazon are offering $30/hr warehouse jobs, while waitresses make $2.25 with little enforcement on tipped wages.

does someone actually make an compressor that runs off DC directly? It'd have to be a universal motor from what I understand. That seems really unreliable.

the fan in an AC unit doesn't consume any reasonable fraction of the power. It's the compressor that takes power.

Peak AC demand in most areas is well after peak solar power production times. During the summer months AC demand often extends well after sunset.

To an extent we can use solar power generated in the western US to feed some of the later hours of AC demand in the east. But we can't do the reverse. And even the most optimistic estimates state that we are many years from having a useful amount of grid scale storage.

Yes, and the point is that we don't need to be constraining our consumption as there's essentially no lack of energy. We need to be increasing our production/capture.

>> We're reaching breast cancer levels of awareness here. At this point, we're all aware of the issue and are actively voting to invest money in solving the problem. Awareness is no longer the problem.

> I don't see a large chunk of the voter base pretending that breast cancer is a myth invented by the chinese to slow down America.

That's because the breast cancer hasn't led to the same kinds of policy proposals that climate change has. If it did, I'd expect you'd see similar claims of it being a myth, etc.

IMHO, claiming climate change is a myth is just a symptom of democratic opposition to certain climate change policies.

"large chunk of the voter base"

I'm not sure how large it is...loud, maybe...

The California grid operator has a really cool website that shows realtime-ish graphs of supply and demand[1] and even daily battery reports[2]. One big takeaway is that the total battery capacity is kinda wimpy when you compare it to how much fossil fuel the state burns over the day.

The way net metering worked in the past is that people with solar could offload their access generation to power companies and make storage or resale the utility's responsibility. Then 2.0 was a sorta-time of use implementation, and now we're up to Net Metering 3.0 and I haven't bothered to look into how that works. However people I know who have looked into Tesla powerwalls haven't found them to be economical for individual homeowners.

[1]: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

[2]: http://www.caiso.com/Documents/DailyEnergyStorageReportJun22...

Battery storage remains constrained by cell availability. There is no spare capacity and it can only be scaled up slowly due to supply chain issues. The battery storage that Tesla sold to Australia is a step in the right direction but capacity is only a tiny fraction of what we would need in the USA to enable a large scale transition to renewable energy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victor...

IIRC the real costs of residential electricity are about half from infrastructure, half from actual energy consumption [1]. If we charged prices proportional to costs, high users would still pay significantly more than average users. The problem is that in many places these costs have been bundled together in a single "per unit" charge that effectively subsidizes the lowest consumers. Changing it so that prices go up at the low end of consumption and go down at the high end of consumption would widely be seen as unfair, so it's politically hard to correct the mis-pricing now that it's ossified into place by tradition.

[1] It's different for big industrial users, like factories operating 24/7; their per-unit costs are dominated by consumption rather than infrastructure. They also get lower prices partially reflecting these lower costs.

I snagged a Generac a few years ago, and never looked back; it runs off my gas line and takes zero input from me to work (although you can fiddle with it if you like). That's definitely where anyone with any money at all is going to end up, not just the rich.

>"At least the rich people will have power."

Phew. I am so relieved. Not a single day goes by when I do not think about how those poor riches manage.

"we should be ending unemployment insurance and moving to guaranteed employment and utilizing unemployed folks for public service projects such as solar installs."

While I agree with that, it seems the implementation of a program like that would be quite difficult...especially considering how difficult it is to get pretty much anything done.

Are these new workers doing things that other union workers could be doing? Would they have to join the union? Those two simple things would derail any plan like that for one side of the isle in the US, at least.

>"utilizing unemployed folks for public service projects such as solar installs"

And when suddenly there is not enough of them work for food people? This is how GULAG came to be.