When Will Our American Electricity Disappear?

JUNE 16, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at PowerLine:

ROLLING BLACKOUTS ON THE WAY

In the recent past, California and Texas have suffered blackouts due to inadequate electricity supply. This year, as the summer heats up, it is the midwestern states served by the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO) that are most likely to see their lights go out. Energy expert Isaac Orr explains:

According to [the North American Electric Reliability Corporation], much of the country is at an elevated risk of not having enough electricity to meet peak demand, plus the margin of safety, this summer, but none are at higher risk than MISO.

Why are blackouts suddenly occurring after many decades of reliable energy? Because of profiteering by “green” energy hucksters.

MISO may simply not have enough reliable power plants on the grid this summer after 3,200 megawatts (MW) of reliable power plants, mostly coal and nuclear, retired last year.

This is a scandal. “Green” energy liberals have demanded, successfully, that reliable coal and nuclear plants be closed so they can be replaced by wind farms and solar installations. But those unreliable, intermittent sources can never replace power plants that actually work 24/7. Hence the blackouts that are now beginning, and will become more and more widespread if we continue to rely increasingly on undependable sources of power.

Because of “green” demands that reliable power plants be shuttered, the Midwest now lacks enough reliable electricity to cover peak demand:

MISO says there is a 1,230 MW shortfall in power plant capacity to meet its peak demand and reserve margin, an amount that could power nearly half of the homes in Minnesota on an average hourly basis.

Liberals know there are blackouts coming, so what is their solution? Since wind and solar can’t meet peak demand, reduce demand! Much as the Biden administration is reducing demand for gasoline by driving prices over $5 per gallon.

This shortage of reliable power plant capacity means system operators in MISO are more likely to need operating mitigations, such as load modifying resources (LMRs) or non-firm imports, to meet reserve requirements under normal peak summer conditions. Each of these “operating mitigations” comes with its own costs.

Under more extreme circumstances, such as warmer temperatures, higher generation outages, or low wind conditions, areas of the MISO North and Central regions will face a higher risk of temporary “operator-initiated load shedding” to maintain system reliability. This is grid operator speak for rolling blackouts.

In all likelihood, the Midwest will see its first blackouts this summer. If not, just wait. If the situation is not yet dire, it is only because the greenies have not yet realized their goal of overwhelming reliance on energy sources that, most of the time, don’t work:

Unfortunately, the reliability of the electric grid could get worse in the coming years as more reliable power plants are retired.

MISO’s capacity shortfall is projected to grow to 2,600 MW by 2023, enough to power virtually every home in Minnesota on an average hour, and capacity deficits are projected to widen in subsequent years.

The graph below shows the capacity shortfall growing from 2,600 MW next year to 10,900 MW by 2027 as the green bars sink lower toward the x-axis. For context, 10,900 MW is more than the amount needed to generate Minnesota’s annual electricity on an average hourly basis. Of course, some hours will have much higher demand, and some hours demand will be lower, but the trend is troubling regardless.

As the greenies retire more and more reliable power plants and replace them with wind and solar installations that don’t produce electricity most of the time, the cost of massive redundancy to try to keep the lights on will increase exponentially. This summer we will probably see the first tremors of grid inadequacy caused by reliance on “green” energy. In future years, if environmentalists and the Democratic Party continue to get their way, we will see the earthquake: a future in which America, like a third-world country, will be a place where electricity is available only intermittently and only to a favored few, based on political allegiance.

Already, liberals are talking about a future in which you don’t control your use of electricity. Rather, a utility does. Thus, when “renewable” energy sources don’t produce enough to meet demand, the response will be “demand management.” That may mean, among other things, that you won’t be able to turn on your own air conditioning. Rather, the utility will control the temperature of your home for you. This is a classic liberal solution to a problem that liberals created: it totally fails to mitigate the disaster that liberal policies have caused, but serves the more important purpose of allowing liberals to use access to electricity to reward their friends and punish their enemies.

“If Democrats in Congress actually worried about political violence, they would have opposed rather than vocally supported the violent Black Lives Matter riots!”

The Corporate Media Aristocracy Is Completely Out Of Touch On What’s Important And Urgent

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY at the Federalist:

JUNE 16, 2022

Americans outside the narrow confines of the media aristocracy find the Stalinist show trial neither urgent nor important.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY at the Federalist:

On Sunday’s “Face The Nation,” CBS News host John Dickerson urged viewers to care more about Democrats’ January 6 production than they do inflation:

JOHN DICKERSON (voice-over): President Eisenhower warned that, in managing national affairs, you can’t let urgent matters eclipse important ones.

The nation’s leaders faced a test of that theory this week. In the urgent category is inflation, up 8.6 percent compared to May a year ago, a 40-year high. In the important category, the House hearing about the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election.

Eisenhower’s advice was aimed at a truth. If you only attend to the urgent, important problems will become urgent soon enough, and you won’t be prepared.

Dickerson is a thoughtful broadcaster. His words are certainly more reasonable than what some of his peers were pushing. Matthew Dowd, who until recently was ABC News’ chief political analyst, repeatedly compared people concerned about inflation to Nazis. But on this day, Dickerson’s analysis suffered from myriad problems.

Here’s one. While it is true that 8.6 percent inflation — a 40-year high — is not considered an existential threat to prominent broadcasters and others who make millions of dollars each year, the same can not be said of the average American voter. Their cost of living and what they’re able to afford with their disposable dollars is not just urgent but extremely important — far more important than a one-sided television production.

Gas is averaging more than $5 a gallon, the stock market has lost $11 trillion this year, and very few people think the economy is headed in the right direction. Elites have spent the last year telling Americans that the inflation will be transitory.

Again, people who have been making comfortable salaries for years on end, and who anticipate continuing to make that kind of money and have tons of cash on hand, understandably do not think inflation is “important,” just “urgent.” But for most Americans, being able to feed, clothe, shelter, and transport their family members is of vital importance. It is condescending and extreme to say otherwise.

Second, the January 6 riot was not unimportant, but its importance has been blown wildly out of proportion by Democrats and their compliant media mostly because it’s a vehicle to get rid of the politician they detest.

If Democrats in Congress actually worried about political violence, they would have opposed rather than vocally supported the violent Black Lives Matter riots that rocked the country for the entire summer of 2020. Those riots included serious and sustained attacks on the White House, federal courthouses, police precincts, small businesses, and private homes.

If Democrats in Congress actually worried about political violence being used to disrupt constitutional proceedings, they would have opposed, rather than coordinated, the disruptions of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. At that time, Democrats in the Senate invited and worked with left-wing groups to import activists to disrupt the confirmation interviews and even the hearings by getting arrested. These activists had their travel paid for and bail paid.

In this context, the incessant moralizing from the media and government aristocracy is offensive.

Third, the sudden opposition to election challenges appears to be ignorant of history or, worse, being done in bad faith. The last presidential election loss that Democrats fully accepted was President George H.W. Bush’s defeat of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Following President George W. Bush’s victory in 2000, litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Democrats spent years saying he was “selected, not elected.” In 2004, many Democrats in Congress, including California Sen. Barbara Boxer, objected to certifying votes on January 7 on the grounds that Karl Rove controlled voting machines in Ohio to deliver Bush’s re-election victory.

Democrats have never held that such objections were tantamount to an insurrection. Neither should they.

Congress is one of the places Americans are allowed to express objections to the administration of elections. It isn’t even wrong to do so, much less criminal. And no counting of electoral college votes was as disputed as the 1876 election. Maladministration of that election led to chaos, disputed certifications, and violence. According to our Constitution, which provides rules and mechanisms for disputes, Congress was a proper venue to air such disputes in 1877 and it’s a proper venue today, contrary to what Rep. Liz Cheney and other Donald Trump-addled politicians are claiming.

But nothing compares to the widespread refusal of the establishment to fully accept Trump’s victory in 2016. Democrats ran a massive and coordinated operation to disseminate the lie that Trump colluded with Russia to steal that election.

They tried to get the Electoral College voters to become “faithless” to keep from voting for Trump. They disseminated a fake “dossier” of invented salacious information with the goal of possibly keeping Trump from being inaugurated.

On January 6, 2017, FBI Director James Comey ran an operation against Trump by briefing him on the fake allegations, the fact of that briefing soon being leaked to propaganda network CNN to fan the flames of a well-funded and extremely coordinated “resistance” to undermine the administration. One out of every three Democrat members of Congress refused to attend Trump’s inauguration on the grounds that his election was illegitimate.

On the day Trump was installed, the Washington Post published a call for his impeachment. The hoax campaign alleging Trump stole the election by colluding with Russia was allowed to operate without any scrutiny for years. And to this day, nearly no one has been held accountable for the damage wrought by that known lie.

The Russia collusion hoax was just one of many ways the aristocratic class in government and the media attempted to subvert the will of the people, and was just one of many reasons many Americans were skeptical of the 2020 election. They also knew that the media had invented other stories defaming Trump, while hiding true stories about the corruption of the Biden family business of selling access.

They knew that tech oligarchs had meddled in the election through censorship, deplatforming, and algorithmic game-playing. They knew that hundreds of laws and processes had been changed suddenly in the months prior to the November election to enable tens of millions of mail-in ballots to flood the system. More than anything, they were skeptical that Joe Biden, a twice-failed presidential contender who was too feeble to campaign and unable to articulate his thoughts, had truly won 81 million votes.

The establishment’s position is that the 2020 election, easily the strangest election in recent history, can not be questioned in any way, shape, or form. They claim that the infusion of $450 million in private funding by Mark Zuckerberg to take over election offices in the blue areas of swing states is of no concern. They say that it can’t be objected to even though the funding happened to pay overwhelmingly partisan dividends.

They are incurious about the fact that the same man who ran the Russia collusion hoax — Hillary Clinton’s general counsel Marc Elias — ran the coordinated effort to weaken election security in 2020. They don’t care that the tech and media environment is so corrupt that international election observers would sound the alarm if the election were in any other country.

The establishment said the election was pure, just as they promised that Biden was the most competent, moderate, and uniting presidential candidate. They look down upon the people who find it all fishy.

To summarize, the establishment’s position is that nothing can or should be done to hold anyone accountable for their republic-threatening Russia collusion hoax, but that the entire country must stop operating until every grandmother within a mile of the Capitol on January 6 is imprisoned. It’s obscene.

Last year, a Republican official in a state far from D.C. told me that voters there don’t care about the January 6 riot, and those who did probably had a very different view on it than the elites in D.C. did. That was true even before Biden and his Democrat Senate and Democrat House put the country in such a precarious position.

The only reason the establishment is pretending to view the Democrat-appointed January 6 committee as legitimate, much less important, is to cover up what a mess the 2020 election was and to get their nemesis out of politics. That’s why Americans outside the narrow confines of the media aristocracy find the Stalinist show trial neither urgent nor important. And they wish that leaders of the country would truly get working on things that are both.

“SOMETIMES THERE ARE NO WORDS!”

Biden’s energy secretary: Oil companies need to step up while we shut them down, or something

ED MORRISSEY Jun 16, 2022 at HotAir:

Sometimes, there are no words.

But let me find a few anyway.

This exchange took place yesterday morning on CNN’s New Day, where even John Berman seemed nonplussed by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. The energy czar demanded that oil companies invest in the very activities that Joe Biden pledged to eliminate — exploration, extraction, and refining of fossil fuels. Thanks to Biden’s policies that he implemented on Day One with his EO 13990, energy companies have stopped investing in expanded production.

Berman can’t quite wrap his mind around how Granholm expects these same companies to sink massive amounts of capital into an industry that Biden’s actively sabotaging …. and neither can we:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3JlZnNyY19zZXNzaW9uIjp7ImJ1Y2tldCI6Im9mZiIsInZlcnNpb24iOm51bGx9LCJ0Zndfc2Vuc2l0aXZlX21lZGlhX2ludGVyc3RpdGlhbF8xMzk2MyI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJpbnRlcnN0aXRpYWwiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X3Jlc3VsdF9taWdyYXRpb25fMTM5NzkiOnsiYnVja2V0IjoidHdlZXRfcmVzdWx0IiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1537214216989552641&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Fed-morrissey%2F2022%2F06%2F16%2Fbidens-energy-secretary-oil-companies-need-to-step-up-while-we-shut-them-down-or-something-n476682&sessionId=e199cc30a3a250fcadf5326d1f5affedcedec092&siteScreenName=hotairblog&theme=light&widgetsVersion=b45a03c79d4c1%3A1654150928467&width=550px

I’ve included a bit more of the relevant exchange from the transcript:

BERMAN: And I just want to be crystal clear about this, it’s possible, you’re saying, that he would support a surtax on excess profits from oil companies?

GRANHOLM: I’m just saying that no tool has been taken off the table and he wants to hear from the refineries, the companies who are doing refining, to see what is the bottleneck and how we can increase supply. And he’s also asking, of course, for the oil and gas industry to increase supply as well by drilling more. They are about 100 rigs shy of what they were before Covid. They need to increase supply.

If Biden wants more drilling, that’s definitely an about-face. He ran in the primaries on the explicit promise to end drilling, and not just on federal lands. Biden’s climate czar John Kerry declared this week that “we absolutely don’t” need to drill more or refine more, calling that a “false narrative”:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3JlZnNyY19zZXNzaW9uIjp7ImJ1Y2tldCI6Im9mZiIsInZlcnNpb24iOm51bGx9LCJ0Zndfc2Vuc2l0aXZlX21lZGlhX2ludGVyc3RpdGlhbF8xMzk2MyI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJpbnRlcnN0aXRpYWwiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X3Jlc3VsdF9taWdyYXRpb25fMTM5NzkiOnsiYnVja2V0IjoidHdlZXRfcmVzdWx0IiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1536821424408731650&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Fed-morrissey%2F2022%2F06%2F16%2Fbidens-energy-secretary-oil-companies-need-to-step-up-while-we-shut-them-down-or-something-n476682&sessionId=e199cc30a3a250fcadf5326d1f5affedcedec092&siteScreenName=hotairblog&theme=light&widgetsVersion=b45a03c79d4c1%3A1654150928467&width=550px

That sounds a lot more consistent with Biden’s policies than what Granholm’s slinging here.  If Biden actually wanted more drilling and expansion, he’d rescind EO 13990 to remove the regulatory and financial disincentives on expanded operations at the very least. Biden hasn’t budged on that, nor has he even bothered to claim that he’s rethinking his pledge to “transition” away from oil altogether.

And neither is Granholm, for that matter, which contributes to Berman’s bemusement. That’s not the only “false narrative entering into this” from Granholm, either:

GRANHOLM: There was a study — there was a study yesterday that came out of Reuters and it said that while the profits in the first quarter were record profits —

BERMAN: Do you want — can I ask —

GRANHOLM: Were record profits, we also know that they returned about $9.5 billion to shareholders. If they had even taken half of that, we’re not against profit, obviously, they’ve taken just half of that and reinvested it in supply, we would see hundreds more rigs, we would see hundreds of thousands more barrels of oil. We’re asking them to be in this era, where we’re on a war footing, to consider increasing supply, both domestically and, of course, internationally.

The United States is not at war, so why would oil companies be on a “war footing”? If the US is on a “war footing,” why hasn’t Biden revised regulatory conditions to incentivize production?

As far as “record profits” are concerned, the net profit margin of most oil companies is still in the single-digit range as I have extensively demonstrated this past week. The reason that oil companies are conducting stock buybacks rather than investing in expanded oil production and refining is because those require massive long-term investments. Biden’s made it clear that he plans to make those investments fail, and soon, so what else are they supposed to do with the money? Stock buybacks are the rational choice when hostile administrations make all other investments all but certain to lose money.

Berman gets close to that point next:

BERMAN: Do you want – do you want – do you — five years from now, ten years from now, are you telling me you want them drilling for more oil, you want the refineries putting out more gasoline in five or ten years?

GRANHOLM: What we’re saying is today we need that supply increased. Of course, in five or ten years – actually, in the immediate, we are also pressing on the accelerator, if you will, to move toward clean energy so that we don’t have to be under the thumb of petro dictators like Putin or at the whim of the volatility of fossil fuels.

Ultimately, America will be most secure when we can rely upon our own clean, domestic production of energy through solar, through wind, through –

BERMAN: But that’s the problem for these companies. These companies are saying, you know, you’re asking me to do more now, invest more now, when, in fact, five or ten years from now we don’t think that demand will there be. And the administration doesn’t even necessarily want it to be there.

Oh, the demand will be there. The regulatory environment, however, will prevent these companies from meeting it, and not just in five years but right the **** now. Biden insists on curtailing all of these activities no matter what the demand might be as a way to pander to radical environmentalists. That’s what the drilling-lease lawsuit is designed to facilitate, in fact; it sets up Granholm and Biden to cut a deal through the courts blocking access to oil leases that they can then blame on the judiciary, all while bypassing Congress.

This administration has pulled out all of the stops to block expansion of American oil and natural gas production. Now that they got their wish, though, the effects are so unpopular that Biden and Granholm have turned to shameless demagoguery as a means to avoid accountability for their own policies and schemes. That demagoguery has gotten brazen enough that even friendlier media outlets have stopped buying it — and voters have long since seen through it.

A CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION?!

BY SCOTT JOHNSON at PowerLine:

COUP’S NEXT

How about a congressional investigation of the perversion of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the service of the Russia hoax intended to take out Donald Trump? The FBI, FISA, and the FISA court should be shut down until we get some answers about the abuse of the law in the service of the hoax. It is all unfinished business, although the Democrats are doing their best to make us forget.

It seems to me an opportune moment to review events with Lee Smith (JNS post here, video below with host Ellie Cohanim). Toward the end of the interview, referring to the media, Lee distinguishes between “dingbats blabbering absolute nonsense” (e.g., Rachel Maddow and unnamed CNN hosts) and others who were part of an information operation (e.g., I take it, the CNN host/reporters whose bylines ran on this story). There is nothing new here, but I thought some readers might find it of interest, as I did.

Lee graciously granted us permission to publish an excerpt from his book The Plot Against the President in this Power Line post. In the excerpt Lee discusses the CNN story linked above.