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By Jo Nova
Shh: The great Power Grid Necromancers are at work
And you thought Blackouts were caused by bad management, but really, it’s “Climate Change”. The poor grid managers now have to cope with floods, fires, heatwaves and a tenth-of-a-degree of warming every decade, you know. It’s not their fault. It’s not the Ministers fault. It’s not the fault of the solar power glut, or the wind drought, or the lack of spinning inertia, the dearth of despatchable power, or the byzantine complexity of managing a grid full of unreliable generators being randomly unreliable. The grid is not more fragile because we built 100,000 kilometers of long delicate high-voltage-interconnectors, swaying in the wind, and made of cheap imported steel because we can’t afford to make proper steel ourselves. No!
It’s your fault the blackouts are coming. You didn’t ride your bike, you didn’t eat tofu and crickets, you didn’t buy enough solar panels and you drove your car to work, you planet-monster. What did you expect?
Climate Change is coming for your electricity grid.
It took four writers, five advisors, several editors and probably buckets of money to write an obsequious article radiating nonsense. It’s like a form of mass hypnosis — training the serfs to blame Exxon, and forgive their inept, traitorous Grid Managers, for their incompetent blackouts.
The answer to every problem on Earth apparently, is to buy more solar panels, install more wind farms and use child slaves in the Congo so the weather will be perfect.
The excuse for every bureaucrat failure is “climate change”:
The World’s Power Grids are Failing as the Planet Warms
By Eamon Farhat, Misha Savic, Fiona MacDonald, and Mark Chediak, Bloomberg
The bad news for Martinovic and hundreds of millions of people around the world is that the risk of outages is getting worse. Hotter summers mean spikes in demand for cooling, as high temperatures cause wires to sag and risk sparking forest fires. Upgrades to power infrastructure haven’t kept pace, even as efforts to reduce use of fossil fuels make electricity distribution more crucial.
Millions of households in Houston suffered blackouts in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl last week, losing air conditioning as sweltering heat followed the storm. Hitting emerging and developed economies, outages from Ecuador to India in recent weeks offer a foretaste of coming disruption.
Unstable networks create instability for businesses, roil politics and threaten lives….
All those unreliable generators are making the grid more unreliable, so hurry, we need even more of them.
Pay us more money, pay everyone lots of money.
Global Power Grids Require Trillions of Investment
Expanding the grid will cost about $24.1 trillion to meet net-zero goals by 2050, outpacing the investment needed in renewable-power capacity, according to BloombergNEF.
“The whole power system was built and designed in one climatic era and now is being asked to work in a different climatic era,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy at the University of Texas at Austin. “It just means more things can go wrong.”
The Earth is warming at 0.13°C every decade. Plant “hardiness” zones are shifting by, hold your breath, 13 miles per decade. The permafrost line has shifted 80 miles north in Canada. Plants can move, you know, but high-voltage lines can’t. It’s so unfair.
If only expert climate models could have predicted this thirty years ago, so we could build power lines 50 miles north…
Most blackouts occur when big chunks of supply or demand come on or off suddenly. Damage from storms, a burst of renewable generation or spikes in usage can all cause outages where the network isn’t resilient enough.
Climate change affects power distribution in lots of ways. Extreme heat increases demand for cooling, while reducing the efficiency of solar panels, crimping supply. High temperatures can cause lines to sag and transformers to overheat, leading to equipment failing and increasing risks of fires.
So solar panels don’t work as well in hot weather when everyone needs their airconditioners on. I mean, who could have seen that coming, apart from a million material engineers?
It’s so unfair.