The Electricity Crisis Is Here

Over the past few weeks I have been tracking several stories about the coming crisis in the electricity supply.

Beege has written quite a bit about the pitfalls of relying on so-called “clean” energy, but there is another side to the coin: the closing down of other forms of electric generating capacity, and the skyrocketing demand for electricity caused both by market forces and government regulations. 

Reducing supply while increasing demand is a bad combination. Worse, replacing reliable sources with unreliable sources of energy strains the already-aging grid. 

Memo to climatistas—when you’ve lost The Guardian. . .https://t.co/tNJdQ72FYG

— Steven F. Hayward (@stevenfhayward) March 24, 2024

By now you likely know about Germany’s crisis. The country has closed down its nuclear plants, built up tons of solar and wind, and moved away from clean natural gas. As a result, prices have spiked, and industry is moving to greener pastures. (See what I did there?). Germany’s price is in the top 10 worldwide, and most of the rest are smallish islands, although other green energy-obsessed European countries are up there. 

If German coal plants are closed down, as is required by 2030, the country faces around 100 power cuts of up to 21 hours a time annually, according to Westenergie, Germany’s largest electricity-distribution system operator. That would mean many areas would be without electricity… pic.twitter.com/Iswio6ufU9

— Net Zero Watch (@NetZeroWatch) March 14, 2024

German industrial production has plummeted as green energy mandates have slammed manufacturing. And Germany’s economy depends more on manufacturing than most European countries. 

German industrial production 👇 The demise started well before the energy crisis. Instead of addressing its structural problems Germany is seriously debating need for siesta. pic.twitter.com/5QYiWH7i18

— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) August 15, 2023

But what really caught my interest was what I am sure was an unanticipated result of the push for green energy. A housing crisis in the UK is being severely exacerbated by a lack of electricity supply. 

You see, you can’t build housing without connecting it to the grid, and the capacity to do so isn’t there. As the UK has imported millions of immigrants, housing prices have spiked. But new supply can’t be built because there is no electric capacity to support them.

Capacity crunch on National Grid is delaying new homes in UK by years https://t.co/PztBYoP7GD

— The Guardian (@guardian) March 10, 2024

Housing projects are being delayed for years because of an “infra­structure crisis” caused by lack of capacity in the National Grid, council leaders have warned.

Building schemes for thousands of homes are on hold, while new ­projects face delays of up to four years in some parts of the UK because of a ­lengthening queue of developers waiting to be connected.

Those hoping to build new wind turbines, solar farms or micro-hydroelectric schemes face even longer waits after a deluge of new connection requests, many of them from speculative schemes.

Ministers have asked the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) to investigate, but senior members of the District Councils’ Network (DCN), part of the Local Government Association, say the delays are slowing down the UK economy. Bridget Smith, the DCN’s vice-chair and leader of South Cambridgeshire district council, said: “Nationally, we’ve got an absolute ­crisis in all infrastructure.”

Plans by Michael Gove, the housing secretary, to build 150,000 homes in Cambridge to create a British Silicon Valley were already being hampered by lack of water, she said. “And where’s the power coming from? Something fundamental has to change.”

It’s an absolute disaster, and it is driven by the Net Zero craze, the demand to electrify everything, and a religious fervor to destroy Western society and replace it with some sort of communist utopia. 

And it is the Tories doing it. God knows what will happen when Labour takes over sometime in the next few months. 

America obviously isn’t immune. As Biden pushes to electrify everything, including the transportation sector, and replace electric production with “renewables,” demand for electricity is skyrocketing at a time when we are making the grid ever less reliable. 

Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said https://t.co/p4XrZ4jBIM

— James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ (@JimPethokoukis) March 29, 2024

Already, we are seeing blackouts, brownouts, supply crunches, and a steady rise in the price of electricity. And demand is skyrocketing beyond expectations, as new uses for electricity keep being invented. Who knew that data centers were going to break our grid?

These pages have been warning for years about an electric-power shortage. And now grid regulators and utilities are ramping up warnings. Projections for U.S. electricity demand growth over the next five years have doubled from a year ago. The major culprits: New artificial-intelligence data centers, federally subsidized manufacturing plants, and the government-driven electric-vehicle transition.

Georgia Power recently increased 17-fold its winter power demand forecast by 2031, citing growth in new industries such as EV and battery factories. AEP Ohio says new data centers and Intel’s $20 billion planned chip plant will increase strain on the grid. Chip factories and data centers can consume 100 times more power than a typical industrial business.

PJM Interconnection, which operates the wholesale power market across 13 Midwest and Northeast states, this year doubled its 15-year annual forecast for demand growth. Its projected power demand in the region for 2029 has increased by about 10 gigawatts—about twice as much as New York City uses on a typical day.

In the midst of all this, the US is rushing headlong into the same future that Germany is experiencing. Spiking prices, insufficient supply, and a bleak future for anybody who is working his way up the economic ladder. 

It’s difficult to believe that our “leaders” are so clueless as to not know what they are doing. The gobsmacking obviousness of it makes claims of ignorance impossible to believe. 

This is intentional. It simply has to be. The alternative is that there was a secret program to lobotomize every world leader pushing green energy. 

This is the Green New Deal. It is not exactly Green, but the deal is certainly new. It is a bad one, though.