The nation’s power grid doesn’t need additional threats to its stability in the form of Democrats playing politics with funds meant to support critical infrastructure.
The nation’s power grid doesn’t need additional threats to its stability in the form of Democrats playing politics with funds meant to support critical infrastructure.
M any Texans are out of power because the Biden administration would prefer to spend money on rewarding its green political cronies over making sure the lights stay on.
Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) rejected a request from Houston’s power utility last year for $100 million to strengthen its electric poles and wires against the exact type of hurricane winds and flooding that took down large portions of the Texas power grid in the aftermath of a recent hurricane.
Utility CenterPoint Energy sought the money from a $10.5 billion dollar Department of Energy (DOE) program intended to help utilities, states, and local agencies protect the electric grid from exactly this sort of threat. But the money appears to have gone to other sources that are more politically palatable to Biden.
CenterPoint has been intensely criticized for widespread power outages after the Category 1 Hurricane Beryl left 1.1 million customers without electricity in extremely hot conditions. Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott is even threatening to issue an executive order forcing the company to improve the reliability and its level of storm preparedness. The utility says the outages were “largely related to” damage that Beryl caused to its distribution system, for which it sought money from Biden’s DOE to upgrade.
“I don’t understand how the grant application could be rejected,” Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston, told Politico Energy and Environment. “This is the home of the petrochemical part of America. I mean, for God’s sakes, what’s DOE thinking? A grant to CenterPoint to make the service in and around Houston more resilient is truly a matter of national security.”
The DOE didn’t respond to Politico‘s request on its reasoning for rejecting the grant. At the time, the Biden administration explained its grant distributions in predictably glowing terms. “Funded by the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, these projects will leverage more than $8 billion in federal and private investments to deliver affordable, clean electricity to all Americans and ensure that communities across the nation have a reliable grid that is prepared for extreme weather worsened by the climate crisis,” a press statement announcing the projects read.
It continued: “These transformative projects, which will all support the President’s Justice40 Initiative to benefit disadvantaged communities, will help bring more than 35 gigawatts of new renewable energy online, invest in 400 microgrids, and maintain and create good-paying union jobs with three out of four projects partnering with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)—helping deliver on the Biden-Harris Administration’s ambitious climate agenda.”
Texas was notably left off of the DOE’s list of state-level investments. Those are suspiciously heavy in likely swing states such as Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. It seems the money to prevent damage from severe weather was diverted to fund Democratic political ambitions and toward projects appealing to voting blocs of elites with global-warming concerns, unions, and disadvantaged communities in swing states.
It wouldn’t be the first time environmentalist fundamentalism left Americans without power or made a bad situation much worse. Mass blackouts directly attributable to left-wing environmental policy have repeatedly left blue states in the dark. The diversion of investment to politically favored, but unreliable, wind and solar power has triggered mass blackouts in California and New England.
A very predictable heat wave in California during August 2022 got so bad that California governor Gavin Newsom had to proclaim a state of emergency. The problem was only solved by Newsom’s temporarily reactivating the very conventional power plants he’d previously worked so hard to shut down. Naturally, Newsom blamed global warming, rather than his own policies that created the problem.
A fairly normal blizzard on Christmas Eve in 2022 caused almost a quarter of a million individual power outages in New England, according to its grid authority. That’s quite something, given that New Englanders were already paying the energy equivalent of $180 per barrel of oil, roughly double what most Americans were spending.
Blue states spent more money for less reliable power because environmentalists aggressively shut down more reliable nuclear, coal, and natural-gas power plants to boost demand for solar and wind farms. This policy to promote green energy has tremendously damaged the electrical grid’s dependability, and has placed many states at serious risk of unintentional mass blackouts to go with the current rolling ones.
Wind- and solar-power sources are troubled at the best of times, as they naturally stop working later in the day just as electricity demand tends to peak. But during emergency situations such as hurricanes, blizzards, or heat waves, they are both much more vulnerable to disruption and vastly slower to repair as “introducing large amounts of highly variable production with little or no inertia can decrease the robustness of the grid if proper measures are not taken.” It’s simply much more difficult to repair and reconnect hundreds of acres of highly distributed wind or solar power to the grid than to do so for much more compact conventional energy.
It is exceedingly common for wind turbines to collapse in even modest storms. Solar panels are so vulnerable most warranties do not include weather events or even basic but necessary maintenance like snow removal. Natural disasters frequently destroy entire fields of solar panels.
The nation’s power grid doesn’t need additional threats to its stability in the form of Democrats playing politics with funds meant to support critical infrastructure. But Biden’s Department of Energy has made its priorities clear.