Must We Freeze in the Dark?

Not so long ago, Californians suffered rolling cutoffs in their electricity supply.  The reason was simple -- nobody had been able to build an electric generating plant in or near California for several decades.  As more and more Californians wanted more and more electricity, there wasn't enough electricity to be had at any price.

The electricity shortage was entirely predictable.  All the utilities had been moaning about the coming supply crisis for years, but until California ran out of power and people began to sweat in the dark, nobody would let the greedy, filthy, earth-destroying, capitalistic, profit-mongering utilities build any new plants.

NIMBY in New York

This isn't a new phenomenon.  Many years ago, I was consulting for Con Ed, the Manhattan electric utility, and ended up talking with the VP of power generation.  He told me things were going to get bad.  Pulling cables to power the recently-constructed World Trade Center had filled their last tunnels in lower Manhattan; they weren't going to be able to build new tunnels to get more power to that part of their market.

What was worse, they weren't allowed to build any generating capacity anywhere; nobody wanted to live near an electric plant.  Demand was going up and he was worried that Con Ed would fall short.  The city had gone dark twice due to interruptions in the electricity supply from Canada.  As a highly-motivated professional, he felt the two blackouts keenly.

I told him not to worry.  "What?" he said, "we're running out of capacity, it's going to hit the wall."

I asked him if he'd warned everybody.  He'd been putting out press releases for years, everybody he'd talked to was tired of hearing him bleat about the coming crisis.  So I told him, "You warned 'em, right?  You can prove you warned them; they can't really blame you, not that they won't.  What might happen?  If demand doesn't keep growing you're OK, right?"  I got a nod.  "If someone invents fusion in a suitcase, you put a box in every basement and you're OK, right?"  Another nod.

"If nothing changes, you'll run out of power, right?  When the governor and the legislature start to freeze in the dark, they'll get out of the way.  How long will it take you to build a plant if everybody gets out of the way?  I mean really gets out of the way."

"What do you mean, 'really gets out of the way'?"

"I mean really gets out of the way.  You put a pin in the map anywhere you want the plant, they send out eviction notices the next day and follow up with the National Guard to bayonet anybody gets in front of your bulldozers.  No bidding -- you call your buddies, tell them they can have all the OT they want, the state is guaranteeing your loans, just get it built NOW!"

"Oh, you mean really get out of the way."  His eyes went vague as he gazed into space.  "If they let me do my job without filling out all the paperwork, we could do it in 9 months, the hard part would be getting the turbine shaft machined.  Less than a year anyway."

"Don't worry about it," I told him, "either there is a problem or there isn't.  If there is, they'll freeze in the dark until they get out of your way."

As it turned out, my friend lucked out.  9-11 reduced electricity demand in lower Manhattan and made it politically possible to dig new tunnels there; he's OK.  The crisis came in California instead of in Manhattan.

When Californians began to sweat in the dark, everybody got out of the way and the utilities fixed the problem just as I'd predicted.  The price of electricity went way up -- somebody had to pay for doing things in a hurry.  As usual, it's the customers who pay for everything.

California, Here We Come

The global warming scam has put the whole country on a path to reenact the California electricity crisis except that most of the country is colder than California; we'll freeze in the dark instead of sweating.  Coal provides over 50 percent of the nation's electricity.  Coal-fired electric plants emit 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, about a third of the country's total.

Until recently, utilities were starting the approvals process for new facilities, pointing out that charging hybrid cars will reduce our dependence on foreign energy supplies because we have several hundred years worth of coal in the ground.

All of a sudden, utilities are abandoning their plans for new coal-fired power plants.  A report Decline in New Coal Power Plant Construction says:

Most Newly Proposed Coal Power Plants Are Never Built. According to the Department of Energy, proposals to build new power plants are often speculative and typically operate on "boom & bust" cycles, based upon the ever changing economic climate of power generation markets. As such, many of the proposed plants will not likely be built. For example, out of a total portfolio (gas, coal, etc) of 500 GW of newly planned power plant capacity announced in 2001, 91 GW have been already been scrapped or delayed.

20% of the planned power plants are being canceled even though demand is likely to double over the next 30 years.  The reason these plants are being canceled isn't hard to find -- environmentalists have decided to play hardball.

"Our goal is to oppose these projects at each and every stage, from zoning and air and water permits, to their mining permits and new coal railroads," said Bruce Nilles, a Sierra Club attorney who directs the group's national coal campaign. "They know they don't have an answer to global warming, so they're fighting for their life. [sic]" [emphasis added]

Industry representatives say the environmentalists' actions threaten to undermine the country's fragile power grid, setting the stage for a future of high-priced electricity and uncontrollable blackouts.

Nilles said the Sierra Club spent about $1 million on such efforts in 2007 and hopes to ratchet that figure up to $10 million this year.

The process of getting a new electric plant approved has become so complicated that $10 million buys a lot of delay.  Delay is the most cruel form of denial.  Delay costs the utilities money and makes the projects much more risky.

I have friends who lived in New Hampshire while the electric utility built a nuclear electric plant called Seabrook.  The "Clamshell Alliance" introduced so many delays and cost increases that the utility went bankrupt.  At the time, New Hampshire had the second highest electric rates in the nation.  It takes real effort to bankrupt an electric utility when rates are that high.

After the stockholders were wiped out, an out of state utility offered to take over the facility if they were promised rate increases of 5% a year compounded for 7 years.  They wouldn't touch it unless these increases were written into law.

With their constituents freezing in the dark, the legislature passed the rate increases in record time.  Democrat Jean Shaheen was later elected governor on a platform of cutting electric bills even though she knew that the courts would uphold the rates which had been written  into the law.  She won the election on a promise she couldn't keep, but that's politics.

There's no way utilities can answer global warming because it's a scam.  The fact that it's a scam doesn't keep the environmentalists from making it very difficult and very expensive to build new electric plants.

Utilities have learned three important lessons:

• Seabrook and the Clamshell Alliance taught them not to fight environmentalists to the last breath.  They'll file applications just to keep in practice and they'll get the odd plant approved here and there, but they won't get serious about new capacity until they're assured that everybody will get out of the way.
• California taught the utilities that as long as they keep the people informed about trying to build plants, the public won't blame them when the electricity runs out.
• When taxpayers start to sweat or freeze in the dark, red tape unwinds like magic and they can build new generating plants without much hassle.

The sensible thing for utilities to do is play patty-cake with the environmentalists until it hits the fan, then they can build whatever they like.  The more negative publicity they get from the environmentalists, the less the public blames them when the electricity runs out.

The California legislature was so panicked by voters screaming at them that they signed long-term contracts for electricity at very high prices just as the New Hampshire legislature had done.  This will happen in all states where the environmentalists are able to delay construction enough to cause a crisis.  As usual, we customers will pay for it all.

Modern environmentalists believe in global warming with religious zeal and hate coal power as much as the Clamshell Alliance hated nuclear power.  France gets 80% of its electric power from nuclear plants; American coal is both cheap and domestic but facts mean nothing in the face of zeal.  The environmentalists won't get out of the way until we get really pissed and tell our elected representatives to make them lay off.

Unless we tell our politicians to ignore Al Gore's scam, we'll all freeze in the dark.  When that happens, electric plants will be built, but we'll end up paying very high rates for electricity thanks to Al Gore's misguided minions.