I’m writing from Texas, so I’ll try to finish this column before the electricity runs out.
As you may have heard, we had an exceptionally strong winter storm here, and despite the fact that one in three families has a four-wheel drive super-duty pickup, Texas stopped. When a little ice hit the highway, half a dozen people lost their lives in the ensuing 135 car pileup.
Meanwhile, after years of mocking Californians for their self-imposed energy problems, Texans are experiencing continuous blackouts – and a series of blackouts that refuse to continue, but obstinately remain in place – because our power grid cannot keep up with the peak require.
As in California, the energy shortage in Texas is largely artificial: the state produces an extraordinary amount of natural gas, but there has been a regrettable underinvestment in infrastructure, ranging from pipelines to equipment for the winter in dealerships. You can also run out of fuel if you can’t take it where it’s needed or use it when you’re there.
What Texas invested was in renewable energy, especially wind. These performed particularly poorly: The state power grid regulator reports that, although wind and solar power still represent a relatively small portion of the state’s overall energy mix, they accounted for 40 percent of the capacity shut down by the storm: Of the 45 gigawatts that went dark, 18 gigawatts were wind and solar.
The wind is, in many ways, a good bet for Texas, especially in the western and northern parts of the state, the Saudi Arabia of gales. The sunny parts of the state also generate a good amount of solar energy, which is also welcome. The problem is that these sources of energy are not reliable. Solar panels don’t work with a few inches of snow on them, and an ice storm can cause these huge wind turbines to freeze and stop working. At the moment, most of these Texas turbines are not functioning power sources – they are modern art.
It may seem perverse to think about global warming when it is so cold outside, but the situation in Texas answers that question directly. There are bona fide disputes over climate policy.
The left wants to use the threat of climate change as a license to remake the entire economy and the government along its own lines – energy policy, yes, but also everything from transport to architecture, and from labor legislation to foreign affairs and trade . The argument for replacing natural gas with wind and solar electricity is that reducing the use of fossil fuels could, if the practice were sufficiently widespread, help to mitigate the effects of climate change already underway.
But there is another way of looking at it. If forecasts are correct and we have to face more extreme weather events, including exceptionally strong winter storms, then it may be more advisable to invest in adaptation than in the much more uncertain project of severely limiting greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. , an effort that would require honest and willing cooperation from countries like India and China, which they are unlikely to comply.
We have a lot of natural gas in the United States, but we have inadequate infrastructure, which makes a lot of that fuel useless in a situation like this. We need more oil and gas capacity instead of less – an issue that the Biden government is on the wrong side of. Gas-fired power plants are much cleaner than coal-fired power plants and depend on a fuel that we have in abundance. We must add gas generation capacity on a large scale. And instead of trying to figure out how to manage a modern industrial economy with pixie dust and unicorn power, we can invest some of that money to ensure that the infrastructure we already have will work under the conditions we can expect.
Of course, we could add a large amount of electricity capacity at a very low carbon cost, if we were inclined: this means more nuclear power – which, unlike wind and solar, provides a reliable generation baseline. The new flexible reactors being developed by Bill Gates’ TerraPower could be a game changer – and the challenges for nuclear power are more a matter of finance and regulation than science and engineering. Making it easier to get nuclear power online is something that can be corrected by policies.
Climate change is not, despite the insistence of some of my conservative friends, a scam. But admitting the reality of this is not the same as accepting the far-reaching schemes of the left, up to and including the so-called New Green Deal. Instead, we must seek to make smart, economical decisions that maximize the use of desirable resources that we already have under our command, balancing environmental concerns with other pressing issues, such as being able to keep Americans’ homes warm and with lights on. lit when a little snow falls in San Antonio.
Kevin D. Williamson’s book “Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of ‘Real America’” (Regnery) has already been released.