It's hard to point and say, "I told you so," when so many denizens of a major city, right here in the United States, are suffering from a heat wave because of the feather-headed ideas of their elected representatives. And yet, these days, we seem to find ourselves in the position of doing just that, all too often.
Here's where this latest tale of urban woe begins: In 2019, the state of New York passed something called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Among other things, this legislation banned the construction of any new coal or natural gas-fired electrical generation plants, also banned the upgrading or repair of existing plants, and mandated more and more solar panels and windmills to pick up that slack.
Now, in the middle of a considerable heat wave, the Big Apple is paying the price for this dumb law in the form of rolling blackouts. The Manhattan Contrarian's Francis Menton saw that coming.
At least since New York passed its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) back in 2019, it has been clear that trouble has been coming for New York’s electrical grid. The CLCPA effectively prohibits construction of new fossil fuel power plants, even natural gas plants; and the old ones are aging and are forbidden to be replaced or upgraded. Supposedly, lots of wind and solar generators were going to be added to the system. But those have been slow to come and, more importantly, can’t be counted on to generate anything when you need them. In addition, new construction of such things has now been stalled by the end of federal subsidies. At some point the lines of diminishing reliable generation and increasing demand would have to cross.
However, here at this website I have held off predicting imminent grid failure. The reason is that I don’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. Our grid operators are competent people, and they have a lot of tricks up their sleeves to hold things together even in difficult circumstances. In a pinch, they can start up every ancient “peaker” plant, and then import some power from PJM, or New England, or even from Canada. Despite New York’s hostile energy environment, they could get lucky and avoid blackouts for at least several more years.
They didn't.
So I think it is important to report that on this past July 2 and 3, Con Edison ran out of options and imposed rolling blackouts in parts of the North Bronx and Southern Westchester County.
You haven’t heard about this? It’s another example of the legacy media burying an inconvenient story. Checking to see what the New York Times has to say about these blackouts, I find just one sentence in the sixth paragraph of a July 3 article that is otherwise reporting on the heat wave that hit that weekend. The sentence in question reads, “The heat also put stress on power grids, contributing to scattered outages in New Jersey, New York and Ohio for tens of thousands of utility customers on Thursday, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us.” The heat put “stress” on the grid, leading to “scattered outages.” That’s it. No mention in the Times that the blackouts on that day in New York were intentionally imposed, or that the ongoing degradation of grid reliability had anything to do with it.
Yes, the heat will place stress on the grid. But the grid should be built with such extremes in mind.
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Hot weather in New York in the summertime isn't exactly a new thing, after all. It's always been hot in the summer, and the Big Apple, with all of its concrete and asphalt roofs, generates an enormous urban heat island effect, making it even hotter. Now, humans, biologically, are rather better adapted for hot weather than cold, but this kind of heat - regularly breaking 100 degrees - can be dangerous, even life-threatening, to the very old, the very young, and the infirm. And these blackouts leave those people without the one amazing modern technology that can prevent disaster: Air conditioning.
It's not just the rolling blackouts that are a problem. Electricity rates in New York have increased since the passage of the New York Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act at three times the rate of increase in the nation as a whole. Energy prices in New York are 44 percent higher than the national average. That's not community protection. It's also not climate leadership. It's callous indifference to the population of one of the nation's greatest cities.
These temperatures aren't new for New York. In the Central Park area, on August 7th, 1918, the high was 104 degrees. On July 9th, 1936, the high was 106 degrees. In fact, that 106 reading in 1936 is the highest ever recorded in Central Park.
The difference between now and then is simply this: Now we have technology, in the form of air conditioning, that can make those hot days far easier and safer to contend with. New York's generation capacity should be able to withstand these occasional highs. So should the grid. Any failures in this are not due to the existing technology, gas, oil, or coal for generation. The failure is in the feather-headed ideas of New York politicians that they can make up the lack of reliable energy with intermittent, low-density sources like wind and solar. Until they figure that out, the people of the city will continue to suffer in the summer heat.
