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AFTERNOON TEA
Grid catastrophe incoming
Keeping up with summer’s heat and surprise storms puts pressure on our electrical grid, and increasingly, it just can’t hold up. And, energy policies from the Biden-Harris administration and green-at-all-costs state governments are only adding to that unreliability. Rules proposed by the Biden-Harris EPA earlier this year would make it nearly impossible to bring new natural gas or other traditional energy sources back into the power generation mix—a move that Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie called “catastrophic.”
Some recent facts:
- Electrical outages are becoming more and more frequent. In 2022, the average American household lost electrical power for five and a half hours.
- The North American Electric Reliability Corp. warned that half the states, spanning nearly every region in the U.S., face an elevated risk of blackouts and brownouts this summer.
- Recent storms hitting Texas and the Atlantic Coast left hundreds of thousands without power.
Moving away from energy sources like American natural gas in favor of subsidized pushes to solar and wind energy for electricity chips away at the reliability and the affordability of our power supply. Retirement of natural gas generators are directly contributing to the strain felt in some U.S. regions this summer and the intermittency of solar power just can’t fill the gap.
At the same time, demand for electricity is growing. Outages in Houston from Hurricane Beryl earlier this summer showed what we’ve already predicted as a major data center in the area went down when the city lost power. Data centers will double their U.S. electric demands by 2030 — requiring enough electricity to power more than 26 million average homes.
If the politicized push toward so-called “green” energy continues with a Harris-Walz agenda, this unreliability could very well be a matter of life or death in extreme heat situations. Even without that kind of dangerous scenario, the rest of us will likely find ourselves sitting in the dark for a few hours as summer blackouts become the new normal.
Hardworking Americans deserve an electrical grid that stays up when we need it most. For more information about how natural gas is the affordable, reliable and clean energy source that can keep America plugged in, check out TEA’s Energy Security ARC.
