I’m writing from Texas, so I’ll try to complete this column before the electricity goes out.
As you may have heard, we had an extraordinarily powerful winter storm down here, and despite the fact that every third household has a four-wheel-drive pickup, Texas has come to a standstill. When some ice lay on the highway, half a dozen people lost their lives in the ensuing stack of 135 cars.
Meanwhile, after years of mocking Californians for their self-imposed energy problems, Texans are experiencing rolling blackouts – and a whole bunch of blackouts that refuse to go on but rather stubbornly sit in their place – because our power grid can’t keep up with the increase in demand .
As in California, the energy scarcity in Texas is largely artificial: the state produces extraordinary amounts of natural gas, but there is a huge underinvestment in infrastructure, ranging from pipelines to winter equipment in utilities. You can also not have fuel if you can not get it where it is needed, or can use it once it is there.
What Texas has invested in is renewable energy, especially wind. It performed particularly poorly: the state’s electricity grid regulator states that although wind and solar power still make up a relatively small part of the state’s overall energy mix, they were responsible for 40 per cent of the capacity cut off by the storm: out of the 45 gigawatts which became dark, 18 gigawatts was of wind and solar power.
Wind is in many ways a good choice for Texas, especially in the western and northern parts of the state, Saudi Arabia. The sunny parts of the state also generate a lot of solar power, which is also welcome. The problem is that these power sources are unreliable. Solar panels do not work with a few inches of snow on top, and an icy storm can cause the massive wind turbines to freeze and stop working. At the moment, most of the turbines in Texas do not operate power sources – this is modern art.
It may seem perverse to think about global warming when it’s so cold outside, but the situation in Texas speaks directly to the question. There are gullible disputes over climate policy.
The left wants to use the threat of climate change as a license to rebuild the entire economy and government along its lines of preference – energy policy, yes, but also everything from transport to architecture, and from labor law to foreign relations and trade. The argument for replacing natural gas electricity with wind and solar power is that reducing our use of fossil fuels can help mitigate the effects of climate change that are already underway.
But there is another way to look at the question. If the forecasts are correct and we want to experience more extreme weather conditions, including extremely strong winter storms, it may be advisable to invest in adaptation as in the much more uncertain project to severely limit global greenhouse gas emissions, a global effort that requires willing and honest cooperation from countries like India and China, which are unlikely to comply.
We have a lot of natural gas in the United States, but we have an inadequate infrastructure, which makes a lot of the fuel useless in a situation like this. We need more oil and gas pipeline capacity rather than less – a problem that the Biden government is on the wrong side of. Gas-fired electricity plants are much cleaner than coal-fired plants, and they rely on a fuel that we have in abundance. We need to add gas generation capability on a large scale. Instead of trying to figure out how to run a modern industrial economy on pixie dust and unicorn power, we can invest some of the money to make sure the infrastructure we already have will function in the conditions we can expect.
Of course, we can add a lot of electricity capacity at a very low carbon cost if we are so inclined: it means more nuclear power – which, unlike wind and solar power, provides a reliable production base. The new flexible reactors 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 of science and engineering. This can be corrected by policies to make it easier to bring nuclear power online.
Despite the insistence of some of my conservative friends, climate change is not a joke. But admitting its reality is not the same as allowing the left’s far-reaching schemes, up to and including the so – called Green New Deal. Instead, we need to look at making intelligent, economic decisions that maximize the use of the desired resources we already have at our disposal, and balance environmental concerns with other pressing issues, such as keeping Americans’ homes warm and their turn on lights 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 Thanksgiving Woolly Wilds of the ‘Real America'” (Regnery) is out now.