Interesting but frightening analysis. Democrats and their environmental allies have taken control of power production, a scary situation. Central planning on steroids. Mish sees an energy train wreck coming. I concur. I see a perfect storm with reduction in supply (early retirement of baseload power plants), increasing demand (electrification of transportation, heating, food preparation, and other areas), NIMBY actions to stop development, and supply chain and inflation to curtail expansions. I do not even see the feasibility of an intermittent/seasonal power grid in most parts of the USA for always on power demands. Who would even contemplate building a grid based on intermittent/seasonal power plants? Winter can be brutal in large parts of the USA with extended periods of frigid, snowy weather. Batteries must be charged to release energy. Intermittent power cannot generate sufficient power to meet demand at certain times of year even with long term batteries. In other times, huge redundancy for intermittent power will greatly overproduce power. The grid requires baseload power, not just intermittent power and battery storage. An analysis by a CO think tank indicated that CO will need to spend $800B by 2040 for battery storage to augment intermittent/seasonal power production.
vanderlyn
1 year ago
i’m glad to see you are coming over to the proper inflation camp. amerika is just another crumbling empire. wasting so much on endless wars and incarceration. no wonder the volks are depressed and offing themselves at the fastest clip per capita in rich world. best spend your benjamins before they are worth a lincoln in another decade.
jivefive98
1 year ago
Very hard to believe how utterly wasteful it has been all these decades for all this endless solar and wind energy, provided for free, to go along uncaptured. What a waste. Why? Because the big men with the big guns always thought Carter-like solar and wind was a wimpy way to conduct business. Win the war, but kill the planet — its someone elses problem. At the moment, Illinois has 56 solar farms at least and it keeps growing. Will it all be solved tomorrow? No. Did we sit our hands trying to look cool all this time doing nothing? Yep. It’s coming along. (And we need a few nukes while were at it).
Litemup
1 year ago
Spoken like someone who has never worked in the energy industry. I was a grid operator at PJM, and an Grid Operations Manager at California ISO. I have decades of energy industry experience. California is incorporating renewable energy fairly well.. things can get tight, like they did in September during an unprecedented heat wave, but the key is storage. California is putting storage and renewables on the grid as fast as they can. Once they get enough over the course of the next few years, they’ll be fine. PJM’s pausing of renewable projects is foolhardy. They need to speed it up, and they either need their various state legislators to mandate storage to go along with it, or they need to do it. If they put both renewable energy and storage on the grid, they’ll be fine, and they’ll keep up with their increasing demand. According to the EIA, gas fired generation is currently the most economically sound source of generation because of its dispatchability, but renewable energy with storage is rapidly closing the gap and should overtake gas fired generation in economics within the next several years. PJM is simply prolonging the inevitable.
Spoken like someone who was fire from the energy industry—and ate the climate change propaganda for breakfast
Esclaro
1 year ago
How’s Zero Hedge working out for you? Every day it’s some Chicken Little nonsense. I live in Texas where the frigging grid is run by MAGA morons and it’s completely dysfunctional. How about an article about that!
mrutkaus
1 year ago
Nobody thinks of guarding USA energy resources, keeping them here for our future.
Its called capitalism and free markets. Are you going to invest and grow an energy business if the government tells you that you can’t sell your product outside your own country? Too many folks here want government to control everything.
PapaDave
1 year ago
Good article Mish. The energy transition that the world is attempting is incredibly complicated and it isn’t going well so far. This was all foretold on this very blog by some very insightful prophets who used to comment here. They recommended cashing in on the transition by loading up on oil and gas companies. Apparently, I was one of the few people paying attention. Because almost everyone else here seems surprised by these stories. Then they bitterly complain and whine. Which is all they ever do.
8dots
1 year ago
When people who like risk take action they move the world. McClendon built a bridge to environmentalist radicals to fight coal, NG arch enemy. He sold fracking real estate to Wall street. During Trump era oil & NG were booming, but the easy stuff to extract is gone. The decline of coal, NG along with regulations suppress our energy supply. The sun, the wind, nuke, geo, biomass…are only 12%/15% of total energy.
On top of that we replaced Russian NG with US LNG. Demand is high, but supply is dwindling. It’s a systemic shift, first slowly, hardly noticed, then faster, Don’t blame regulations.
Well said. After close to a decade of of worldwide underinvestment in oil, gas, and nuclear we are setting up for supply shortages and higher prices.
DolyG
1 year ago
“Don’t expect any of this to do a damn thing for the environment.”
Of course. There is a lot of damage already baked in with all the emissions that have happened already. Look, it’s like being told that you have lung cancer, and giving up smoking after the news. Don’t expect that quitting will fix your cancer. If you are lucky, it will be just one of the many unpleasant health measures you need to take in order to survive cancer. If you aren’t lucky, you won’t survive it. And if you choose not to quit and not to fight cancer, then there are good chances of a pretty horrible sort of death, with the added issues that everybody will know you didn’t even try. There just aren’t any good options here, there are only bad and hellish.
There’s no long term damage from power plants. CO2 isn’t a toxin. It actually makes things grow better. The earth is greener now than at any time we had satellite photos thanks to greenhouse gasses. CO isn’t a long term problem either. Coal miners may have long term problems, but that’s from mining. Not from burning. Rain might be more acidic up wind, but it’s temporary. Once coal burning stops, acid rain stops
gstegen
1 year ago
It seems pretty obvious that there is a need to stretch out the coal and especially natural gas fired power plant retirements. Hopefully the agencies and politicians will see the handwriting on the wall and take some actions before it is forced by crises.
In another weird twist I noticed that PJM has reduced capacity payments by 15 %, further reducing the economic incentive to keep power plants available.
GruesomeHarvest
1 year ago
And all this for a scam. For a laugh, please watch Bill Nye the science guy (not) be school by MIT prof. of atmospheric physics Richard Lindzen.
Many of these mansions that they purchased with their $150k politician salary are located on the coast. The same coast that a politician won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for saying that Global Warming would melt all of the ice caps and raise the oceans and flood the coasts.
Lisa_Hooker
1 year ago
Political mandates exceeding the capacity of reality – whoda thunk?
There is a strong belief among Liberals that scientists and engineers will figure something out – because they always do.
While the West demands and requires use of electrical energy (trashing their economies), Russia and China are stuck with plentiful supplies of “fossil” fuels. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
What are you talking about? China imports 8% of its coal, 40% of its natural gas, and 72% of the oil it consumes.
That’s why they are leading the world in the development of renewable energy. To reduce dependence on others for their energy and to gain a competitive advantage.
Gee Whillikers!!! I really missed the China importing coal part, although 8% ain’t much. I knew China imported gas and oil because I track discussions on bringing Russian resources all the way over to China. (I’m wondering what China is going to find in their oceans and western lands.) Russia has had slightly over 100 years to develop resources while China has had 70 at most, and with little external help. They both have good technical education systems, and China creates an almost unbelievable number of engineers every year. Both Russia and China are more pragmatic about implementing renewable energy. Big changes take a while.
Yooper
1 year ago
Sitting here in Western PA already a top 10 energy exporter in the states, it’s amazing that the state sits on the largest natural gas reserves in the US, but we see wind turbines being put up mid-state instead of building more NG power generation. Need more nuclear, too.
Apologies, I guess I ran out of edit time. I’d also stop the export of NG to other countries instead of jacking up the energy prices here for us because corporations want 7x profits overseas.
Well, ultimately it’s the corporations, but it was Obama that opened the flood gates to allowing the export of our energy resources (from Forbes)
President Obama was also pro-LNG exports, with the domestic industry
really beginning during his last year as president, when Cheniere
Energy’s Sabine Pass facility started shipments in February 2016.
In fact, shale and accompanying export have been strongly supported by both the Obama and Trump administrations: “LNG Exports – A Rare Case of Policy Continuity From Obama to Trump.”
Further, it was President Obama in December 2015 who signed a bill into law to end the ban on U.S. crude exports.
You Yanks have been driving us crazy for decades for buying russian gas instead of good old US NG. Now somebody blew up our infrastructure (Wonder who that was?) and the americain dream has come true. So keep pumping!
The green line shows the problem quite well. There are 2800 MW of installed wind turbines in the BPA service area. The amount of installed solar is too small to plot at 138 MW. But what is installed will be coming on line any minute now since the sun is just now (at 7:10 AM) coming up, and it’s clear for once.
Do I see green energy waltzing up-and-down erratically?
TheCaptain
1 year ago
We send billions to Ukraine so its homopuppet can have more parties and get more Ukrainian young men killed. We know it is nothing more than a money laundering kickback operation yet those who voted for it will still not admit that orange hair and mean tweets are far more preferable. The hundreds of billions spent on the ridiculous prolonging of Russias eventual dominance of their reason should have been spent on US infrastructure. Shame on everyone who voted for Brandon yet will not simply admit they had their heads up their @$$es.
All my democrat friends think Biden is doing a great job. I’m sure a nuclear war that wipes out a lot of cities and people here in the US will not change their mind. It’s true that once humans make a decision, they are reluctant to re consider it even when evidence demands re consideration.
Perhaps “Let’s discuss” instead of “Lest discuss?”
HippyDippy
1 year ago
Remember, this is only possible because of government. This is just one of the many reasons I consider voters the enemies of liberty. You elected those selected for you to choose from. All because you’re not man/woman enough to rule yourself. How proud you must be of your choice to be a slave. Look at the destruction your choice is causing.
Pining for that strong, certain leader that will fix everything with a wave of a hand? You might be suffering from fascist delusions. See your doctor now.
This is because the US has the best government money can buy. Until that is fixed by implementing a 1 term limit and eliminating campaign donations/bribes we will continue to circle the drain. We have evolved into a corrupt crony capitalist oligarchy and nothing will change (both parties) until that is fixed. Unfortunately I don’t ever see that happening.
Anything to keep you from ruling yourself. No one has more authority over your life than you do, unless you (through spinelessness) give them said authority. No terms is the limit for liberty. Anything else is slavery.
Lobbying is the most important issue we face in government. Huge amounts of money are used to pass legislation that voters don’t want. We will not get honest legislators until the bribery, called lobbying, is removed. That will be very tough to do. It will require an existential crisis.
It’s true. All governments are evil and we should have the balls to govern ourselves, but because we are lazy, we give that power to others, and that power turns quickly into corruption, as presently writ large throughout the world. I have not voted for 50 years, and I consider anyone who votes an ignoramus or worse. We must take individual responsibility for our individual actions. Depending upon government is like depending upon Mickey Mouse, except that Mickey is more ethical.
Congratulations on your voting record. It’s better than mine. I’v voted in two presidential grand poobah selections. The last being a vote cast against Bill “rapey” Clinton in about 93 I believe. And so true about Mickey Mouse; even when you consider the pedophilic uses of the Disney characters by their creator Walt. That’s an ugly rabbit hole for sure.
Mob rule isn’t the only kind of anarchy. That’s for the ignorant and cowardly. Civilizations are borne out of the warrior. Not just the kind that goes around sticking swords into people. Individuals who have forged their own character in response to their environment. Their will has been forged by dedication and passion. They develop self-respect from their embracing of suffering to reach their objectives. This enables them to love themselves, and so they can love others. Be it physical, mental, or spiritual; the warrior spirit is essential to creating and maintaining a civilization. No civilization can be borne without the warrior spirit being dominant. And no civilization can survive without them. Look around. All these spineless slaves constitute the majority of our culture because we are imploding at light speed in historical time. This grid integrity problem alone can destroy our rather feeble civilization, and will do so if the people remain so pathetic. Warriors don’t have the problem of mob rule. They rule themselves. Anything else is slavery, and the closest thing I know to blasphemy is to embrace ignorance. But this is what a slave desires; ignorance. That is why you envision mob rule. True mob rule is government. Open your eyes; I know you know better than to have written such drivel.
A republic is still slavery. In many ways it’s worse than democracy as it has the whole thin veneer of liberty. Ultimately, it’s just as tyrannical. It just sounds better to the slaves.
I’m glad the ones who removed the insanely incompetent Chicago mayor voted,
quantzic
1 year ago
Another great article.
A couple years ago, a company responsible for the electricity load balancing in CA asked me if I could optimize their software because they were wasting 30% due to renewables. My reply to the marxists: NO.
Lies from fox about the election , from china about how they’re still communists booking 10% gdp growth every year, or from the lesser kooky news outlets and Facebook. All that matters is outrage and the squirt of adrenaline you get from it. Right wing nuttery is the extreme sport of the obese.
the chinese call themselves communists for less than a century. it is a meaningless term in an empire built on world wide commerce for thousands of years.
Will Cali electricity prices moderate over time? Gets pretty pricey in tier 3 per kWh
Marxist corporations! Who knew such things could exist?