Last week, the Department of Energy issued a short-term emergency order under the Federal Power Act, allowing regional power grid operator PJM Interconnection to go past normal pollution limits to keep the electricity on, reported Daily Mail.
This announcement followed a power grid emergency that affected 60 million Americans. Officials were worried that the increase of power for air conditioning due to a spike in warm weather would overwork PJM’s power grid.
Larry Behrens of Power the Future says the order gave utilities and markets more tools to be able to keep the power running.
“These are green energy seeds that are sprouting and bringing forth terrible fruit,” Behrens says.
According to him, the Biden administration took off about 50 gigawatts of reliable coal and natural gas power off the grid. That’s like taking away a family’s monthly income and then racking up more charges, he says.
“They’re having to demand a little higher than what they’re used to because they’re trying to do some maintenance on some of the plants in the fall. It is energy infrastructure that is needed desperately, and they took it off the grid expecting that wind and solar would replace it. It obviously can’t,” Behrens states.
Energy usage in cold weather is different, he continues, because not as much energy is used.
“Air conditioners use more energy than furnaces do. When you see electric usage at the highest, it's almost always 100% in the summer. And so, there’s the good news here. The reason we’re seeing this in the fall is because in preparation for the winter,” Behrens explains.
Fall is the time when there’s a lot of maintenance work done on power plants because it’s not too hot or too cold, making it the perfect time to do it.
“If that demand stays higher than expected, well, some of that power is off the grid because of maintenance. The fact of the matter is we used to have other sources of power to bring to bear when these things happened.”
Additional sources like nuclear, coal-fired plants and natural gas, he says, will be needed to help keep the electricity on.
