Monday, April 07, 2008

A Shortage Of Power

Carl from Chicago Boyz is discussing the looming collapse of the electrical power grid in Britain and how it relates to what is happening in America.

There is a looming electricity crisis that is about to overtake the United States. While our demand for electricity continues to increase due to construction, computers (data centers take up a significant portion of electricity demand), and potentially even electric cars, essentially no new “base load” supply of electrical generation is being added to the market. We do get the occasional wind farm or solar or geothermal source of energy, and a bit of conservation is on the rise, but these tiny dents in supply and demand, respectively, don’t even begin to cover growth much less the fact that many electricity plants are aging and will face retirement in the future. Due to the long lead times involved with getting a new plant on line (at LEAST 5-10 years in the case of large base load coal or nuclear plants, best case), our problem is that we aren’t doing anything NOW to head off the crisis LATER, when we won’t have any options at all.
They have a nice graph showing how the grid in Britain will not be able to meet demand by around 2015. They also mention that already there are spot shortages in London.

We need to plan ahead and throw the Greenies overboard. Already they are contributing to the destruction of the rain forests, and starving the poor. Why we want to let them have so much power in the face of their almost total ignorance of anything outside their narrow interests is beyond me.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

2 comments:

al fin said...

Very true. But have you looked at the US Congress lately? The inmates control the asylum. Those jokers are several decks short of a full deck. They couldn't meet and solve an impending crisis even though all our well-being depends on it.

J Carlton said...

This was posted at Depleted Cranium about a week ago:
http://green-agenda.com/index.html
The Greens have wanted to have new kind of state mired in poverty.
As Jerry Pournelle said in “A Step Farther Out”-”Given energy we will not starve; we will lick the pollution problem and we will generate the wealth which historically has brought about population limits.” Yet the Greens attack energy production first and especially nuclear energy. Read the website pages very closely. A depleted smaller, poorer world society is what the Club of Rome people want. An energy rich society doesn’t need crisis management, doesn’t need rationing and economic controls, and doesn’t need the Club of Rome, Al Gore, James Hansen, Helen Caldecott, Ralph Nader, the Progressives, the Liberals fascists or any other restriction on its freedoms. Nothing scares the Greens more.