Modern societies take a steady flow of electricity for granted to power our smartphones, laptops, appliances, nighttime lighting, home air conditioning, credit card and ATM transactions, and countless other dependencies … until its interruption shuts everything down.
And then we forget until the next time we again find ourselves shivering or sweltering in the dark.
Imagine Texas, the “energy capital of the world,” during the near collapse of its power grid during the Feb. 2021 winter storm Yuri which led to prolonged shortages of water, food and heat at more than 4.5 million homes, leaving behind nearly 250 deaths and costing at least $195 billion in economic damages.
Meredith Angwin, the author of Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, attributes the Texas outage to a “fatal trifecta” of factors.
The first of these influences was an overreliance on renewable energy sources “which go on and off when they want to.”
A second cause was too much dependence upon natural gas just when needed for backup delivery which can also be interrupted just at that time.
The third trifecta leg is “relying on a neighbor for help,” that neighbor (coal) having mostly been replaced down to 13% by ever-increasing reliance on wind (25%) and natural gas (51%).
According to the Texas comptroller, utilities frantically enacted blackouts to cut demand fearing that a mismatch of energy supply lasting more than several minutes would cause long-term damage to grid hardware.
If this could happen in Texas, imagine the grid vulnerability everywhere else in the country as indicated in a May 2023 report of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), warning that a majority of America’s grid is at heightened risk of levels for outages.
As concurred by National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson, the NERC report “is an especially dire warning that America’s ability to keep the lights on has been jeopardized.”
Pointing out rolling blackouts in nine states in December 2023 as energy demands exceeded supplies, Matheson said, “American families and businesses expect the lights to stay on at a cost they can afford. But that’s no longer a guarantee.”
America should also heed recent lessons from Germany which has depended upon wind for about 32% of its power and solar for 15%.
An unusually windless February and March dropped offshore and onshore wind output by half, boosting energy costs to record levels.
While March was sunnier to help boost solar-electricity output compared to a year earlier, relatively short daylight hours in a northern latitude meant this increase wasn’t enough to offset the decline in wind generation.
Then there’s that sudden Spain power outage that collapsed the grid and disrupted lives and paralyzed activities of about 55 million people across the Iberian Peninsula.
As noted by Wired.com, "The increasing integration of renewable energy into the Spanish system may have exacerbated the disconnection issues and subsequent need to balance the grid."
Wired notes that renewables already account for 66% of Spain’s installed capacity — mostly wind, solar and hydro — and have generated about 60% of the country’s electricity.
Given that the blackout occurred on a sunny day and that hydro doesn’t fluctuate with weather, any attribution leaves wind as the only likely contributing culprit.
Meanwhile, huge power needs to meet reliable 24/7 demands of giant new U.S. artificial intelligence data centers has turbocharged additional generation capacity and grid security challenges.
An explosion of new hyperscale data centers in Northern Virginia will consume enormous amounts of power, some using as much as currently used to supply the city of Seattle.
Referred to as “Data Center Alley,” the area is home to about 150 data warehouses which support about 70% of global internet traffic through a spider web of crisscrossing power lines.
Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com’s cloud-computing business, has previously invested $52 billion in the region with plans to add another $35 billion by 2040.
The company, which has reportedly enabled 19 solar farms in Virginia and is the world’s largest corporate renewable energy buyer, has also struck a $650 million deal to buy a data center in Pennsylvania powered by a 2.5-gigawatt nuclear plant.
Dominion Energy, which supplies electricity to most of the Virginia data centers projects their power requirements to quadruple over the next 15 years, representing 40% of the utility’s demand in the entire state.
Dominion wants to build a 1,000-megawatt natural-gas plant in Chesterfield County where a coal plant closed last year, stating that the addition is critically important for reliability.
Beware those costs for meeting these increased power demands — including transmission infrastructures — will be passed on to household and business consumers.
Dominion projects that grid investments, plus the new projects, will raise average utility bills for Virginia customers from around $133 a month to $174 over 15 years.
As Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie has warned: “The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down.”
Consequently, this transition from reliable and abundant fossil energy sources we previously took for granted to intermittent and weather-dependent wind and solar is a topic we should urgently think about now while the lights are still on.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.