Harsh winter weather combined with coal-fired power plant closings could spell trouble for many households across the country who will desperately need to keep the lights and heat on this winter.
Joe Bastardi, chief meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics,told the Wall Street Journal Live that current weather patterns are “flowing along right now into the type of El Niño situation that is notorious for giving the United States cold, snowy winters, especially in the southern and eastern part of the United States, relative to the averages.”
Temperatures last winter set new record lows for huge swaths of the U.S. The stretch from December 2013 to February 2014 was the “34th coldest such period for the contiguous 48 states as a whole since modern records began in 1895,” reports the Weather Channel.
But the harsh winter did more than just chill the air, it sent demand for heat and power surging and brought the electrical grid to near its breaking point. Natural gas power plants lacked the supplies and infrastructure to keep the lights on and green energy was unable to generate power in fierce winter weather.
Bastardi noted that another harsh winter “would be significant because we were within one power plant last year of having the grid overload.”
“This year, if you get the kind of winter that we had in 2009-2010 or 2002-2003 with the nation’s grid on the ropes the way it is and some of these regulations that I hear about coming down that are supposed to close plants on January 1st… this could be a very, very big economic impact on the winter,” Bastardi continued. “And we’re very concerned about that.”
....“We’re closing an enormous amount of coal generation, through a variety of rules, and a good number of those plants are set to retire next April,” Philip Moeller, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told Platts Energy Week. “But most people would say about 90% of that capacity was running and used and necessary during the polar vortex events.”
“So the question is: Are we going to have mild weather for the next 2-3 years? If so, we can probably get through it,” Moeller said. “But if we have more extreme weather events, like we had this winter, and that power is no longer available, we could be in a real situation that’s not good for consumers.”
Moeller added that blackouts were a “possibility” for parts of the country where large amounts of coal retirements are taking place or that rely too heavily on natural gas for electricity generation — like New England.
....“The question we should be asking is, what happens when that capacity is gone? Hoping for a mild winter isn’t a viable strategy. We can’t have a-hope-and-a-prayer policy,” she added.
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