Roughly half the country is at risk of blackouts. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment released last week indicates that multiple regions across the U.S. are “likely to experience a shortfall in electricity supplies” during extreme weather events or even just at the peak of summer or winter.
While this year is an improvement over last year, where a larger portion of North America was at some level of risk, it is still a warning that millions of Americans could experience electricity shortages at some point in the coming years. Output is not meeting demand, and in situations of increased electrical needs, the supply has and will continue to fall short.
We should not be putting lives and livelihoods in jeopardy for the sake of implementing politically popular but drastically inferior energy sources.
Elected officials have pushed an aggressive net zero agenda that hopes to decarbonize energy usage. They heavily promote that intermittent wind and solar replace reliable coal and natural gas, and at much faster rates than the grid can adequately manage.
NERC’s annual evaluation asserts that the increasing wind and solar replacements of coal and natural gas is “affecting the essential reliability services (ERS) that the resource mix provides.” Renewables are not capable of handling a significant portion of America’s electricity needs.
Earlier this year, CEO of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO)—the most vulnerable region—wrote that “the transition that is underway to get to a decarbonized end state is posing material, adverse challenges to electric reliability.” Wind and solar lack certain key reliability attributes that other sources possess.
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Kristen Walker is a policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, visit www.theamericanconsumer.org or follow us on Twitter @ConsumerPal.