FERC Member Follows Perry Onstage, Debunks His Statements On Renewable "Theat" To Grid

[hatrack]

EDIT

Perry, speaking at the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s annual energy conference in Washington, D.C., said that under his leadership the Department of Energy will do what it can to ensure baseload generating capacity, such as coal and nuclear power, “is not tossed aside in the name of some political favorite.” To that end, “I’ve asked the staff of the Department of Energy to undertake a critical review of regulatory burdens placed by the previous administration on baseload generators,” Perry said. “Baseload power is critical to a well-functioning grid. … But over the last several years, grid experts have expressed concern about the erosion of critical baseload resources.”

Colette Honorable, a commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), said in a presentation immediately after Perry’s that the introduction of greater amounts of renewable energy has “absolutely not” harmed grid reliability.

Recent history shows that large amounts of renewables have been successfully integrated into regional grids across the nation, Honorable said. “I have seen no problems with reliability,” she said. “Bring on more renewables.” FERC regulates the interstate transmission of natural gas, oil, and electricity and oversees the operation of almost all of the nation’s regional power grids.

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Honorable, who tweeted on Monday that this is her last week as a FERC commissioner, told reporters after her presentation that her agency has been in touch with the DOE staff who are working on the grid reliability study. “We have offered to be supportive of them. And we’ve provided them with publications and other information,” she said. “We carry out this work every day. And we look forward to helping the new administration at DOE understand and grapple with these challenges.”

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https://thinkprogress.org/rick-perry-raises-fears-about-grid-reliability-810357fb7d6b

[gordianot]

1. It is not a matter necessarily of cognitive functioning.

But any room containing Rick Perry you have the most ignorant fuck in the room. In his case it is a life style choice.

[hatrack]

2. You have to wonder . . .

A gift like that could be genetic, but who knows? Maybe he spent his adolescence out in the garage huffing paint.

[mountain grammy]

3. that'd be my guess.

[hunter]

4. I don't think there is any renewable threat to grid

That's a simple engineering problem, and not an especially difficult one. Network theory these days is pretty solid. (Back in the 'seventies it was not.)

The problem is that nimble fossil fuel power plants combined with renewable energy sources can be made to work and "better than coal" is a pretty low hurdle to leap.

Renewable energy WITHOUT fossil fuels is a technology that does not yet exist, at least not in a way that would support any high energy industrial affluence.

If ever I see ordinary people "cutting the cable" with electricity, same as some are now cutting cable television, I'll be impressed.

In our house we've cut the television cable, no Comcast, no satellite, no broadcast TV. Out television plays movies, commercial free, that's all it does. But cutting Pacific Gas & Electric service still eludes me, at least as a married man and not some wild eyed crazy man living in a post office box and sleeping wherever with the other homeless people... down by the creek, maybe.

I can throw my freshly washed clothes in the dryer before I go to bed and wear them in the morning. I can safely eat leftovers from the refrigerator, food I'd have given to the dogs in non-electric times.

Thanks to my solar neighbors as the sun is shining the posts I make on my little chromebook are solar powered. 16 watts, no big deal. When the sun goes down, my high energy lifestyle is powered by un-natural, living dead, fracked "natural" gas. Others in the U.S.A. as affluent as I am enjoy the luxury of coal and nuclear power.

That's the crux of the problem. "Renewables" are not displacing fossil fuels and it's not yet clear they can.

A society without fossil fuels looks nothing like the affluent society some of us now enjoy, not even the build-nukes-as-fast-as-we-can society, nor the impossible wind and solar powered utopias with Tesla electric cars for all.