\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\nJust days away from the 10-year anniversary of the worst power\r\noutage in U.S. history, the White House and the Energy Department\r\nreleased a report on Monday evaluating the resiliency of the\r\nnation’s electric grid and recommending steps to prevent future\r\nblackouts.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nThe report called storms and severe weather “the leading cause of\r\npower outages in the United States,” and warned against the steep\r\ncost of weather-related damage to the electric grid. It put the\r\nprice tag for electrical failures caused by inclement weather at\r\nbetween $18 billion and $33 billion annually, and noted that costs\r\nhave increased in recent years, jumping from a range of $14 billion\r\nto $26 billion in 2003 to $27 billion to $52 billion in 2012. Storms\r\nexceeding a billion dollars in damages (electrical and otherwise)\r\nhave also become more frequent in the past decade, as the chart\r\nbelow shows.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\r\nWell,\r\nEntergy’s Arkansas Nuclear 1 (ANO1) is still down\r\n\r\nmore than four months after a fatal accident<\/a>\r\n(hey,\r\n\r\nlook at that<\/a>; it got up to 87% yesterday before it shut down again).\r\nXcel Energy\r\n\r\nmanaged to run up $267 over budget and 5 1\/2 months downtime<\/a>\r\non its Monticello nuke.\r\nAnd of course\r\n\r\nSan Onofre 2 and 3 are down forever<\/a>\r\nbecause of faulty parts that Southern California Edison knew were bad before\r\nit tried to get NRC to let it restart.\r\nNone of those was weather-related.\r\n
\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\nBut of course\r\nthe same Entergy that still has ANO1 down operates\r\nPilgrim that has been down\r\n\r\nbecause of both winter snow and summer heat<\/a>.\r\nMany\r\n\r\nnukes can’t handle heat<\/a>.\r\n
\r\nAnd many nukes and their vendors\r\n\r\nhave been involved in records scandals<\/a> such as\r\n\r\na supervisor falsifying safety records at Entergy’s Indian Point<\/a>.\r\n
\r\nIf somebody falsifies solar panel records you get solar panels that don’t work,\r\nnot a safety risk for millions of people.\r\nHow about we stop building new nukes, shut down more of the old ones,\r\nand get on with solar panels, which like summer sunshine just fine?\r\nMassachusetts may not make much solar power in a winter blizzard,\r\nbut it its nukes are going to be shut down then anyway, we might as well\r\nship them Georgia solar power instead.\r\n
\r\nSure, we should also do this:\r\n
\r\n\r\nOne investment to strengthen the system, they suggested, would be to\r\nadd automated sensors to pinpoint the exact location of a power\r\nfailure. “One of the things we have been working with is to help\r\ndeploy automated switches, which utilities have been able to [use]\r\nto minimize the impact of outages … so what they’ve been able to\r\ndo is actually isolate a fault or where the damage is on the system\r\nfaster and be able to keep other customers up that normally would\r\nhave gone down in an outage,” one offical said.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nAdministration officals also urged continued investment in\r\nmonitoring systems to identify areas of the grid most likely to be\r\ndamaged in the event of a storm.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\r\nWait, electric utilities haven’t already<\/em> done that?\r\nMaybe they should\r\n\r\nstop wasting our time and money with nuclear boondoggles<\/a>\r\nand get on with fixing some real problems!\r\nIf even\r\nCattenom-smoking<\/a>\r\nEDF can\r\n\r\nexit nukes and turn to solar and wind<\/a>,\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\nformerly all-powerful\r\n\r\nGeorgia Power<\/a> and\r\n\r\nSouthern Company<\/a> can do the same.\r\nEventually we’ll hear even Paul Bowers saying\r\n\r\na carbon tax is needed<\/a>\r\nonce he catches on that his company and its parent SO can profit\r\nby more of that\r\n\r\nsolar power GA PSC required it to buy<\/a>.\r\n
\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yes, and moving away from baseload coal, nukes, and natural gas and towards distributed solar and wind power will help with that, both directly by making the grid more resilient, and indirectly by slowing climate change. Clare Foran wrote for NationalJournal 12 August 2013, Climate Change Is Threatening the Power Grid: So says the White […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[47,216,17,18,2,19,6124,104,23,24],"tags":[6672,8719,8753,1606,663,8707,8701,8708,8699,397,2077,8709,8702,12,7,360,562,8737,1136,708,107,8713,4308,8766,6819,1135,6818,8714,335,108,1102,6,8735,4360,6820],"class_list":["post-5167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-change","category-coal","category-ga-psc","category-georgia-power","category-government","category-history","category-natural-gas-2","category-nuclear","category-renewable-energy","category-solar","tag-ano1","tag-climate-change","tag-coal","tag-cost-overruns","tag-entergy","tag-ga-psc","tag-georgia","tag-georgia-power","tag-government","tag-grid","tag-heat","tag-history","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-monticello","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear","tag-outages","tag-pilgrim","tag-plant-vogtle","tag-renewable-energy","tag-resilient","tag-san-onofre","tag-sensors","tag-smart-grid","tag-snow","tag-solar","tag-southern-california-edison","tag-southern-company","tag-storm","tag-valdosta","tag-weather","tag-white-house","tag-xcel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-1ll","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5167"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5169,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5167\/revisions\/5169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}