Everybody and his brother — the Sierra Club, the natural gas industry, the solar industry, the wind industry, President Barack Obama and Lisa Jackson of the EPA — want to design the nation’s energy mix and the nation’s electrical system.
This is dangerous. The nation needs a reliable, affordable energy supply and a tough electrical grid.
It’s time Americans listened to the engineers.
As The Washington Post reported, the super-derecho storm of June 29 was just the latest indication of how badly the nation needs to pay attention to its electrical grid. The system is old, stretched to capacity and failing.
India’s failure to keep its system up to date resulted in more than half a billion customers losing power. It would be wise, politically, to make sure that does not happen to Americans.
The American Society of Civil Engineers reported that Americans need to spend $107 billion by 2020 to modernize their electrical infrastructure. The federal government throws around that kind of money on noncritical projects. It’s time for Congress to get this much more important work started. After all, politicizing energy and failing to make critical investments would be expensive as well.
“By 2020, the cost of service interruptions will be $71 billion, or if you break that down to households, $565 over that period,” the engineering society’s president, Andrew W. Hermann, told the Post.
Americans will not take kindly to games that affect their jobs and their security at home. Politicians should not risk it.
The Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail (Aug. 9)
I find it interesting that there is such backlog on upgrading and improving aging infrastructure like this. The utilities should be more diligent in planning this work as part of on-going capital improvement budgets. Reliability and efficiency are important and improved infrastructure should cut down on losses.
What I disapprove of is expanding and overbuilding transmission lines as a costly favor to wind power developers. This is the case of the MPRP currently under way here in Maine. The expansion to a 345 kv line from Orrington to Elliot has nothing to do with more effective local power distribution but is to serve the fickle trickle of wind power that suddenly surges when the wind blows just right a few days a year. At $1.4 billion, that’s a costly favor to an industry that wouldn’t even exist without heavy subsidization and arbitrary mandates.