Remember the good old days, when grid reliability was a "given" in the United States? No one feared that the lights would go out every time a summer heatwave or winter coldsnap rolled through. But now -- not just in California and Texas, but also in Arizona and Michigan -- officials worry aloud about whether formerly routine surges in energy use will bring down the grid.
This wasn't a problem ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Blackouts sometimes occurred due to equipment malfunctions, but those were anomalies and highly memorable events -- "where were you when the lights went out"? Countries that couldn't reliably keep the lights on were scoffed at by Americans as backward and "third world."
So what happened?
What changed?
How did our formerly stable, reliable, world-class grid become the finicky, vulnerable, frail thing it is today?
The answer is obvious to anyone with eyes to see. The trumped-up "climate crisis" gave politicians and special interests an engraved invitation to meddle with the grid -- which is like trusting an incompetent backyard mechanic to tear down and rebuild your Ferarri. And grid reliability has predictably been on the decline ever since. It's not a coincidence that the biggest breakdowns in reliability are happening where the "renewables revolution" has been pushed most aggressively, in California and (somewhat ironically) Texas. The too-hasty push to "transition" the grid from reliable to unreliable energy tech, from the tried-and-true to pie-in-the-sky, is turning the US into an embarrassing third-world Banana Republic.
That's perfectly acceptable to eco-Luddites and climate cult members. Third-world countries have "sustainable economies," don't ya know. Green central planners actually welcome energy scarcity and energy unreliability, along with rising energy costs, if this will put prosperous people on the crash energy diet they/we must endure if the planet is to be "saved." America's grid isn't faltering by chance, or from neglect. It's faltering because the revolutionaries driving this agenda either never think thru the long-term implications of their war on reliable energy, or they have thought it through and welcome the collapse of a system they see as threatening to the planet's survival.
Unless the silent majority wakes to this menace and loudly supports energy realism over energy fantasy, millions more Americans will be sitting in the cold and dark one winter day, shaking their heads and wondering how the hell this happened to them.
