When the Lights Go Out

Electricity is something we all take forgranted — until we don’t have it. Then our society breaks down.

That’s why we ought to pay attention to a recent study, “Lights Out in 2009,” published by the NextGen Energy Council. That organization is supported by the electric utility industry, the coal industry and other players with a vested interest in growing the electric industry, so we need to take its conclusions with a grain of salt. However, if NextGen is even close to being right, the U.S. faces massive disruptions within the next few years that will make the today’s concerns about the impact of Global Warming in 2010 seem absurdly remote.

Here’s the argument in a nutshell: Since the early 1990s, baseload generation reserve margins have declined precipitously from 30-40 percent to 17 percent in 2007. Compounding the problem, a disparity between growth in electric demand and capacity could shrink those margins by another 10 percent by 2016. Margins of 12-15 percent are deemed the minimum required to safeguard against brownouts and blackouts.

According to NextGen, the shortage of generating capacity will be compounded by insufficient transmission capacity — the ability to get electricity to where it’s needed. Some areas are likely to be hit sooner and harder than others. California and the Rocky Mountain states are in deep doodoo, and the northeast urban corridor, including Washington, D.C., are in mid-waist doodoo.

Nationally, NextGen estimates that the U.S. will need to install $250 billion of new generating capacity and $80 billion of new transmission capacity by 2016 to avoid power disruptions costing the economy a guesstimated $80 billion a year. That capacity is not being built, the organization contends, because (a) virtually every project is blocked or delayed by lawsuits, and (b) state regulatory agencies are imposing Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), which would make electric supplies dependent upon variable wind- and solar-powered generating capacity and aggravating the challenge of getting electricity where you need it when you need it.

A hallmark of the Kaine administration has been its attention to the impact of Global Warming upon Virginia’s economy and ecosystems. That’s a worthy study. We need to think long term, and we need to adopt a holistic framework for approaching public policy that gives proper weight to the environment. However, while attention of our policy makers is fixated on the end of the century, we are paying scant attention to problems of far greater magnitude that could be only three or four years away.

Here’s a prediction: If brownouts and blackouts start devastating Virginia’s economy, people will be a whole lot more focused on that problem — by a factor of 100 — than hypothetical concerns of what might happen if temperatures and sea levels rise nine decades from now. Global Warming alarmists and environmentalists generally will be discredited. The public will demand immediate solutions, even if those solutions are expensive, short-sighted and environmentally destructive. The public will throw money at Big Grid remedies that provide a quick fix, even if they perpetuate the energy status quo instead of creating the distributed grid we need for a sustainable future.

Virginia’s public policy makers, including its environmental leaders, need to get out front of these problems now — not when the blackouts hit.