It’s winter, which means it’s real cold outside. None of this is surprising when demand increases to keep our homes warm.

And as you can imagine, the fact that we are producing less energy and depending more on people outside our state is causing more challenges. PJM offered these comments as reported in Yahoo Finance on the stresses the grid is facing: 

You would think that the idea of “jeopardizing reliability and public safety” might get people to try something different.

That is our hope with a new administration because you can’t oppose development of in state baseload energy generation like natural gas while at the same time telling people you want to lower energy costs. That’s how we got ourself in this situation where there continue to be “stresses on fuel availability.” They just don’t go together. It just won’t work.

At some point, people are going to have to accept that just like we learned with wind, we can’t solar our way out of this.

In fact, solar panels in some places have frozen because of the temps and as you can see from this chart, on a perfectly sunny winter day, solar is generating for only part of the day meaning we will need massive amounts of batteries to fill in the gap. So where is the plan there?

These deep freezes continue to become more and more expensive than they need to be. This is why we need to stop fighting and start planning for the long term where we include