Electric reliability: Minnesota in the red

Is anyone paying attention? More importantly, are the correct people paying attention?

As far as I can tell, our own Sarah Montalbano was the first to report locally on the latest report of electric reliability regulators. I can summarize it with one picture (Figure 1) from page 6 of the 148-page report:

Minnesota is in the red (“high risk”). You do not want to be in the red. The money quote:

High-risk areas are likely to experience a shortfall in electricity supplies at the peak of an average summer or winter season. Extreme weather, producing wide-area heat waves or deep-freeze events, poses an even greater threat to reliability.

The report was produced by an entity called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), which monitors electric grid reliability for the 48 states, most of Canada, and a small bit of Mexico. As with any bureaucracy, you need to cut through the jargon: “shortfalls” mean blackouts.

What’s causing this? Specifically for our region (MISO), the red area? NERC explains in Table 1 (p. 7).

Resource additions are not keeping up with generator retirements and demand growth.

Resource additions=new power plants. Generator retirements=premature closure of coal-fired power plants as the result of “climate” mandates. Demand growth=all those new computer data centers. So, to translate: we aren’t building new power plants fast enough to keep up with the premature closure of coal plants, forget about power for all those new data centers under construction.

Now is the time to panic, while the lights are still on. You will recall that NERC published this exact same warning last year. Going back further, you may recall the Polar Vortex of January 2019. That was our early warning. And we haven’t even gotten to the subject of price.

So far, we have the Star Tribune‘s Walter Orenstein posting about the report on Twitter (X). We have a report from KSTP-TV. And that’s pretty much it.

The one bit of big news coming out of this year’s NERC warning is the announcement by the state’s rural electric cooperatives that they favor repealing the ban on new nuclear power plants.

I think they meant “conversation”? In either case, it’s a change in the correct direction.

However, local renewable energy advocates aren’t concerned about high-risk alerts. KSTP quotes a “clean-grid” group as pointing out that “state regulators” are on the job with “supply plans” to meet “future projections.”

Unfortunately for actual energy users, the future is now. And counting on the same “state regulators” who have gotten it exactly wrong, every inch of the way, so far, would seem a poor strategy. No one is planning for “black swan” events. Future projections assume that everything will continue as it has in the past.

Utilities, renewable energy suppliers, and state regulators will not be the ones suffering when the lights go out. You will.

My advice, buy generators and lots of fuel.