Thoughts On A Sunday

Old Man Winter is reluctant to release his grip up here at the lake, dumping a couple of inches snow yesterday. Not that it was problematic as for the most part the snow melted on the roads and only the grass, ground, parked cars and trucks, and the roofs of houses seemed to collect snow. It was pretty much over by early afternoon, but it did remind us that we still get snow in April. Last year at this time we saw an April Nor’easter that dropped about a foot of snow here at The Gulch and knocked out our power for almost two days. (Thank goodness we had the Official Weekend Pundit Generator to keep the lights and heat on.)

We were back into more spring-like weather today and it will be warmer later in the week, a nice lead up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

On a side note, the trusty RAM 1550 has been in the shop over the weekend. It’s nothing major but the shop didn’t have the part needed to effect the repair. The problem?

The windshield wipers would run even with the wiper switch set to ‘OFF’ and the ignition key off. The only way to shut them off was to remove the fuse from the fuse panel under the hood, something that is very inconvenient.

The guys at the shop figured out what was causing the problem, something I had looked up on the Internet before calling the shop, and what they found matched what I found on the web. So the RAM will be stuck at the shop until they can get the new part as it isn’t prudent to drive during wet weather when your wipers don’t work.

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Was this a “mostly” peaceful protest as the Left has defined it? Or was it an act of attempted murder?

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home set on fire by arsonist while he and his family slept.

I don't care what Shapiro's political or religious leanings are, this action is unforgivable. The arsonist should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, period.

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In line with the above, I have to wonder how it is that CNN can claim that “Only the Right has an ‘Extremism Problem’.”

I guess they can claim that if it is considered ‘extremism’ only when the Right allegedly does that but is ‘protest’ when the Left does exactly the same thing...or worse.

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Here are 10 of the over 30 pieces of evidence the climate scam is now collapsing:

1. “Huge: A powerful climate alliance of the World Economic Forum, major companies, the UN, and banks is “at an end“.

2. “Bill Gates is giving up on climate change…Breakthrough Energy, a joint venture between Bill Gates and a handful of other billionaires… is slashing much of its policy staff.”

3. NASA GISS funding “terminated”?: “New NASA Chief Will Wind Down Climate Alarm Shop”.

4. Delicious straight talk from U.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin: “We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion”.

5. Wonderful straight talk from U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright: “2050” ; he suggests climate change alarmism is “a quasi-cult religion”.

6. The Tories have ditched Net Zero by 2050.

7. Remarkably, Just Stop Oil just announced “the end of soup on Van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets”.

8. Shellenberger/Pielke Jr: “Climate change is going to fade from view like overpopulation did…Lack of protests over Trump’s action on energy shows how little anyone every really cared about global warming”.

9. One of the longest running climate cases, Juliana v. United States, just ended in rejection at the Supreme Court.

10. A climate startup that boasted a roster of celebrity backers and arranged carbon credits for Meta, Microsoft and other large companies just filed bankruptcy.

Read The Whole Thing.

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This is not exactly news to me or anyone else paying attention:

There is a looming energy crunch facing the US, specifically in electrical capacity.

Major US grid operators are raising the alarm about the looming capacity crunch.

Power has the story:

“Six major U.S. grid operators have raised a unified alarm about an impending capacity crunch, warning that the pace and scale of explosive demand—including from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification—poses a precarious misalignment with accelerating generator retirements and transmission constraints.

At a March 25 hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, the nation’s top grid officials testified that the U.S. power system is under mounting strain—and that without urgent structural reforms, the ability to maintain reliable electric service could falter. Their message was unusually direct: demand is accelerating, supply is lagging, and current tools may not be enough to bridge the gap.

--snip--

All of the ten regional grids seem to be facing the same problems of increasing demand and closure of dispatchable capacity. ERCOT, for instance, who run the grid in Texas, forecast that peak demand will increase from 86 GW to 106 GW by 2030.

PJM in the Mid-Atlantic and Mid West anticipate a rise in peak demand of 47% in the next 15 years, and California’s CAISO are looking at an increase of 33% in the next ten years.

This is not a new problem. It was brought up when the ill-advised EV mandate by the Biden Administration was announced. Considering the amount of electricity that would be needed to charge all of those mandated EVs there was no way the nation’s electrical grid would be able to meet the demand. Capacity would need to be at least doubled. Then there’s the rapidly increasing electrical demand from hyperscale and AI data centers which would require an equal amount of grid expansion and you can see why there is a problem.

While the EV issue seems to have been diminished as the mandate has gone away, that leaves the expanding data center electrical demand that still needs to be met. Unless there is a concerted effort to update the electrical grid and build new generating capacity, those needs won’t be met. Yet it seems to me that the problem is being devoutly ignored, or if not ignored, being downplayed. Neither solves the problem.

One thing we should not do under any circumstances is follow the examples of either Germany or the UK and push renewable energy upon the populace. As we have seen there, renewables cannot meet the demands as it is neither reliable or dispatchable. Germany went so far as to shut down its nuclear power plants and replace them with wind turbines which have shown they cannot meet their electrical demands. The UK has had similar problems though as best I can tell they haven’t decommissioned any of their nuclear plants.

We should focus on things like nuclear power, particularly Gen III and Gen IV SMRs – small modular reactors – which can be quickly built in a factory, employ up-to-date nuclear technology, can use ‘depleted’ fuel from older nuclear plants as fuel, and are considered “Walk Away Safe” because they can’t melt down like the Gen II plants being used worldwide.

The question is whether we will do so or not.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where winter is on retreat again, warmer weather is on the way, and plans for launching the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout are in the works.