I’ve been seeing articles about how “vulnerable” our electrical power grid has become to various potential crises. And we’re finally starting to get to the root CAUSE of the REAL crisis. In short, it is the “Crisis’-in-Chief” who also goes by the name Barack Hussein Obama.
Note how this article begins by blathering on about “the polar vortex.” And then see how – by the time the average reader has probably switched his/her brain off – you see the paragraph that says:
The electrical system’s duress was a direct result of the polar vortex, the cold air mass that settled over the nation. But it exposed a more fundamental problem. There is a growing fragility in the U.S. electricity system, experts warn, the result of the shutdown of coal-fired plants, reductions in nuclear power, a shift to more expensive renewable energy and natural gas pipeline constraints. The result is likely to be future price shocks. And they may not be temporary.
So allow me to simply restate the main point: the problem that has caused your electricity bill to soar to never-before-seen heights – and STAY THERE FOREVER – is your stupid decision to elect and then re-elect Barack Obama and a frankly Demonic bureauCrat party (which is what “Democrat” actually stands for). It was Obama’s dictate – cheered on by worshipful DemoCrats, to bankrupt the coal plants that provided HALF America’s electricity and force them to shut down, to kill nuclear power, to shift to these extravagant and financially ruinous “green” energies so that the rich liberals who bought and invested in these boondoggles could gorge on the pig trough of public money.
I want you to understand before you read the LA Times’ spin: I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN. I told you it would happen before you elected Obama and said, “I hope they find out about this … before they make the biggest mistake of their lives.”
I pointed out and preserved for the historic record what Obama said:
Let me sort of describe my overall policy.
“What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.
[…]
So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.
[…]
So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.
It’s just that it will bankrupt them.”
That’s what Obama said. That’s what Obama did.
Obama declared that electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket” under his plan.
When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal…under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket…even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I’m capping greenhouse gasses, coal power plants, natural gas…you name it…whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retro-fit their operations.
That will cost money…they will pass that money on to the consumers.
Congratulations for voting for his damn plan.
For the record, as this article from a couple of years ago proves, this has been going on. Obama is and has been at war with American energy and while Obama is powerless, helpless and weak before Putin he is a tyrant when it comes to dictating his domestic agenda. His war has succeeded.
I pointed out that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal. We have billions of tons of the stuff. And Obama made it not only useless to America’s national security and economic prosperity but actually a HANDICAP to them.
And now you get to pay for Obama’s ruinous policies.
I’m stating as a FACT that the LA Times is a biased piece of dishonest propaganda. As an example, when they talk about “the last decade” and begin their dating with “2006” they don’t bother to tell you that that was the year that Democrats – having lied to the American people – took over both the House and the Senate. Back then, EVERYTHING was George Bush’s fault because he was the president and he was a Republican and NOTHING could be the fault of Nancy Pelosi’s liberal lordship over the House and Harry Reid’s liberal tyranny in the Senate. And of course now EVERYTHING is the Republican House’s fault and NOTHING is the president’s fault or the still-there Harry Reid’s fault. The first thing Pelosi and Reid and the Democrats began doing was imposing energy insanity on America – as I documented. But given that the LA Times is staffed with propagandist liars who spin the news rather than report it, I want you to note that even THESE Goebbels are admitting reality now:
U.S. electricity prices may be going up for good
Experts warn of a growing fragility as coal-fired plants are shut down, nuclear power is reduced and consumers switch to renewable energy.
By Ralph Vartabedian
April 25, 2014, 8:47 p.m.As temperatures plunged to 16 below zero in Chicago in early January and set record lows across the eastern U.S., electrical system managers implored the public to turn off stoves, dryers and even lights or risk blackouts.
A fifth of all power-generating capacity in a grid serving 60 million people went suddenly offline, as coal piles froze, sensitive electrical equipment went haywire and utility operators had trouble finding enough to keep power plants running. The wholesale price of electricity skyrocketed to nearly $2 per kilowatt hour, more than 40 times the normal rate. The price hikes cascaded quickly down to consumers. Robert Thompson, who lives in the suburbs of Allentown, Pa., got a $1,250 bill for January.
“I thought, how am I going to pay this?” he recalled. “This was going to put us in the poorhouse.”
The bill was reduced to about $750 after Thompson complained, but Susan Martucci, a part-time administrative assistant in Allentown, got no relief on her $654 charge. “It was ridiculous,” she said.
The electrical system’s duress was a direct result of the polar vortex, the cold air mass that settled over the nation. But it exposed a more fundamental problem. There is a growing fragility in the U.S. electricity system, experts warn, the result of the shutdown of coal-fired plants, reductions in nuclear power, a shift to more expensive renewable energy and natural gas pipeline constraints. The result is likely to be future price shocks. And they may not be temporary.
One recent study predicts the cost of electricity in California alone could jump 47% over the next 16 years, in part because of the state’s shift toward more expensive renewable energy.
“We are now in an era of rising electricity prices,” said Philip Moeller, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who said the steady reduction in generating capacity across the nation means that prices are headed up. “If you take enough supply out of the system, the price is going to increase.”
In fact, the price of electricity has already been rising over the last decade, jumping by double digits in many states, even after accounting for inflation. In California, residential electricity prices shot up 30% between 2006 and 2012, adjusted for inflation, according to Energy Department figures. Experts in the state’s energy markets project the price could jump an additional 47% over the next 15 years.
The problems confronting the electricity system are the result of a wide range of forces: new federal regulations on toxic emissions, rules on greenhouse gases, state mandates for renewable power, technical problems at nuclear power plants and unpredictable price trends for natural gas. Even cheap hydro power is declining in some areas, particularly California, owing to the long-lasting drought.
“Everywhere you turn, there are proposals and regulations to make prices go higher,” said Daniel Kish, senior vice president at the Institute for Energy Research. “The trend line is up, up, up. We are going into uncharted territory.”
New emissions rules on mercury, acid gases and other toxics by the Environmental Protection Agency are expected to result in significant losses of the nation’s coal-generated power, historically the largest and cheapest source of electricity. Already, two dozen coal generating units across the country are scheduled for decommissioning. When the regulations go into effect next year, 60 gigawatts of capacity — equivalent to the output of 60 nuclear reactors — will be taken out of the system, according to Energy Department estimates.
Moeller, the federal energy commissioner, warns that these rapid changes are eroding the system’s ability to handle unexpected upsets, such as the polar vortex, and could result in brownouts or even blackouts in some regions as early as next year. He doesn’t argue against the changes, but believes they are being phased in too quickly.
The federal government appears to have underestimated the impact as well. An Environmental Protection Agency analysis in 2011 had asserted that new regulations would cause few coal plant retirements. The forecast on coal plants turned out wrong almost immediately, as utilities decided it wasn’t economical to upgrade their plants and scheduled them for decommissioning.
The lost coal-generating capacity is being replaced largely with cleaner natural gas, but the result is that electricity prices are linked to a fuel that has been far more volatile in price than coal. The price of natural gas now stands at about $4.50 per million BTUs, more expensive than coal. Plans to export massive amounts of liquefied natural gas, the rapid construction of gas-fired power plants and the growing trend to convert the U.S. heavy truck fleet to natural gas could exert even more upward pressure on prices. Malcolm Johnson, a former Shell Oil gas executive who now teaches the Oxford Princeton Program, a private energy training company, said prices could move toward European price levels of $10.
“When those natural gas prices start going up again, we will feel it in the way of higher electricity prices,” warns James Sweeney, a Stanford University energy expert.
The loss of coal is being exacerbated by problems at the nation’s nuclear plants. Five reactors have been taken out of operation in the last few years, mainly due to technical problems. Additional shutdowns are under consideration.
At the same time, 30 states have mandates for renewable energy that will require the use of more expensive wind and solar energy. Since those sources depend on the weather, they require backup generation — a hidden factor that can add significantly to the overall cost to consumers.
Nowhere are the forces more in play than in California, which has the nation’s most aggressive mandate for renewable power. Major utilities must obtain 33% of their power from renewable sources by 2020, not counting low-cost hydropower from giant dams in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
In some cases, the renewable power costs as much as twice the price of electricity from new gas-fired power plants. Newer facilities are more competitive and improved technology should hold down future electricity prices, said former FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff, now a San Francisco attorney.
But San Francisco-based Energy + Environmental Economics, a respected consultant, has projected that the cost of California’s electricity is likely to increase 47% over the next 16 years, adjusted for inflation, in part because of the renewable power mandate and heavy investments in transmission lines.
The mandate is just one market force. California has all but phased out coal-generated electricity. The state lost the output of San Onofre’s two nuclear reactors and is facing the shutdown of 19 gas-fired power plants along the coast because of new state-imposed ocean water rules by 2020.
“Our rates are increasing because of all of these changes that are occurring and will continue to occur as far out as we can see,” said Phil Leiber, chief financial officer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Renewable power has merit, but unfortunately it is more costly and is one of the drivers of our rates.”
“While renewables are coming down in cost, they are still more expensive,” said Russell Garwacki, manager of pricing design and research at Southern California Edison. The company is imposing a 10% price hike this year to catch up with increased costs in the past.
Officials at the California Public Utilities Commission, responsible for setting utility rates, dispute predictions of large-scale electricity price hikes in the near future. Edward Randolph, head of the PUC’s energy division, said price increases were not likely to exceed the rate of inflation, though the commission has refused to spell out the data on which it bases its projections. In any case, while California already has some of the highest hourly rates for electricity in the nation, the average consumer in the state pays bills that are below the national average because overall electricity use is so low.
The push to wean California off fossil fuels for electricity could cause a consumer backlash as the price for doing so becomes increasingly apparent, warns Alex Leupp, an executive with the Northern California Power Agency, a nonprofit that generates low-cost power for 15 agencies across the state. The nonprofit was formed decades ago during a rebellion against the PUC and the high prices that resulted from its regulations.
“If power gets too expensive, there will be a revolt,” Leupp said. “If the state pushes too fast on renewables before the technology is viable, it could set back the environmental goals we all believe in at the end of the day.”
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-power-prices-20140426,0,6329274.story#ixzz30Cs9hCJQ
Will there be a revolt? Probably not. We live in times that are even MORE dishonest than Hitler’s and Stalin’s because our leaders are advantaged with the latest skills in mass media manipulation and our media outlets are more propagandistic than Joseph Goebbels or TASS ever was. Democrats – liars to the cores of their beings – will simply find their equivalent of “Jews” (Republicans, energy companies, insurance companies, rich people, etc.) to slander. Bad people invariably believe lies – and we have become a bad people.
Obama declared war on coal, and with the aid of the stupid American people who frankly deserve to freeze in the dark, coal was forced to surrender.
We won’t get these assets back for YEARS if we can get them back at all, ye stupid dumbasses. Even if you vote Republican, the investors who would bring cheap, efficient coal back on line now know that we’re only one election away from a fascist who will bankrupt them. They won’t DARE invest in coal again: because the moral idiot American people elected and then re-elected a fascist and they know that it can happen again (and may in 2016 in the pantsuited form of Hillary Clinton).
So you CAN count on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama has permanently caused American energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.” Amazingly, he did so in a country that has more coal than any other nation on the face of the earth.
In terms of energy and in terms of so many other things, Obama made the richest nation in the history of the world IMPOVERISHED.
And not only that, but the integrity of our grid is now in open question: having abolished coal, with NOTHING to take its place in terms of either price OR supply, we don’t have enough power to provide so we’re going to have more crashes and more devastating crashes in our electrical grid.
And who is going to suffer the most from this moral idiocy? The rich? They’ll buy themselves generators. And even steep increases will hardly dent the percentage of income they dedicate to their heating and cooling bills.
You stupid liberals. Here is another example of how you afflicted the poor who will now – thanks to the Democrat Party – have to pay unprecedented percentages of their meager household incomes on their energy because you made their rates soar.
And the only other thing you can count upon in God damn America as Democrats wage economic warfare on the poorest among us is that those very poor are ignorant enough and depraved enough to keep believing the lies of the Democrats who are most oppressing them.
Start Thinking Right 