Now the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, has told residents they need to shut off their air conditioners during a heat wave, because they don't have enough electricity. At the state level, alleged serial sexual predator Governor Andrew Cuomo is deflecting from his scandals by appealing to his base with another ban on energy - making the state one on natural gas using hydraulic fracturing permanent.
Leaving residents wondering what the plan is. Though solar power has received hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies since 2009, even Renewables Now has to concede that it hasn't gained any ground. Unless you are a wealthy nation adding solar and wind as an intellectual placebo for voters, you can't rely on it. It is an adjuvant to real energy, like music therapy is to a chemo patient.
H/T Michael Shellenburger of Environmental Progress.
The reason is simple. It is too sporadic and too costly. Solar and wind are great for rich people when they work, but their backups are still fossil fuels and they still run full-time. Germany has to pretend it is being green when the real green is the money going to Russia - which keeps their lights on using natural gas from fracking. New York also has to buy natural gas from Pennsylvania fracking sites a few miles from where they have it banned to pretend for their political constituents it is harmful to the environment.
The great thing about being an elite is the rules don't apply to you, they only apply to the poor people you claim to care more about on surveys. While poor people are without power, Times Square, which in a tiny section of Manhattan uses enough electricity for 161,000 homes or millions of air conditioners, is as bright as ever.
Here is live footage from mid-day.
Link. When even avowed communists think NYC is messing up, they are really messing up.
Wealthy elites all agree people need to conserve during this heat wave caused by Trump but those apartments on Riverside Boulevard are nice and cool and their wealthy residents love them - they just took Trump's name off of 120 Riverside, 220 Riverside and the others when he was elected President.
That's virtue signaling, just like nodding your head when the government says to cut electricity usage for everyone else.
Con Edison's Allan Drury, tasked with avoiding questions on how they maintain a government-mandated monopoly in New York City, had the most ironic statement, telling poor people in Queens the public relations equivalent of "it's science, bro."
Though tens of thousands of poor people have to go without electricity - because government banned sources cleaner than coal before replacements were viable and Con Ed got rid of its coal plants - and all residents are told no one should use their air conditioner in the 98 degree heat, much less warm up food, the government's officially designated monopoly says they have it under control - because the transmission lines work. (bold below mine)
"We have a lot of redundancy built into the system. So that if a cable fails, another cable picks up the load.... With heat and humidity this intense, that puts pressure on the electric delivery equipment. We can't compete with science, but we'll manage to restore those customers as quickly as possible. And we've done that so far."
What good is a transmission line when the same sun that can't generate enough electricity to keep air conditioning but became the thing politicians said was ready to take over now is the thing baking everyone? That is not a science issue, it is a political failure.
You can't compete with science but politicians can - and they do, mostly because they hate it. With the pandemic fading, the usual battle lines against vaccines, energy and food will be back to their normal orders, with wealthy coastal elites in opposition. Manhattan residents fund the political party firmly on Team Solar, Team Organic, and Team Supplement rather than Team Science - at least until poor people get hot enough and they change their ways.
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