"Another Obamination" - New England Facing Power Shortage This Winter.

"Another Obamination" - New England Facing Power Shortage This Winter.(Spectator).

“Get ready for the New England power shortage,” reads the headline in The Spectator. “Governors are already meeting in emergency session.”

“In a hell-bent campaign to rid itself of any form of dirty, messy “non-renewable” energy, New England has been closing down coal and oil plants for the last decade,” the article warns. “In 2000, 18 percent of New England’s electricity came from coal and 22 percent from oil. Today it’s 3 percent coal and 1 percent oil. Meanwhile, natural gas — the fuel that everybody loves until you have to drill for it — has risen from 15 percent to a starkly vulnerable 52 percent, just behind California.

Last week the governors of the six New England states met in an emergency session at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss what to do about the pending crisis. Significantly, they asked the premiers of five of Canada’s provinces to attend. That makes sense because if the region is going to get electricity from anywhere it is probably going to be from north of the border.

“There’s only one problem. New England doesn’t have the pipelines to bring in the gas.”

It’s not as if it’s not needed. Last winter, when record low temperatures hit, there just wasn’t enough gas to go around. Utilities that service home heating have long-term contracts and get first dibs. You can’t stockpile gas the way you stockpile coal, so power plant operators were left bidding against each other for what was left. Prices skyrocketed from $4 per mBTU to an unbelievable $79 per mBTU and electricity prices spiked to ten times their normal level. Just to put things in perspective, during the first four months of last winter, New England spent $5.1 billion on electricity. In the whole of 2012, it had spent only $5.2 billion.

So what is likely to happen? Another cold winter is certain to bring skyrocketing prices and possible brownouts. New Englanders already pay 45 percent higher electric bills than the rest of the country and that figure can only grow. The first region of the country to industrialize is about the drive away the last of its blue-collar workshops.

One thing the region will not run short of, however, is political bluster. When the New England States Committee on Electricity (NESCOE) tried to broker a deal to have ratepayers finance a collectively owned gas pipeline, the volunteer organization was lambasted for “conspiring with industry to produce profits” and “failing to consider all the renewable alternatives.” When the crisis finally arrives this winter or next, you can be sure Vermont’s socialist Senator Bernie Sanders will be at the head of the pack, braying that the whole thing has been caused by “speculators.”

Read entire article by William Tucker:
http://spectator.org/articles/60007/get-ready-new-england-power-shortage