Full time electricity for over a hundred years in all metropolitan areas, and for about eighty years in all rural areas with the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. In 1935, only 25 percent of rural homes in the United States had electricity, Some people alive today grew up without electricity.
Electricity flows with across the United States through the electric grid, There are actually three grids covering the lower forty-eight states. Over the past one hundred years, there have been only two area-wide blackouts affecting over 30 million people caused by a failure of the transmission system.
Both of them got me. One when I lived in New York -- I was in the shower at the time -- good thing there was a window in the bathroom so i could see. One when I lived in Bingham Farms, Michigan -- it was really hot here, so I drove a few hours upstate to stay with relatives who had electric power.
There have been other blackouts—mostly caused by storms—affecting smaller groups, perhaps as many as several million people. Overall, the grid has worked remarkably well. Reliability can still be improved upon, but this is primarily a question of placing transmission and distribution lines underground to minimize weather-induced outages.
Most leftists leadership positions view climate change as an existential threat to mankind and want to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity. They claim wind and solar and other renew ables can replace all the coal-fired, natural gas, and nuclear power plants in the United States. But that makes electricity much more expensive and less reliable.
Imagine rolling blackouts while quarantined at home during a future pandemic. Would the newer emergency hospitals diesel fuel or natural gas to power emergency generators?. Hospitals consume twice as much electric power per square foot than hotels, which use more power than . . . schools and office buildings. Keeping the lights on is critical for hospitals. We need adequate and reliable electricity for the next pandemic.
President Trump signed an executive order on May 1, 2020, to protect the grid from foreign adversaries. He said the grid, “provides the electricity that supports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastructure, economy, and way of life.”
The green ideology threatens the grid. Federal regulators, state governments, utility companies, and the operators of the grid themselves are imposing their science free beliefs about a climate change crisis on all Americans. Unelected bureaucrats are making decisions that place Americans in danger.
We must continue to use fossil fuels to protect the electric grid from the actions leftists imposing their personal beliefs on the rest of us. Our objective should be low-cost, reliable electricity available for everyone.
That is impossible with 100% renewables, or even with 50% renewables, given the current low technology and high cost of battery backup electricity storage. Grid reliability is a national security issue.