No Time, No Money – In Need of $300B by 2016, US Power Industry Woes Could Wreck GDP (Pt. 2 of 2)
Submitted by EnergyTechStocks.com
A new study warns the U.S. power industry needs a minimum of $300 billion spent on new baseload generation and transmission by 2016, without which a series of region-wide blackouts will threaten lives and cost the overall economy tens of billions of dollars.
Jim Sims, former director of communication for President Bush’s National Energy Policy Task Force, told EnergyTechStocks.com that the study is intended to be a wakeup call to Washington, a warning that, as much as the U.S. has to fear from the current credit crisis, it has as much to fear from the looming nationwide power crisis. Sims, who is senior policy advisor to the nonprofit group that issued the study, NextGen Energy Council, warned in the first part of this EnergyTechStocks.com newsmaker series that crippling blackouts could strike next summer, with California and the Southeast most at risk. (For more, see link at bottom of this story.)
Sims made it plain in an interview that he fears it may already be too late for the U.S. to avoid a series of crippling blackouts occurring over many years. Even as time grows short to add 14,500 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines that the study says are needed to maintain system reliability, Sims said he expects projects to be delayed by environmental and other issues. He added that as much as environmentalists could hurt, they also are helping in that they are finally awakening politicians to the need to add more transmission, specifically in order to hook up far-flung wind and solar power plants.
Sims noted that while the U.S. is counting heavily on wind power in the coming years, global turbine manufacturing is being seriously delayed by parts shortages. Moreover, he added, wind remains only an “intermittent” power source that’s also difficult to connect to the grid. With the entire economy now running on computers that require huge amounts of extremely reliable electricity, Sims said he fears that increasingly prevalent power problems could have a devastating effect on the American economy.
“It’s a pretty grim future,” he said.
