Share this article
We take electricity for granted. Until we don’t have it. According to Entergy, over 250,000 Mississippi customers in its monopoly service area were recently without electricity for days. Some, for weeks. They were unhappy.
Mississippi’s Central District Public Service Commissioner bestirred himself to excoriate Entergy and its CEO for the outages. They were caused by an Act of God – unforeseen bad weather. Entergy’s CEO understandably pled Force Majeure. And brought in lots of crews to restore service.
I have said critical things about utility executives and their boondoggles (e.g. Mississippi Power’s Kemper County Lignite Plant that never generated electricity from lignite and Entergy’s solar plants that occasionally generate electricity). And about Mississippi’s Public Service Commission which approves the boondoggles. And about the politicians who encourage the PSC to approve them. But in this case, I will cut Entergy and its CEO some slack. And credit them and their frontline workers for their all-out efforts in response to the freak thunderstorms.
However, I think the Central District Commissioner may be guilty of hypocrisy and sleeping at the switch. Actually he hasn’t been asleep. He’s just been busy promoting green energy and rubber-stamping Entergy’s solar plant schemes – instead of asking questions before the lights go out. We shouldn’t be surprised since he was promoting green energy when he was elected in 2019. In a close race. He won by 2022 votes out of 291,170 cast. He’s running for re-election. He may go back to his old job.
He is harshly critical of Entergy’s response to the storms. He wants more detailed reports about the company’s response. Sound like a bureaucrat sitting in his office waiting on the paperwork? Did the Commissioner get out to see damage and repair efforts firsthand? Talk to his constituents? Do something constructive? Well, he said he was going to monitor the situation closely. I guess that passes for constructive in government work.
He also said he would hold utilities accountable for providing affordable and reliable service. At the same time he promotes and votes for solar power that makes electricity more expensive and less reliable. Talking out of both sides of your mouth. That’s hypocrisy.
Green energy promoters want green electricity – as in dollars that its subsidies and tax breaks bring. They don’t care if it’s not on when you need it. That’s someone else’s problem. That’s most of the time. Here’s a factoid. Entergy’s Mississippi Sunflower Solar Plant generated electricity 14% of the time between September 2022 and March 2023. It generated electricity 6% of the time in December. So it didn’t generate electricity 94% of the time. Well duh! That’s the math.
So what happens when you flip the switch if the sun’s not shining? If you are lucky, your utility has a backup plant and is in a stable electric grid. Hopefully the backup is a combined cycle natural gas plant that’s cheap and reliable. It probably idles on standby most of the time (even when the sun
Read original article by clicking here.