Wind and Solar Blackouts Threaten New England
Blue states could see a cold winter when environmental initiatives fail to warm them.
New England’s deep-blue states may become all too familiar with energy rationing and blackouts this winter, courtesy of the region’s overreliance on green energy.
The Northeastern states face an immense shortfall in conventional electrical generation capacity, leaving the power grid extremely vulnerable at times when wind and solar power are offline. This precarious situation is expected to continue for at least the next decade.
“We cannot operate the system in the wintertime without a dependable energy source that can balance the system when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. I think policymakers sometimes lose sight of that fact,” Gordon van Welie, president of Independent System Operator (ISO) New England, which manages the region’s power grid, said at a recent energy conference in Washington, D.C.
In order to function, power grids require demand to exactly match supply, which is an enormous problem for variable wind and solar power, as the amount of energy they produce cannot easily be predicted in advance. Wind and solar can burn out the grid if they produce too much — or not enough — electricity, leading to brownouts or blackouts.
Such damage has already occurred in power grids relying too much on solar and wind power, like in California, which is much more reliably sunny and windy than New England. Solar and wind power also do not generate electricity at times when it is most needed. Cold winter evenings, when people come home from work and begin to turn on their appliances, are precisely when green energy goes offline.
“Prior to now, I don’t think anyone’s really asked the question: ‘How do we supply power when there is no wind?’” Regis Devonish, the head of Northeast energy trading for utility AES, said at the D.C. conference.
I first pointed out New England’s power crisis in 2022, when a similar policy situation led to a quarter of a million people losing electricity on Christmas Eve. ISO New England issued an eerily similar warning before that disaster, but blue-state governments ignored the opinions of their engineers and doubled down on unreliable green energy, even as New England’s slow recovery from the Christmas blackouts forced power grid operators to consider rolling blackouts and rationing measures.
In the long run, grid regulators hope small modular nuclear reactors can come online at critical power moments in the future to fix this problem, but America has yet to construct any of these experimental power plants, largely because of intense regulatory burdens.
“The problem is, that resource doesn’t exist today,” van Welie told the conference. “Maybe [small modular reactors] will fulfill the goal in the future, but for now, the balancing resource is natural gas.”
Deep blue Massachusetts generated 76 percent of its electricity from natural gas in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Only Delaware and Rhode Island generated more of their electricity from gas. Natural gas provided 55 percent of the region’s electricity, while solar and wind energy accounted for just 4 and 3 percent respectively, according to ISO New England’s 2024 report.
This is actually more dramatic than it sounds. The region uses gas to back up wind and solar, because coal-fired or nuclear reactors are not simple machines and can require days to fully turn on from a dead stop. This means that solar and wind power in New England requires natural gas energy to be kept in “standby” mode to ensure reliability.
Power demand is relatively predictable, and conventional power plants — like those driven by nuclear power or coal — can be leveraged in advance to adjust output to meet demand. Solar and wind power cannot, so adding green power, which only works at intermittent and unpredictable times, makes the power grid more fragile.
The sort of rapid construction of natural gas energy infrastructure that could save the region from blackouts has been actively blocked by environmentalists for years.
President Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly suggested that New England increase its gas pipeline capacity to stabilize the region’s power grid, but the Massachusetts Supreme Court previously banned grid operators from approving new gas pipelines, despite just how much of the state’s electricity comes from this source.
“One of the things that we learned, though, is that the economics of large gas infrastructure investments, is that you really have to have a majority of the states participating,” van Welie said at the conference. “That’s the question. Will there be a sufficiently large coalition of states that are willing to do that? I think that’s uncertain at this point.”
So for now, Northeastern states are dependent on importing natural gas from other countries that are often politically unstable, such as Trinidad and Tobago, according to the EIA. Transporting energy from these distant countries drives up the cost of electricity and home heating in the U.S., and is notably worse for the planet than using gas from closer to home.
New England originally planned to get its natural gas via pipeline from nearby energy-rich states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, but this was blocked and eventually canceled following a series of Russian-funded environmentalist protests targeting the region’s pipeline infrastructure, which continued even after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Before the war, Boston was the hub of imported Russian energy, with 20 percent of the region’s power coming from the country. It shouldn’t be surprising that Moscow was very willing to send tens of millions of dollars in “donations” from Russian-government-run energy companies to U.S. environmentalists, who promptly tied down the region’s energy infrastructure in endless litigation about the fate of obscure fish. Effectively, this means there won’t be enough electricity to meet demand when New England most needs it.
Blackouts have previously killed hundreds of New Englanders, especially in the winter. Until New England’s political leaders rediscover the value of reliable power, their citizens will keep paying the price for ideological energy experiments, sometimes with their lives.
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