Biden/China and our power grid: whatever could go wrong?
One of so many things that Biden has been doing [emphasis mine]:
President Biden has revoked a Trump-era executive order that sought to keep foreign countries and companies out of America’s bulk power systems – principally entities associated with the Chinese Communist Party – as part of his “Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis.”
The executive order, which executes key tenets of President Biden’s climate change agenda, was released on the former Veep’s first day in office…
Subpoint C notes that “Executive Order 13920 of May 1, 2020 (Securing the United States Bulk-Power System), is hereby suspended for 90 days.”
The Trump-era order sought to ban, replace, and set new criteria on bulk-power system (BPS) electric equipment coming from a foreign country or national that poses a national security threat…
[Trump’s] move [had] “prohibited any acquisition, importation, transfer, or installation of BPS electric equipment by any person or with respect to any property to which a foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that poses an undue risk to the BPS, the security or resiliency of U.S. critical infrastructure or the U.S. economy, or U.S. national security or the security and safety of U.S. persons.”
The DOE was also tasked with identifying existing BPS electric equipment that violated the aforementioned prescription and “develop recommendations to identify, isolate, monitor, or replace this equipment as appropriate.”…
Now, according to Biden’s executive order, the fate of the executive order and America’s BPS rests in the hands of Biden’s Secretary of Energy and Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB):
“The Secretary of Energy and the Director of OMB shall jointly consider whether to recommend that a replacement order be issued.”
The National Pulse exposed Biden’s OMB Head as formerly serving as the president of the Center for American Progress (CAP), an establishment think tank that has taken trips to China and co-authored reports alongside a Chinese Communist Party-backed influence operation.
What’s more, Biden’s son Hunter was previously involved in several business relationships with CEFC China Energy Chairman Ye Jianming.
Whatever Trump was accused of regarding Russia is something that Biden probably is really guilty of with China.
My husband spent 45 years in the electric power industry. He tells me that he is wary of quality and reliability from some Chinese suppliers. (He was at a level to know.) Even more, anything pertaining to control systems, that is, with software, is susceptible to hacking and manipulation and Chinese sources would be something we’d want to avoid.
This is on top of the “green” energy sources which already make the grid unstable.
Impeach!
I can’t remember where I read of it, nor the details but reportedly Trump’s E.O. threatened a big money deal for the ChiComs. The resulting graft sure to be received by the dems explains their motivation.
Only the naive and willfully blind cannot see what the ChiCom’s malevolent motivation is for wanting to insert themselves into the U.S. electrical grid. And that motivation has nothing to do with a business opportunity.
Time will tell but I anticipate a new Instapundit organizing phrase: “Suckers”.
I certainly hope so!
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/427660/
Time to buy more candles.
I expect the push to “decouple” from NG will pick up speed. Near where I live a city council member wants to ban NG from all new builds, and force homeowners to take out NG appliances and put in all electric. He thinks that Solar and Wind will be enough.
One of the great under appreciated stories of the last decade has been the increasing availability of cheap Natural Gas. Bunch of technological and geopolitical reasons for this.
Have a look at the 20 Year Chart here:
https://www.macrotrends.net/2478/natural-gas-prices-historical-chart
If you were a Little Green Man from Mars and I told you that this incredible advance (Cheaper energy is almost literally Life Itself. And it’s pretty damn clean.) resulted in the Usual Suspects having to invent from whole cloth a totally new ‘pollutant’ and that this pollutant just happens to be the building block of life itself on our planet… well you’d lock me up in the insane asylum.
They hate us and they want us all dead.
Well he’s wrong. Solar and wind will NEVER be enough. We will ALWAYS have to have enough generation to to keep the grid up and running. Solar and wind can never achieve that no matter how many solar and wind farms are built.
I worked in the Distribution Operation Center for large public utility until retirement. There were untold points of entry into the system and who knows how many more have been introduced since my retirement. One example is millions of “smart meters” being installed daily for almost all the electric utilities.
“One example is millions of “smart meters” being installed daily for almost all the electric utilities.”
Correction …
One example is millions of “smart meters” being installed for almost all the electric utilities.
The Climate Change Crisis is not about climate change. It is being sold on scant evidence. The True Believers will not change their minds because facts don’t matter anymore. It is all taken on faith in the studies of men who have proliferated the catechism of the warming faith.. However, the true value of climate change as a crisis is the power to control the population that it provides to the elites. Do not accept this scam.
My argument against abandoning fossil fuels:
The climate has always changed. It was much colder 10,000 years ago. It warmed over 2000 years to a temperature warmer than the present about 8000years ago, then cooled, and warmed again and so on for several cycles. It has been warmer than the present at least three times in the last 10,000 years – the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval warm periods. In the mid 1600s the Earth was in the grips of a Little Ice Age. It has been warming now for 300 years and it has been good for humans and not caused by humans. Our ancestors , who lived through all these climate changes, without all the technology and fossil fuel energy that we have, adjusted and survived just fine. Why should we abandon the very energy that has made modernity possible in pursuit of a nebulous, unproven threat from global warming? Why not do what our ancestors did? Adapt.
Video of the temperatures of the last 10,000 years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=higXpFF79Hw
I rest my case.
J.J.,
The response to that by the climate change fanatics is that those are natural cycles. They claim that what we are experiencing today is an artificial exacerbation of those natural cycles. Creating an oscillation that will drive the climate into collapse.
It doesn’t matter that there’s no actual supporting data for that ‘model’. Climate ‘scientists’ have created computer models that through manipulation of data show that outcome.
Why are they doing this? Well, besides grant money and going along to get along, there’s a deeper, subconscious motivation.
In abandoning belief in a beneficent creator they have no basis for believing that there will be an afterlife. This is it. Lose this and it’s over, including the hope of being remembered. A pointless existence = nihilism. So any threat to the world, whether a nuclear war, the 70’s fear of a coming ice age, running out of food through Ehrlich’s pop.explosion and now “anthropogenic climate change”… all are of a piece and the resultant primal fear inherent to a pointless, faithless existence.
Having fully bought into the flawed argument that if there were a loving God, he couldn’t allow man’s inhumanity to man to persist, they have nowhere else to go. And human existence is reduced to the satisfaction of appetite and virtue signaling, ‘proving’ that their lives had meaning.
jack,
“Solar and wind will NEVER be enough.”
Sure they will. All that it will take is the required reduction in population and impoverishment of the masses. Then demand will be brought into line with supply. Supply being what wind and solar can provide.
The global elite will of course have first claim to electrical supply with the managerial class being second in line. The technocratic and bureaucratic classes will be third in line.
Whatever’s left over will be what the servant class receives.
It will be a glorious and brave… new world.
To get a preview, just look to California’s blackouts.
GB, do not underestimate the power of the dark side.
DS=Dark State=Deep State
There is a lot of resentment that ordinary Americans ‘have it too easy.’ I remember that an NYC blackout years ago resulted in callers to an NPR station saying things like:
“I’m glad when these things happen, it teaches us a lesson”
and
“We deserve this, because we’re so wasteful”
(Pretty sure ‘we deserve this’ translates as ‘they deserve this’)
It has even been argued (in The Nation) that use of fossil fuels is in some way equivalent to *slavery*. See my post Of Energy and Slavery:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/42837.html#more-42837
Geoffrey Britain:
Subsistsnce agriculture can only feed a minimal population. How do you force a population into servitude? Eliminate access to reliable inexpensive power, electricity and fossil fuels. Third world agriculture is the new future as are cow dung “futures.”
“What could go wrong? Nothing! It’s scientific, like history, now that the right people are in charge, “Kulak!”
I was wryly amused by a complaint from my left-wing niece in southern California complaining about the recent two-day power outage because of the winds. She’s sure it’s “climate change” making the winds more common. I don’t think there’s really any proof of that, plus, if California utilities and California legislators hadn’t pushed investment in all of this “green” technology instead of putting money into line and equipment maintenance, there would be fewer power-caused fires. The connector which failed prior to the Paradise fire had been there for one hundred years without being replaced.
Reliance on “green” energy is going to result in frequent power outages. It will be like living in India, where we knew electricity would go out for hours at a time, but just not always when.
G.B., yes, the warmers will always have a reason to ignore the facts. Control of energy equals control of the population. Making it scarce and costly means that those who are favored by the rulers will get more. I’m sure there are those who really believe in the idea of a world on fire. Also people willing to believe they can really save the world by cutting fossil fuel usage. That is the purpose of all the propaganda – inspire fear, get people to comply. (Think Greta Thunberg.) The end game, though, is control.
It’s somewhat akin to the lockdown strategy for defeating the virus. The lockdowns’ knock on effects maybe worse than the pandemic itself. Just as substituting solar and wind for fossil fuels will certainly be worse than adapting to whatever warming will happen in the next 100 years.
“The end game, though, is control.”
That may be the case in Europe, where the governing elite are serious about actually running things. I’m not sure that it’s true in America, where virtue-signaling seems to be the primary motivation for most things.
Mike
“Reliance on “green” energy is going to result in frequent power outages.”
And that’s when all the nice white people who were so upset by Trump’s mean tweets vote for someone who makes Trump look like Casper Milquetoast.
Mike
Germany, which has made massive investments in ‘green’ energy and has deleted its nuclear plants, is looking at electricity rationing via remote control of consumer power uses such as heating and electric-car charging:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/19/germany-weighs-electricity-rationing-scheme-to-stabilize-its-now-shaky-green-power-grid/
Many industrial processes use a lot of electricity, and countries that maintain a reliable and cost-effective electrical infrastructure will have a huge economic advantage when it comes to manufacturing.
David Foster: “Many industrial processes use a lot of electricity, and countries that maintain a reliable and cost-effective electrical infrastructure will have a huge economic advantage when it comes to manufacturing.”
Yes. It is as if the warmers/greens can’t see that our standard of living is due to reliable energy at affordable prices and a balanced economy. With the Chinese trying to become the world’s supplier of manufactured goods, you would think they would see that we need an economy that is not over dependent on China. If nothing else, the pandemic has shown this to be true. China actually has a lot of leverage over us in many areas of manufacturing. Then, of course, there’s the fact that China is continuing to build coal fired power plants at a rapid clip. I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the Paris Climate Accords nations tell the Chinese to quit building coal fired plants. (Not holding my breath on that one.)
Your German example is also plain to see for any who are interested.
I feel like a toothless old lion I saw in Africa. Roaring at the sky and anyone who will listen while knowing it’s just noise blowing in the wind. But, like the lion, it makes me feel like I’m still alive. 🙂
“electricity rationing via remote control of consumer power uses such as … electric-car charging”
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha. But seriously, ROTFLMAO.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
https://unherd.com/2021/01/how-china-could-turn-off-britains-lights/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3
From the article:
Chinese companies have Communist Party cells active inside them — the secretary of the cell is the most powerful person in the company. After all, he (and it normally it is a he) represents the masters in Beijing and can over-rule the company’s board. However, conflict between a company board and party cell is hardly common. In 2016, President Xi decreed that the positions of party secretary and chairman of a Chinese company’s board should be occupied by the same person.
All of this applies to the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN), which owns a third of the nuclear power station being built at Hinkley Point and hopes to be involved in the construction of two more nuclear plants, at Sizewell in Suffolk and Bradwell in Essex. The personnel of CGN is typical of any CCP-sponsored company. Until a few months ago, its chairman in Shenzhen, was a man called He Yu, who doubled as the secretary of the company’s Communist Party cell. He was instrumental in securing CGN’s investment in the Hinkley power plant.
Our utility companies should not need to have government regulation to prohibit them from using Chinese products into their generation and distribution systems. Their management, shareholders, and customers should exercise a little common sense and not buy, or support buying, the cheapest solutions from sources that are “unreliable” because they will on doubt turn against us when the it suits them. I learned this first hand with the Chinese almost three decades ago. As individuals we need to do what is right on our own regardless of government action or inaction. Historically people were smart enough to realize how to treat real and potential enemies. What has happened? Too many years of being naive sheltering from the world’s harsh realities?