The state of New York wants to shut down a nuclear plant. They and Connecticut currently oppose an offshore LNG platform in Long Island Sound. Electricity and heating costs in the northeast US are already extremely expensive. Development of alternative power is puny. Yet any attempt to get more power, whether it be nukes, LNG platforms, or wind turbines off Martha’s Vineyard is met with NIMBYs.
To all you rugged, individualist New Englanders – you might wish to consider that freezing in the dark will be a much worse fate than having the Kennedys suffer the admittedly gross indignity of having to look at wind turbines in the ocean from their Chappaquidick estate. Oh, the agony. As for that aging electrical connection point in the southwest of Connecticut where major grids meet, the one that is aging, can’t take the load, and is already causing blackouts. Golly, let’s not actually do anything to fix it. After all, someone might have to look a new power transmission line then. How frightfully inconvenient.
And when the brownouts stretch into blackouts, when average citizens who once could rely on reasonably priced and readily available electricity from the grid are subject to wild price fluctuations as their electricity providers go begging on the spot market, when the Northeast becomes an energy colony of Canada – then maybe, just maybe, these fools in the political establishment will wake up.
Utah is going full-bore on wind energy. California gets it too. Texas built themselves a self-contained grid for electricity and petroleum years ago. They don’t need energy from any other state. But the Northeast stands alone in their obstinate refusal to do anything substantive about their ever-growing heating, petroleum, and electricity problems.