We noted Friday evening that Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities were asking customers to reduce their electric consumption during this bitterly cold snap, and even then KU was employing “brief service interruptions” to reduce demand. I’m not sure what good that does: as people’s heat goes out for an hour, that just means they’ll have to use it more after the sparktricity is restored to get their homes back up to the desired temperature.

Now there’s this, from The Philadelphia Inquirer, on Christmas Eve:

Bitter cold prompts call for electricity conservation until Christmas morning

PJM Interconnection is asking consumers to voluntarily limit their electricity usage until 10 a.m. Christmas Day to avoid the need to implement short blackout periods.

by Lynette Hazleton | Saturday, December 24, 2022

With winter storms raging and temperatures plunging to the lowest in decades, PJM Interconnection is asking consumers to voluntarily limit their electricity usage until 10 a.m. Christmas Day to avoid the need to implement short blackout periods.

“If we don’t have enough supply to meet demand then sometimes, on rare occasions, we will have rotating outages,” said PJM spokesman Jeff Shields.

During a rotating outage, different regions of PJM’s service area would be intentionally taken off the grid for about an hour. “We’ve seen that consumer conservation efforts can really help, and we need it now,” Shields said.

PJM is asking consumers to hold off using their largest appliances, such as washing machines and dryers as well as taking a shower and using hair dryers.

So dirty bodies in dirty clothes, right? Nope, no lovin’ tonight, honey.

PJM Interconnection isn’t an electric generation company itself, but a regional transmission organization which manages the power distribution grid serving all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. That does not include my part of Kentucky!

I’ve asked this question before, but I’ll ask it again: if the current electric power generation and transmission system cannot handle an unusual but hardly unprecedented bitterly cold snap now, how can it handle things when the Biden Administration is pushing for all new cars to be plug in electrics just 13 years from now, and the global warming climate change emergency activists want all new homes, and older homes as well, converted over to electric heat, as well as banning gas ranges?

According to Statista, slightly over half of the homes in the keystone State use natural gas as their primary home heating fuel, with another 15.88% using home heating oil or kerosene. My previous home in Jim Thorpe had a heating oil-fired steam boiler for heat, but we also added a wood stove as both a backup for times when the electricity failed — the boiler still required electricity to operate — and it evened out the heat in the one-zone boiler.

Only 23.5% of Pennsylvania homes were heated primarily with a heat pump or electric baseboard heat.

Our heating oil boiler ran on a single 110-volt, 20-amp circuit. I also installed two baseboard units, one in the living room and another in the kitchen, which were on 220-volt, 30-amphere circuits each. Now in the Bluegrass State, our primary heating system, an electric heat pump, is on two 220-volt circuits, 30-amps for the outside condenser, and 50-amps for the crawlspace unit, which does include ’emergency heat’ circuits for use during extreme cold. Of course, we also have a propane fireplace, which is not only a great back-up for when we lose electricity, but sure is nice when it’s bitterly cold outside.

So, just how the heck do the activists think that our power-generation capabilities, expanded solely with solar, wind and non-fossil-fueled sources, can handle greatly increased demand for power by increasing electricity’s share of home heating, and most automobiles being plug-in electrics?

Of course, Our Betters are so very much smarter than we are that I’m certain, certain! that they have a plan for all of this, right? Perhaps the fairy dust and unicorn farts they expect us to use do not emit CO₂?