Chicago City Wire

A Chicago Tribune headline for Wednesday, Sept. 18 read: "Editorial: An electricity crisis is looming for Illinois. Is anybody paying attention in Springfield?"

Now they start asking questions? When CEJA (Climate and Equitable Jobs Act) passed in 2021, where was the Chicago Tribune, its ace Springfield reporter, Rick Pearson, and its environmental alarmist, Michael Hawthorne?

For the Chicago Tribune to now come out with a headline like that is the height of hubris.

Is Anybody Paying Attention in Springfield? Not the Chicago Tribune just three years ago.

Yes – plenty of people were paying attention in 2021 before CEJA passed and for months afterward. However, most media ignored the concerns of conservative state legislators, businesses, and grid operators.

But there were plenty of warnings.

The Chicago Tribune, however, with the exception of publishing a couple of guest opinion pieces that warned against CEJA, refused to write in bold strokes about the nonsensical and unworkable CEJA bill.

Instead, they let Hawthorne use lots of ink to support the move to an all-renewable future based on climate scares and hysteria.

Hawthorne wrote glowingly about the move to “climate-friendly” electrical generation. He was giddy that Illinois was the first state in the Midwest that was going to ban coal-burning power plants. He disparaged coal, specifically the Prairie State Energy Campus (PSEC), which has power contracts with several suburban Chicago municipalities that still receive reliable power from PSEC. And PSEC was the cleanest coal plant in the country when it was built.

But Hawthorne and a number of progressive Democrats, including our governor, are climate alarmists. They refused to consider the facts on how cheap reliable energy is actually produced or the fallacies of the climate scare.

Regular readers of my newsletter and listeners on my radio show know better. They have heard experts, like Steve Goreham, discuss the cyclical nature of climate and temperature lows and highs and the fact that there isn’t a climate crisis. They know that the earth was much warmer 1,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, and 20,000 years ago.

Regular readers are also aware that there is nothing climate-friendly about wind and solar. They are environmental disasters from start to finish. From the procurement of rare earth minerals to the need for 335 tons of steel and 1,200 tons of concrete for one windmill, they need more inputs per megawatt hour than a conventional power plant. And those inputs are mined, processed, manufactured, and transported using fossil fuels.

Back to the main subject, though—that YES, people were paying attention three years ago when the woke politicians passed the virtue-signaling CEJA bill.

Here is what the Illinois Chamber of Commerce wrote:

“CEJA’s 600-plus pages include a host of unfunded initiatives that lack budgets or cost caps. Several of those programs will require the utilities to rate-base expenses, and lack real assessment metrics, which will lead to long-term rate increases for consumers….

We strongly encourage legislators, members of the media and the general public to truly take a deeper dive into this legislation to see for themselves how damaging it could be to families and businesses struggling to pay for electricity in Illinois.”

In February 2021, longtime energy expert Terry Jarrett, who has served on the board of the national utility commissioners, wrote this about MISO, which supplies about 2/3 of Illinois with power:

“The current Arctic conditions provide a stress test of America’s power grid. We’re seeing in real-time exactly how the U.S. electric grid fares when it’s being pushed to the limit.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO)— which oversees power transmission in 15 states. MISO is reporting that coal is currently generating more than half of its overall electricity. In fact, a February 10 snapshot of MISO’s grid showed coal producing roughly 41,000 megawatts of electricity, with natural gas coming in second at 22,000 megawatts…Solar panels delivered roughly 231 megawatts at the time. And wind turbine output fluctuated widely, topping out at around 3,200 megawatts. That means these much-vaunted renewable systems produced only about 4 percent of the electricity needed across 15 states.

“This isn’t exactly what we’re told about America’s power grid. We often hear that advances in solar power and wind turbines have allowed more and more renewable energy to come online. But when push comes to shove — as it has during the current Arctic blast — coal is proving to be the sturdy fuel that can step in and carry the load.”

Jarrett wrote this during the Texas cold snap that lasted days and threatened lives.

An Illinois Manufacturers’ Association (IMA), Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC), and Constellation Energy Update released in May 2022, just months after the bill passed and before the summer cooling season, stated this:

“As the IMA and others warned for years, closure of baseload generation without the ability to replace that energy would lead to devastating price hikes and potential brownouts.

In their update, they noted this:

The Illinois Commerce Commission, whose members are appointed by the Governor, issued a warning in front of a legislative committee on April 8, 2021. The Chief of the Public Utilities Bureau, in remarks about the legislation that was under consideration, noted:

“The elimination of fossil fuel plants in Illinois that is currently the source of such as significant share of Illinois’ power generation, will substantially impact energy and capacity market prices and reliability in Illinois… the Ameren service territory is likely to be disproportionately impacted… It’s not clear how Illinois’ electricity needs will be fully met in the event fossil fuel plans are eliminated… the impacts on electric power reliability are likely to be significant.”

Ameren had also been sounding the alarm in front of elected officials and issued a press release in April 2022 following the MISO capacity auction noting: “we have been sounding the warning bell that the transition to renewable generation must occur in a steady and measured fashion and that moving too fast could drive up prices for downstate. It is likely to have a substantial impact on heating and cooling costs starting in June.”

So, spare me, Chicago Tribune. There were warnings of the need for cheap, reliable fossil fuels before, during, and after the passage of CEJA. But, for the most part, the politicians all got re-elected with abortion on demand, any time, taxpayer-funded—real issues, like providing cheap, reliable energy, were ignored by the press and never considered by voters who are uneducated on the issue.

Now in their editorial, the Chicago Tribune, three years later, after millions of dollars have been spent on green energy subsidies writes,

"Central and southern Illinois, which fall under the purview of multi-state grid manager Midcontinent Independent System Operator, will be about 50% short of the capacity to keep the lights on during highest-demand periods as soon as 2027, according to MISO. That situation should be ringing alarm bells.

The shortage issue isn’t as dire in northern Illinois. But the 2030 plant-closure mandates in Illinois’ clean energy law, if unchanged, will threaten reliability during peak periods by 2030 in the Chicago area, according to PJM.”

The Trib editorial also speaks about the massive increase in demand for electricity from data centers and AI needs, writing:

“But the crisis could be upon northern Illinois even faster than that, because future demand is projected to soar even as supply falls. Power-hungry data centers, the development of which a number of Chicago aldermen are encouraging within city limits as a way to generate more property tax revenue, are on the drawing boards. ComEd projects that new data centers throughout its territory easily could require four gigawatts of electricity. To put that in context, such an enormous amount alone would consume nearly the entire output of two of the five nuclear stations serving the region.”

First of all, none of this news. The Tribune should have been writing about the coming power shortage for years. Secondly, people who run data centers know they are a power suck. So do the utilities. It’s just the press who write about data centers as economic development and the Democrats who entice them to Illinois with tax subsidies that haven’t connected the dots to power shortages.

On top of state tax breaks, Cook County created a new property tax break for the Quantum Computing Campus. South suburban Cook County homeowners should be livid. In many cases, their property taxes doubled in one year.

Money from the state for these energy-sucking industries.

Property tax breaks no one else gets.

Higher energy costs as demand drives up prices.

Taxpayers are getting a raw deal, and so are businesses that aren’t one of the favored industries.

Steve Goreham, writing in the Washington Examiner, said two things will result from the increased demand for energy from AI and data centers:

“The coming power shortage will produce two big economic impacts. First, electrical utilities will cease the premature shut down of coal, gas, and nuclear power plants. It will be impossible to construct enough new wind and solar generators to provide electricity to meet the new demand for AI data centers, let alone the needs of electric vehicles, electric home appliances, and hydrogen electrolyzers…

The second economic impact will be rapidly rising electricity prices, driven by a growing disparity between power demand and supply. Higher prices will reduce the demand for heat pumps endorsed by the green energy movement, which will remain more expensive than natural gas and propane furnaces in cold regions. EVs will be more expensive to charge and public EV charging facilities will struggle to be profitable. Gasoline cars will hold cost advantages for decades to come.

For the Record:

According to the US Energy Information Energy, the most recent data show that overall, Illinois consumes more energy than we produce. We are the nation’s sixth-largest energy-consuming and eleventh-largest energy-producing state. In terms of electricity, however, we are the 5th largest in production and send about 1/5 of our power to other states. Our production comes from:

• 15% Coal
• 16% Natural Gas
• 54% Nuclear
• 14% All Renewable

Here’s real-time snapshots of our energy sources today: PJM and MISO

However, any electricity produced is sent straight to the grid. The real-time graphs from PJM and MISO show that the grid as a whole uses primarily natural gas, nuclear, and coal, and those three consistently account for over 80% of the power generation.

And – Illinois is on track to destroy more coal power and natural gas, what then?

But guess what—coal and natural gas will be around for decades. If they aren’t produced in Illinois, they will be produced in other states and pushed to the grid. And we will pay extra for it.

Wind and solar aren’t the answer to our energy needs.

So, enough of the virtue-signaling on Green Energy,

Enough of the handouts to businesses, which, according to this article by Scott Lincicome in the Dispatch, “oft-promised benefits usually fail to materialize, while oft-realized problems are significant yet usually ignored,” when it comes to tax subsidies sold as economic development.

Meanwhile, there are plans to re-open the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant specifically for AI needs.

There are some things legislators can do:

1. Immediately suspend the CEJA requirements on zero emissions by 2050.
2. Stop subsidizing wind and solar. They are mature industries and need to stand on their own.
3. Require any large user of electricity to analyze the impact on the grid, the local cost of energy and the sourcing of that energy.

Final note – At least the Chicago Tribune admitted that people who should have been listened to three years ago weren’t. They wrote:

Just three years later, it appears the alarmists were right, and Pritzker and the green lobby were wrong.

But please stop calling them alarmists – how about calling them truth-tellers?