In reply to ThurdFerguson :
There are 3 levels of terrible things going on right now in the power industry:
-The first has to do with the 24/7 operations that operate power plants and the grid. Everyone is talking about first responders and medical professionals but no one is talking about the guys who work shifts and keep things running around the clock. Security requires those jobs be done in person at specific locations, and the training programs range up to years to get replacements up to speed. The industry is taking extreme measures to protect those operators, and the cubic dollars being spent are mind boggling.
The second level has to do with the time of year and traditional energy sector operations. It's the time of year where we are past the need for winter heat load, but haven't yet reached the summer AC load, so in general energy usage is down. Typically this is the time of year to do maintenance on equipment, so the very complicated dance of coordinating resources, obligations, and conflicts to get periodic maintenance done would be in full swing. None of that is happening as planned, because nobody knows anything and who wants to take a risk right now, and those maintenances are being deferred, but will have to happen or we are going to see failures. For something like a nuclear plant refueling outage the supply chain is several years long to have everything and everyone available at just the right time, and shifting those timeliness is also cubic dollars.
The last level has to do with both the time of year and the direct effects of people staying at home, especially in combination with our renewable energy sources of power. Wind and solar can create power, but almost universally they can not control voltage or frequency of their output. For a car guy, imagine strapping a JATO rocket to the roof of your car and trying to drive it, with the craziest ex you ever had controlling the rocket remotely with no idea where you are going. With a small rocket, pointing forwards, generally it will help. But if the rocket gets fired full blast while you are on the brakes coming down a mountain it's a bad day. Historically it's been more like rockets strapped to trains than cars, so not as big a deal, but as renewables make up larger shares of the system we have been retiring the engines and leaning more on the renewables. We have been replacing the train engines with rockets. That's ok to a point, but if you start down a hill and the rockets keep pushing the whole train is going to derail.
What's going on now is that we have all the business and factories shut down right now, and we were already in the low load time of year. Essentially we have dropped the last few cars off the train. We were already close, but this has accentuated the issue. Fire up the rockets when there's no load, and what's going to happen?
Combine all 3, stressed workers doing crazy schedules in isolation from their families, maintenance being deferred, and completely unpredictable load levels and the best outcome is going to be huge rate increases, but the worst outcomes all involve needing a generator.
