Woke Greens have been pushing us toward an energy apocalypse, and New Hampshire has not been immune. Sununu was pro-wind, which got us involved with the Gulf of Maine Offshore Wind project developers and greenwashers love, but no one else.
There are, arguably, a lot of people who don’t know enough to know it is not green, renewable, reliable, or safe, but they aren’t going to profit. They also may not know how much it will cost in real dollars, but I digress. Sort of.
The same can be said of Schiller Station. The decommissioned coal plant on the Pisqutaqua River in Portsmouth is on track to become a battery storage facility (no irony about the expense and emissions needed to create that), so we’ll have one. Progressive resume building at its finest. Look, we have an unreliable, costly, intermittent energy source that harms dolphins and whales and, when damaged, despoils our oceans and beaches. They leave that last part out. In fact, they get mad if you try to bring it up.
And I don’t recall wanting or needing a battery backup facility, for the record, but we’ve been assured it will not be used to collect whatever the OSW generates to on-shore power. It has to come ashore someplace, and Maine lost their grant to despoil protected land to do it, so you decide what that means.
It is important.
Whether the Battery facility is set up for OSW (and they have been lying to us) or not, people in Portsmouth should take note of this. Niko wrote about it yesterday.
These lithium battery storage facilities are an essential bit of infrastructure for the so-called “renewable” energy future.
The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office issued evacuation orders shortly after 6:30 p.m., following the fire that erupted at the Moss Landing Power Plant about 3 p.m. The plant is located about 77 miles south of San Francisco. …
The battery storage plant, owned by the Texas-based company Vistra Energy, houses tens of thousands of lithium batteries that are important for storing electricity generated from renewable energy sources like solar power. If the batteries ignite, the fires can be extremely difficult to extinguish.
It’s almost impossible to put them out, especially since the ban on foams that could work but were made with PFOA or PFOS. So, we watch them burn and try to contain them (which is not something California is good at), and then there are the emissions the plant was ostensibly created to mitigate.
This fire makes liars out of them four times. The emissions they ‘offshored’ to build the batteries, transport them and install them, and the emissions when they burned. And this plant has burned twice in under two years.
Domestic terrorists? Was it sabotaged by military-aged males allowed to enter illegally? Is it just a horrible idea? Or is this what happens in states run like California (which concerns me as a Granite Staters because they surround me)? Vermont, Massachusetts, and, increasingly, Maine. States obsessed with the all-electric energy economy and nut-zero. So, who pays for all the lost stored energy? Where are they getting their power from now? How is the new energy grid delivering electricity to all those electric heat pumps or EVs?
How much will it cost me? It is a very serious question if this happened in another state in the New England grid New Hampshire is part of.
Will Granite Staters and their so-called leaders learn any lessons from this? Can we create an energy future for New Hampshire independent of the lunacy surrounding us? Not yet, not so far, but Gov. Ayotte has expressed an interest in small reactors as part of New Hampshire’s energy future. Whether that develops past the saying-it-to-meaning-it-stage remains to be seen, but we’ll give her more than the week she’s had in office to get it started.
But we can’t wait too long. We need to end the government-subsidized greenwashing and focus on natural gas infrastructure and more reliable energy solutions, or “solving” the so-called housing crisis will only mean more people in homes without heat or lights.