Palisades Power Plant Shuts Down Despite Warnings Of Rolling Blackouts This Summer

The Palisades Power Plant in Michigan has been shut down by regulators, the same day that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) issued a report which stated that the United States electric grid is lacking capacity. 

There have also been warnings of rolling black outs coming this summer but despite this, the 811-megawatt nuclear facility was shut down anyway.

According to NERC, the Midwest is most at risk and there is a “high risk of energy emergencies during peak summer conditions.”

Robert Bryce, host of the Power-Hungry Podcast and executive producer of the documentary “Juice: How Electricity Explains the World.” Said:

“Palisades was located in the heart of the Midwest, immediately adjacent to the area served by the Mid-continent Independent System Operator (MISO), the region that NERC identified as being particularly short on juice,” 

“NERC said the MISO region has 3,200 megawatts less generation capacity this summer than it did in 2021. Despite this loss of generation capacity, NERC expects demand in the region to increase by about 1.7 percent this summer and warned that ‘extreme temperatures, higher generation outages, or low wind conditions’ will mean that MISO will have a ‘higher risk’ of ‘load-shedding to maintain system reliability’ – the industry’s preferred term for rolling blackouts.”

The Palisades were producing around 7 terawatt hours of energy per year, more than the amount of all the wind turbines in the state of Michigan combined.

“It’s a key comparison because the backlash against the wind industry has been fierce in Michigan,” Bryce notes. “Among the latest examples, last month the town board in Fulton Township voted unanimously to reject a project proposed by Chicago-based Invenergy that would put several dozen wind turbines in and around the township.”

Even Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer tried to prevent Palisades being closed and there was really no reason as the plant qualified as “green” energy because it produced no carbon. But nuclear power plants are being closed in favor of supposed other “green” energy, like windmills.

On April 20, Whitmer stated publicly that “keeping Palisades open is a top priority,” promising to dip into some of the $6 billion available at the Department of Energy’s Civil Nuclear Credit Program to make that happen and Whitmer wrote in a letter to the DoE, that keeping Palisades open will “allow us to shore up Michigan’s energy supply to prevent price spikes on working families and small businesses.” Unfortunately, the effort was in vain.

“There’s no doubt that the plant’s closure will result in more greenhouse gas emissions,” Bryce says. “When nuclear plants close in the United States, they are replaced by gas-fired generation.”

Just like those who think everyone should have an electric vehicle because it’s “cleaner,” when it comes with a huge carbon footprint. The irony.