“Study” Says NY Plagued By Blackouts From Global Boiling Or Something

It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with New York killing off reliable, dependable, affordable energy sources and replacing them with unreliable and expensive energy sources which are dependent on the sun shining and the wind blowing, right? Replacing energy sources which can take weather and can be repaired quickly, can take over loads, with energy that can be knocked offline easily, is hard to fix, and is hurt by weather events, righ?

New York cities plagued by blackouts due to climate change, study finds

Climate change is pushing some New York City neighborhoods into dozens of nearly daylong blackouts per year, a new study has found.

Large swaths of the state’s principal towns and cities faced repeated, protracted and dangerous weather-driven power outages between 2017 and 2020, according to findings published Wednesday in the Public Library of Science.

The risk to the grid is rising as more frequent extreme weather knocks down power lines, damages transformers and threatens the stability of the grid, said first author Nina Flores, a doctoral student at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Researchers found that several neighborhoods in Queens had more than 100 outages over the three-year period: 147 in Jamaica, 138 in Flushing and 104 in Richmond Hills.

Other cities had dozens of outages: 48 in Lewisboro, near the Connecticut state line; 42 in Flower Hill, on Long Island; 38 in Boston, south of Buffalo. Small towns in counties like Nassau, Hamilton and Westchester had 20-30 outages.

So, mostly urban areas which already have transmission issues and are now more and more reliant on solar and wind.

Flooding and extreme levels of rain, hail or snow were the primary causes of outages, researchers found.

The scientists also noted that these outages are more than an inconvenience. If they coincide with heat waves or cold snaps, these outages can harm or kill residents — and at all times, they endanger the lives of people dependent on elevators or electric medical devices.

Would you be surprised that a high percentage of these outages are from winter weather? Who would have thought that snow and ice, along with the associated clouds, would cause problems with solar and wind? Don’t forget that wind turbines are meant to operate with wind speeds of 5mph to 30mph. More can damage the turbines. Snow and ice can likewise affect performance. Solar cannot gather light when it is cloudy, when rain is hitting them, or covered in snow or ice.

And it’s not a barely rising sea or storms which are not getting more extreme and more often, it’s having more power usage in those areas.

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