With natural gas supplies disrupted, citizens and businesses may be asked to reduce energy use this winter | Maine Public Scary thinking about it. One more reason to be heating with wood. Pellet burners might even be affected by this shortage as they need electric for their stoves.
It is a real concern and it gets a tremendous amount of attention, winter prep. Below is the winter prep forum in your region. A couple big differences between New England and MISO, both fuel related, are the amounts of coal and nuclear power generation. Where NE has some, MISO has much more, as a percentage of total available generation. And natural gas isn’t produced in New England. It has to get here by either one of very few lines that exist or by ship in the form of LNG, which is also very limited. so there are a lot of eggs, natural gas generation, in one basket, limited ways to get fuel to them. And it gets more precarious as older oil and coal burner plants retire, making reliable 24/7 generation more dependent on NG. https://cdn.misoenergy.org/20211026 Winter Readiness Presentation598196.pdf
It's been all over the local news (we only really have one news channel in NH) for the last week or so. First time I ever remember hearing about rolling blackouts in NH. It would be interesting to see a statistic on how much of an increase in firewood purchases are being made this year. Surprisingly enough, according to the state government only around 6.4 households use wood as their primary heat source (seems low when you consider that NH is the second most forested state with 81 percent of the state being forest). Rolling blackouts during winter in NH could occur (wmur.com)
I read the other day that the cost to heat the house will be outrageous this year. They even mentioned that many were turning to supplementing with firewood.
The possibility of the rolling blackouts was even discussed somewhat here in W. Michigan earlier on. A nuke plant & a couple coal plants retired. NG shortages etc. Even a coal supply issue possibly. I purchased a big new custom fabbed woodstove in case of a longer term outage. My boiler requires electricity obviously & I do have generator back up, but if it were to be a longer term thing, the stove will allow limiting usage of the genny. Who thought we'd be discussing this in the U.S. Good news is I can likely get more for fuelwood this winter.
The growth of cleaner natural gas in New England, has been lowered due to gas line limitations. It would be a good use of infrastructure $'s to beef-up the pipeline capacity. But, it won't be spent there,
Look on the bright side Dennis. With all those windmills over by you you'll never have a power shortage.
More doom and gloom, that’s kinda like saying you might be hit by a bus if you cross the road…sure it happens but…
Sort of lol. I would get my autistic nephew from the bus stop on occasion. Kid's anything but dumb, however that was the requirement. I taught him how to make & launch really good paper wads. Driver didn't like that, so she bumped me with the mirror one day. Nate & I still have good fun with that story.
And solar farms moving in. Over by Juddville there are thousands of acres going in. They plan on around 2400 acres right by us very soon.
One of the big reasons I chose a wood stove over a pellet stove. When the power goes out in winter we are still nice and toasty!
This and they cannot have a pandemic/disaster decide to tell trees to stop growing. Bugs can kill them, but dead trees increases fuel supply
Bad enough starting Jan our power bill here will go up from what I hear will be 30% and now this. I'm not going to worry about it.
As I read this commercial comes on for electric cars, might want to With NG shortage, not enough electricity, saving the dead trees, they'll be telling everyone just think warm thoughts. That will get you through the cold winters.
