A report last month confirmed much of the blame for the Caddo and Bossier Parish blackouts of Apr. 26 rested with the pell-mell rush of power providers into use of less-reliable renewable sources of energy.

Urged by the Public Service Commission, this document by American Electric Power-Southwestern Electric Power Company (AEP the parent of SWEPCO) and the regional transmission organization to which it belongs, the Southwest Power Pool detailed why tens of thousands of structures were left without power for several hours. It claimed essentially that a degraded environment for power provision suffered bad luck that could be mitigated to some degree in the future with changes to more conservative procedures until that environment improves.

The environment, it explained, was degraded for two reasons: insufficient transmission capacity and local generative capacity. What it didn’t explain was the more general transition away from fossil fuels by utilities towards especially wind and solar sources, and particularly by SWEPCO, were the root causes of less capacity and therefore greater need for transmission lines into the service area.

By their nature, wind and solar power are unreliable because wherever the windmills or panels are located the wind doesn’t always blow hard enough or at all or the sunshine isn’t as intense as need be (or isn’t there at all at night). With battery storage outrageously expensive and extremely unwieldy to place, only a tiny fraction of that output can be stored. So, as the proportion of the grid with wind and solar increases, the less reliably can power overall be dispatched at any given moment when a shortage arises.

Further, the amount of transmission lines has to multiply, as does the reliance on wind and solar. That’s because to compensate for their intermittency, more of each would have to be built, or lines to dispatchable sources somewhere else for backup.

The two work together. More lines are needed – and, again, this multiplied the greater the share of wind and solar that is part of the mix – where there is less local generative capacity. And SWEPCO has made an own goal on this through recent decisions that ended up replacing locally coal-generated power with solar in a move that both reduced generative capacity, both its baseline and degree of intermittency, that exacerbated the need for more transmission capacity into its service area.

A few years ago, it closed years early its co-owned Dolet Hills coal-fired generator, under pressure from changing economics, but most importantly from government fiat that in part drove coal to become less economical (even as in other parts of the world where governments didn’t discourage its production that soared) for consumption at home even as exports of it surged. In its place came a solar array, but sacrificing close to a half-gigawatt in capacity. In the works still at least a couple years from completion are other SWEPCO solar projects that would bridge the gap, although less reliably.

Worse, it all comes at higher costs to consumers driven by the need for duplication and the extra transmission avenues required, as confirmed by the data. Fortunately, the federal government has begun removing its thumb on the scale with a declaration of the ending in short order subsidization of renewable power generation and removing the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming motive behind increase renewable sources by revoking the half-baked declaration that carbon dioxide is dangerous.

With that, economics rather than politics increasingly will drive decisions about power generation and likely a pullback in chasing renewable resources will occur. That means in the years to come improved reliability in power provision, reducing the chances of blackouts although other states’ decisions and choices in participating in regional transmission organizations still magnify that threat for Louisiana – even if this report is too politically cautious to acknowledge these truths.