Power Prices Spike Up 4X, Coldest in a Century Across Canada

Starting in Texas with the temperature drops that resulted in power prices spiking to four times the average as well as an absolute increase of 140 dollars per megawatt, that was five times the pricing.

As we move into the Grand Solar Minimum intensification phase, cold waves will begin sweeping into lower latitudes with less uninsulated homes, because they normally have temperate climates. We are now seeing colder conditions with different power demands through the season. If you take a look at Texas on the map shown below, you see temperatures that are 16 to 20 degrees Celsius below normal.

Now if you thought that was interesting and was really pushing far south, wait until January 31st. Three-quarters of the US is going to experience 20–25 degrees Celsius below normal temperatures during this time.

In the meantime, as I was researching for the video about power demand, I kept running across all of these different stories that I’d either covered or forgot about. We have here a headline that says, February 2015 coldest in 115 years in Ottawa, and here we are, just a couple years later and we are already smashing another century cold mark. Another headline says, UK’s coldest December in a hundred years, so if you want to know when the US winter was the coldest in a century, all you have to do is go back to 2014, 2015 and 2016 and you can see these century marks being smashed again, and again.

Historic storm that smashed Ottawa recently was the coldest snowstorm in more than a hundred years, with -24 degrees Celsius temperature, coupled by over a foot of snow.

What I found most interesting though, was the image put up by John Zwicker, an image of blue roots coming off of a tree due to excessive cold.

Trees are turning blue! I’m not sure of the mechanisms that caused these branches to freeze and become blue.

YOW Weather Records shows all prior snowstorms as well as temperature totals. We need to go back to February 8, 1895 to match these recorded maximum temperature and snow totals. So when they said more than 100 years, it is actually 125 years.

It seems like this will be the new normal, even in April and May.

We can also see a cold blob sitting over Louisiana and Texas in the map and up in Canada it’s record cold @ -50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Arctic front is going to start to sweep into the US, especially Ohio, Indiana and Illinois will have extreme storms in the way of temperature and snowfall totals.

As we move through the 31st that Arctic blast literally encompasses everything from the Arctic down to Southern Mexico.

Montreal breaking a hundred-year snowstorm record. They hadn’t seen anything like this since 1920, and Environment Canada was reporting that thousands of snow removal trucks were being brought out for the monster blizzard.

The problem was, it was so cold that demand for electricity has been pushed to the limit of what Quebec can generate with hydro. They’re still selling a lot to the U.S. but now need to internally pull from other provinces to meet demand. Now they’re asking the people to please turn down the thermostat and try to use appliances only in off hours.

Even with all of the measures, there were still areas with power outages leaving thousands in the dark when temperatures outside were -50 degrees Fahrenheit. Once you lose your power and source of heat and with all the new regulations across the planet, you can’t even have wood stoves in your homes any longer so this was a life-and-death situation.

Same article on iceagenow.info, Robert Felix’s site, there are talks in the comment board about how much Hydro-Québec is able to produce at this time. There were also figures given about the plan to add another 1,500 megawatts by 2021, but, yesterday’s demand @ 38,600 megawatts, that is at the brink of what they can produce during this time of the year.

Montreal wind chills win a silver-medal. The city had 80 hours of -26 degrees Celsius or lower, wind chill factor. This was the longest since 2004, so it’s looking like a tie for total duration of 80 hours.

It shows that record later in the year than 2004, so if it is true that our seasons are actually being pushed out a month or so, this record could possibly fall somewhere in February, because it will be a couple of weeks after what we’re traditionally used to, as the coldest time of the year.

And with all these colds, at least you have beautiful scenery to look at.

Thanks for reading. I hope you got something out of the article. If you are looking for more in-depth analysis on these exact same issues, Mini Ice Age Conversations tri-weekly podcast, 30-minutes on the go anywhere you can find a podcast hosted across the net.