‘Snow Hurricane’ Energy Reality Check: You Can’t Heat Homes With NetZero Promises
As with Winter Storm Fern, the Iron Law of Electricity will win again as Northeast is slammed with massive blizzard.
The last severe cold snap that hit the country brought more attention to the energy needs of many states, leading to a “NetZero” utopia.
In addition, it nearly froze Lake Erie to the point of complete ice cover.
Well, there is likely to be even greater appreciation for inexpensive, reliable energy in the wake of the “snow hurricane” (as it is being called by some). Especially after over half-a-million people have lost power during the deep freeze.
The storm snarled travel at airports and on the roads, breaking records in Providence, Rhode Island, and Islip, New York. More than 5,600 flights were canceled, according to FlightAware. Street closures abounded as snow piled up and whiteout conditions made for “potentially life-threatening” travel conditions, the National Weather Service said.
Over half a million homes and businesses across the Northeast were without power, according to a USA TODAY outage tracker. The intense snowfall and winds began to ease off across New York and New Jersey by mid-afternoon. But the storm was making a slow exit in New England, not expected to fully clear out of Massachusetts and Maine until late Monday evening.
a snow hurricane is about to wipe boston off the face of the planet and youre laughing? pic.twitter.com/1XpSuvyOAn
— doomer (@uncledoomer) February 21, 2026
A shout out to Professor Jacobson and his family, as the highest snow total, so far, is 36.2 inches in Warwick, Rhode Island.
More than 3 feet of snow in Warwick, Rhode Island at 37.9” today.
The all-time record was set today that shattered the Blizzard of ‘78.
It also beats the Blizzard of ‘96 for one day snowfall.
📸Jeanne Connery pic.twitter.com/zTWYnpaHdU
— Jason Nappi (@jasonnappiwx) February 24, 2026
Climate crisis cultists who made natural gas pipelines impossible to construct are going to learn a valuable lesson about supply and demand. Prices for this very efficient fuel source jumped during the last cold snap we had in January.
The contracts for near-term US natural gas futures have skyrocketed more than 70% so far this week, according to FactSet data. That leaves natural gas on track for the biggest weekly increase since 1990 and at the highest price since 2022, according to Bloomberg.
The explosive move has been driven by meteorologists warning of one of the most extreme winter storms in years. As much of the country soon enters a deep freeze, people cranking up the heat in their homes could deplete some stockpiles of natural gas.
Darrell Fletcher, managing director of commodities at Bannockburn Capital Markets, said he’s only seen a few moves in natural gas futures like this in his 30 years as a trader.
As a delightful bonus, coal use also increased during last month’s deep freeze.
The U.S. electric grid leaned heavily on fossil fuels during Winter Storm Fern, with coal generation in particular jumping 31% for the week ended Sunday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Tuesday.
Beginning Friday, Fern brought snow, ice and frigid temperatures to a swath of the U.S. from Texas to New England.
Coal generation has surged in the second half of January, from a mid-month low of around 70 GWh/day to about 130 GWh/day, according to EIA data. During the week of Fern, gas generation in the Lower 48 also increased 14% from the previous week while generation from solar, wind, and hydropower declined.
“Grid operators can call upon the coal fleet to increase electricity generation in extreme weather events and other times when demand surges or output falls from other generation sources, a pattern also evident in severe cold snaps in February 2021 and January 2025,” EIA said.
The Iron Law of Electricity for the win…again.
IRON LAW OF ELECTRUCITY TRUMPS GREEN ENERGY DELUSION: US coal generation jumped 31% during Winter Storm Fern: EIA | Utility Dive https://t.co/LGyvqvioLF
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) February 24, 2026
Interestingly, talk of another Ice Age has resurfaced.
The idea of a mini ice age (a period of significant global or regional cooling) sounds dramatic, but it’s not entirely fringe science. While mainstream climate consensus emphasises ongoing human-driven warming, a minority of researchers have long warned of natural factors that could trigger abrupt or localised cooling.
The most prominent claim centres on a grand solar minimum (GSM), where solar activity drops sharply, reducing solar irradiance and potentially leading to cooler conditions. Astrophysicist Valentina Zharkova has been a key voice here. Her model, based on solar magnetic field dynamics, predicts a modern GSM from around 2020–2053, with the deepest cooling in cycles 25–27 (particularly 2030–2040).
She argues this could drop average temperatures by up to 1°C globally, echoing Maunder Minimum conditions during the Little Ice Age.
So as the “snow hurricane” buries airports, freezes lakes, and turns highways into luge tracks, all the evidence suggests that when temperatures crash, people do not crave “NetZero utopia,” they crave heat.
Politicians could spin, activists could tweet, and modelers could promise a perfectly balanced climate in 2050, but none of that will coax a single electron through a frozen, darkened transmission line when gas supplies are gone, and solar panels and wind turbines fail to meet energy demands.
What happened in January will happen again with energy pricing. Perhaps people will remember the shock of seeing their energy bills next month when they are choosing which candidate will be making energy policy after the next election.
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Comments
Wind turbines can ice up, can’t operate in high wind, sit idle in low wind. Maybe that could be mitigated with back up battery storage? But its not the direction to go for reliability.
All true but battery storage is useless, unless you need less than a hour of backup power
This happened near home where a windmill was put on top of a mountain to much fan fare but ended up getting so much ice in the winter that it was useless and was removed.
Why should you need battery back-up? After all the sun still shines on solar panels even when the wind blows. It would take some pretty specific criteria to cause a situation where both wind and solar would be unavailable at the same time…. something like weather in the month of February, but how often does that happen?
Oh, wait.
“It would take some pretty specific criteria to cause a situation where both wind and solar would be unavailable at the same time”
Like the Jimmy Kimmel show being on TV.
PA is loaded with natural gas. Its not like they don’t have options.
As is Southern NY, where drilling is/was banned.
“a snow hurricane is about to wipe boston off the face of the planet and youre laughing?” I thought this job belonged to their silly new Democrat mayor.
As opposed to other silly Democrat mayors.
Yes they are united in silliness.
Lived Experience
When it comes to discrimination: If you claim you feel it or see it, it is your “authentic truth,” and experts should listen to you.
When it comes to global warming: If you see record cold and snow, your “lived experience” is dismissed as an “anecdote” or “weather, and it has nothing to do with climate.”
This is why the Iron Law of Electricity is the ultimate equalizer. It doesn’t care about your social theory or your 100-year computer model. When the grid fails during a blizzard, the “lived experience” of being cold is the only truth that matters.
but thats their goal
the failure lets you/us share that lived experience with their offspring that they couldnt/wouldnt raise properly to be educated,, to be honest non criminals etc etc
Paula, the warmunistas will claim that the severe winter weather is because of global warming, or climate change. Nothing that happens can ever be offered as refuting their religion.
Unfortunately idiot lemming democrats will continue to vote for the economic and societal destruction furthered by democrats. Every country that has fallen from greatness has had its own self inflicted wound like the Democratic Party. It seems to be unavoidable.
I don’t care what they taught you in school: my grandmother taught me that Cleopatra froze her ass off when the weather was cold.
You can keep your house above freezing for a few weeks by leaving the basement door open, and using heat stored in the ground below the basement floor to waft upwards into the house.
No.
The thermal mass of the upper floors, plus thermal “leakage” from windows and doors will overwhelm any heat below the frost line.
Even heat pumps which draw on the heat below that frost line and forcing warm air through vents can and will fail to be able to overcome the mass of the upper floors and require additional BTU’s to be added into the mix in extreme cold.
No. We have an unheated dirt crawlspace under the house and it never freezes.
Not sure what you would have in a crawlspace that would freeze.
If you have something like a water pipe, that won’t freeze because of the movement of water through the pipe, the limited exposure to the cold, plus the heat traveling down through the pipe from the heated interior of the house.
The space is getting heat from the mass of the house and sun shining on the side of the crawlspace.
The key thermodynamic variable is thermal mass. None upstairs, enormous in the basement.
No. The variable is where that mass is.
Maybe you have a basement that is totally below grade level. Even so, the frost line would be at least 4 feet below the grade level. It is that point that the temperature stays consistent.
Interesting. So you live in a building with no floors, no walls, no furniture? You simply live with a basement?
The fact of the matter is arguably you may have more mass in the basement because a concrete floor and perhaps block walls. But you still have to transfer that heat to the upper floors. The first floor would be insulated so the heat cannot go through that path. The block walls are losing heat to the outside walls of the upper floors.
Finally, heat needs a medium to transfer from heat to cold. A simple open door will not allow enough transfer through the air.
I’ve done it, in a 2 week ice storm aftermath when it never went above zero F.
The reverse I do every summer: a 12 inch diameter fabric hose hovering just an inch above the basement floor, running upstairs and aimed at the computer desk, with a fan on the end to suck cool basement air onto the computer desk. Free air conditioning.
Don’t forget to vacuum your keyboard regularly.
Your basement would have to be below the frost line where temperatures are consistent.
Secondly, there is not enough air movement through a door to lift the volume of warm(er) air to the upper floors.
As to your “free air conditioning,” you are using a fan to draw the air up. An electrical fan. Electricity costs money, Secondly, the amount of air for a small computer desk to be “cooled” is not the same as cooling the whole house.
Sorry, but the thermodynamics don’t work out.
no but we can bur the paper that those laws were written on
and when we think of yet again allll the money that has burned to fullfill yet another blmplo shakedown of the system…that would produce more heat than the fakery from the left has
Wood burning stoves…
Alabama has some of the highest electricity rates in the country but our generating capacity and, to a lesser extent, distribution network seem to be up to the load in summer as well as winter. I know I’ve seen fewer problems caused by trees on lines than was common decades ago. I’ve told everybody I know about using budget billing to save the shocks of peak use of gas as well as power.
.
For the most part, a lot of power companies have “hardened” the grid with concrete poles along main lines. I saw that in Florida with FPL.
Interestingly, BGE which handles Maryland, recently announced they would no longer be replacing poles proactively. Weakened poles will fail, but that is a benefit to the power company which can ask for higher rates due to poles being down after storms.
Finally, in the early 1990’s power companies were told power generation would triple by 2030. That prediction gave the companies plenty of time to address the need.
And that was before the power suck that AI centers created.
Yet we haven’t seen new reliable power generation being addressed at all.
Politicians and power companies helped create this mess.
And the people have to pay for their lack of actions.
OT, but is anybody else seeing slow response from the LI web site? It’s been going on for months at least.
.
Or it could just be you.
Here’s a writeup on Kimwolf, which has been slamming our local ISP… maybe yours.
Anyone remember the NYC snowstorm of 1947? I was there, and I remember it. Officially the snowfall reached 26.4 inches in Central Park, a record at the time. Unlike blizzards there was no wind, just lots of snow. I remember my whole block filled with snow. The 1947 storm might have been an all time record in terms of the average snowpack over the whole city. One, or a few stations in Central Park don’t provide enough information. We have what’s known as the “scattered data problem.” We now know to use a technique called “Kriging” to interpolate between the scattered point measurements. Even better to use radial basis functions, but I’m already too technical for a general audience. So even the official 27.5 inches in 2016 might not be a record.
I much prefer the NYC of 1947 to the NYC of today or even the 1960s. No one worried about “Climate Change,” you just shoveled snow, and went about your life. None of the others with shovels were from the Turd World.
How old are you?
My guess is mid-to-late 80s. I remember Hurricane Donna in 1960.
The more people who freeze to death, the less energy dependent …the more warmth left for collectivism. See…. a bright bit of happiness from socialism. It is all Trump’s fault for not supporting a green future….. or something like that.
Perhaps people will remember the shock of seeing their energy bills next month when they are choosing which candidate will be making energy policy after the next election.
——————-
Never overestimate the democrap base when it comes to voting. Their lived slogan is “vote blue no matter who”.
My guess is you’d need at least a month of below zero temps with huge snow storms every third day or so making shoveling snow out of the way really difficult to make any inroads into their fragile minds.
I say repubs should do some petition drives to make gas, oil and coal illegal in the blue states so that a storm like this can leave them without heat for a week or two to maybe change their minds. Pretty sure they could easily fill up the signature sheets to put it on the ballot.
Climate nuts should be forbidden from using fossil fuels for everything including heating/cooling their homes, electrifying them, and driving autos. They are required to use only renewable sources of energy they gather themselves. Wood though is forbidden. I;m tired of their BS.
“While mainstream climate consensus emphasises ongoing human-driven warming, a minority of researchers have long warned of natural factors that could trigger abrupt or localised cooling.”
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Some Days As Early As 6 Or 7, But Occasionally As Late As 12:30 Or 1,
But Usually Around 9 Unless It’s Later.
We Close At 5 Or 6, Sometimes At 4.
If All Hell Breaks out at home we close at 3.
Occasionally we’re open as late as 11:30 or 12 pm, depending.
Some afternoons, mornings, or entire days we aren’t even here at all, but lately we’ve been open all the time, except when we’re closed, but really we should be here then too, unless we left early.
Grew up on a farm in the mountains in upstate NY. Plenty of electrical blackouts, but never without heat, thanks to old-fashioned gravity (octopus) furnace in the basement plus a few fireplaces.
New isn’t necessarily better.
Google Maps tells me that’s 20 miles from Barrington by road, but it looks like about four miles as the snow-laden crow flies.
At peak load, “green” energy sources are typically producing absolutely nothing.
Hottest days of the summer – no wind.
Coldest days of the winter, solar panels covered in snow and wind turbines frozen.
Bonus: On windy days, the blades of the turbines are feathered so they don’t self destruct.
For every megawatt of potential green energy production, there is at least a megawatt of reliable power sources for when the green garbage is off line. Which, in actual practice, is typically at peak load when you need it most.