In case you missed this over at Instpundit

Glenn Reynolds has an excerpt from an article written by Jon Sanders

THEY WANT YOU TO FREEZE IN THE DARK, AND ACCEPT IT: The New-Normaling of Blackouts.

It already seems as if people are being conditioned to expect talk of rolling blackoutswhenever the weather outside seems frightful.

To be very clear: rolling blackouts are not now, nor have they been, normal in the US. Therefore, having to expect rolling blackouts going forward would be abnormal. Nevertheless, as utility providers and power grid monitors have recently warned, the more grids are saddled with intermittent, unreliable wind and solar facilities, the more unreliable they are becoming. They’re more prone to capacity shortfalls and blackouts.

The Biden administration is dead-set on adding more wind and solar generation to the grid, which requires shuttering existing, reliable power plants. Along with much higher electric bills, it means more rolling blackouts. Electric customers would be incensed, however, given their current expectation of power at the flip of a switch. There are only two ways to go: change the plan to destabilize the grid with politically favored renewables, or try to change people’s idea of normal grid operations.

Changing people’s idea of what’s normal…we’ve seen this process before. Remember April 15, 2020, when the governors of several US states all began speaking of the “new normal” of government reordering their lives in dealing with COVID-19? The rollout was inartful, but effective. Almost three years later, people wonder whether the next cold and virus season might prompt fresh rounds of government lockdowns, face mask mandates, school closures, and worse. All these concepts were plain unthinkable before 2020.

We’ve seen similar new-normalling of other inevitable bad outcomes of Biden policies, including inflation, COVID vaccine mandates, and illegal immigration. So I write with a high degree of confidence of how changing expectations on blackouts will play out, though I confess I’m not sure which of The Atlantic, Washington Post, or CNN will be first with the inevitable “I Love Blackouts” column, or whether it’ll be “Rolling Blackouts: Why Saving the Planet Has Never Been So Much Fun.”

Following is an outline of the new-normalling process, in general.

And I’ll add this, also from the Sanders article:

Early in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith watched his fellow citizens react to an announcement that the government was “raising” their chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. Winston remembered the announcement from the previous day, however: the government was reducing the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. He marveled as everyone all celebrated what was actually bad news, which they should have all remembered was bad news.

Winston thought: “Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?”

With respect to that great achievement long ago of cheap, reliable electricity, how many of us in the new normal will even allow ourselves to remember it?

It seems to me that western civilization is returning to an updated version of Romanticism, with its dream of happy people living in a pleasant, peaceful state of nature, where all is abundant, and technology is missing. Missing from the picture is the actual state of the world back then, where peasants shivered in the dark, subsisted on turnips during the winter, and toiled for their masters 12 hours a day while being paid practically nothing. That absence is not unintentional.