The story is here.
A long time friend and I had a conversation about this recently. He's in power generation in central California, and the stories he told about how this situation developed was eye popping.
I told him he should let me do a Youtube video so that everyone could get a handle on how the grid works, the problems with it now, and how the current troubles came to be.
Suffice it to say, the entire problem has been caused by politicians interfering in the market to push green power, and the issues the big power companies have had to deal with in attempting to adjust to the foolish fiats that have come down from Sacramento.
Like everything it seems, it's a fully manufactured crisis that shouldn't have happened, but virtue signaling and pandering by politicians that don't understand the most basic things about science, economics or human nature have pushed this critical system to the edge of failure.
If the legislature was disbanded and allowed to only meet for six months every five years, it would be a blessing.
Furthermore, it every law it has passed for the last ten years by these human locusts was voided, much trouble and disaster would also be alleviated. Ask an Uber driver what their opinion is on these two proposals.
It's hard to do anything for fools who elect fools.
ReplyDeleteCounting "it's" as a single word, you pretty much summed it up in ten.
DeleteThe problem is green energy is non-dispatchable. You can't control solar or wind. What ever the peak demand is, you better have a generator able to meet that demand. If you had 100% solar and wind, you'd still need the same amount in a regular dependable powerplant. You pay twice for elec that way.
ReplyDeleteThe figures I've seen, indicate that the only power source close to green and renewable is hydroelectric; and they are trying to destroy that to save the fish. The wind power vanes and solar panels have a short 18 year life span and no way to recycle. By the time you figure the cost of manufacture, including environmental impact of that manufacture, so called green power isn't. Wyoming has a land fill where many of the giant wind vanes laying around. You can't even grind them up or otherwise dispose of them.
ReplyDeleteThis gambit is probably worse than ethanol diluted gasoline where more energy is consumed to add alcohol to a tank of gas than is added to that same tank and it hurts performance by reducing mileage too. Brilliant.
ReplyDeleteThat made money for the farmers, I think that was the intention.
DeleteNot all farmers got into that. I knew a farmer who grew corn and soybeans. He expanded his corn crop (including leasing other fields) to get in the ethanol craze. He missed out. It was something about too much from his area plus some arcane quality standard. This guy is 5th generation - he knows quality.
DeleteToo, mostly gone are the days of family farms. More accurate would be to rephrase your comment as, It made money for the corporations.
When there is a government program as large as the ethanol program and governed under such Byzantium regulations you know a few people are scooping up fantastical amounts of money.
I'd like to see that video, CW. I read somewhere that CA is committed to 100% renewables by 2050 or something, similar to the EU countries. 30 years away and so far no definite plans are in place for any of them, and CA is shutting down one of their nukes soon as an early step. Hence the rolling blackouts.
ReplyDeleteIf half the money & effort of the Green New Deal and Anthropogenic Global Warming causes were being poured into advancing nuclear technology, we would have clean unlimited power with tiny environmental downsides by comparison, and probably well before 2050.
Diablo Canyon would have gone online a decade earlier if it weren't for the newly formed local group, Mothers For Peace. I lived in the area. The aunt of my friend was one of the founders of that technically illiterate emotional support group.
DeleteThey are the ones who started the shock campaign that OMG!!1 The plant is built on an earthquake fault!!1
There isn't a place within the entire state which isn't in a fault zone. But not all faults are the same. Very basically, a small fault cannon produce a large quake. The Hosgri fault 3 miles offshore from the plant is a scrape in the earth. But try telling that to anyone who thinks 8.0 on the San Andreas destroying entire cities.
CA is also on record of wanting to remove vehicles from the state. 'Road diets' to reduce the number of lanes on a highway is one program towards that end. It was that very same reduction of lanes which was causative in preventing people from fleeing the 2018 Camp fire. People died in their cars trying to get out.
Books can be written about the already disastrous effects of CA's pie in the sky dreams of the path to Kumbaya City. There is not one industry which remains unscathed by such imbecilic programs.
way back in the '80s Mother Earth News published an article in which the author opined that solar and wind power should not be used for the grid. they should be a small scale neighborhood thing, supplying extra power as needed. not relied on; but taken advantage of when possible
ReplyDeleteCalifornia listened to the wrong hippy.
The tecno is NOT here YET! kalifornia=FOOLISH dream chasers...IMO
ReplyDeleteAs pretty much everyone has said, solar and wind power are simply not capable of supplying energy demands without the same amount of backup generators online and running.
ReplyDeleteWhen they talk about renewable energy, point out that humanity relied entirely on renewable energy until a little over a hundred years ago. It's called burning wood, and that's the way they get energy in the poorest parts of the world today. If all of civilization went to burning wood, there wouldn't be a tree left on earth in two years. If petroleum is outlawed the great die off starts, which is a feature not a bug to many of the people who advocate for it.
I hate to break it to you CW, but I'm sure you really know that California is going to collapse completely within the next 10 years.
Your heady amount of optimism is a thing to behold.
DeleteI say less than 5 years.
California at least has other states to bail it out. That excess power goes away if green goes national.
ReplyDeleteYou mean like when CA has an excess supply of energy that it has to pay other states to buy it?
Deletehttps://calmatters.org/projects/california-electricity-grid-modernization-efforts-cost/
Of course the state having regulated PG&E into bankruptcy so the state could take over the utility (a long hope-for dream become reality) the state now becomes a real player. Recall that a Governor was tossed out of office (Gray Davis) for likewise dabbling in the energy sector.
Commiefornia will not be happy until the politboro runs the grid.
ReplyDelete