My impression is that california uniquely empowers individuals to obstruct projects with myriad legal mechanisms that are easy to initiate but expensive to fight.

CEQA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Environmental_Quali...

Ever since it was passed, NIMBYs and other types of individualists have found more and more ways to use its provisions to block anything from happening that they don't want to happen.

Rumblings I heard had to do with too-aggressively retiring traditional power plants in favor of renewables, resulting in a lack of adequate baseload power.

But I have looked into it exactly zero.