California faces power shortages and price hikes amid drought woes: report
kentucky.com
kentucky.com
We could and should have built far more renewable power. We could and should have built far more desalination plants. We could and should have cleared out far more undergrowth. We could and should have built far more cheap housing while cleaning up the streets.
The Democratic supermajority has been in power for years but has done nothing in these areas. Perhaps some solutions go against the far left of the party and so they do nothing. Perhaps these issues don't better help them get reelected.
Oftentimes, behind an issue is a powerful lobby group benefiting from the status quo. You can easily tell from the lobbyists that the politicians choose to meet with: PG&E, healthcare, teachers unions, etc... and who have carveouts against policies held over the rest of the population. That is why teachers were amongst the last to go back to in person, PG&E now has insurance against fires, etc...
The Democrats holding office bounce from one office to another up the office hierarchy irrespective of their qualifications for the office.
Many if not at the least overwhelming majority of the Republicans running for office appear to the neighborhood crazies you don't want to be office.
While I don't agree that everyone saw the energy capacity issues from miles away (even if it's obvious in retrospect), I do agree that our political class is not doing their job.
But I disagree with the partisan political analysis of it. The problem isn't that we have a lack of diversity of political opinion, and in fact there's a huge diversity in democratic opinions, as big as I ever saw between democrats and republicans in the 1980s.
The problem is that we have embraced an extreme form of conservatism that rejects changes to the status quo, and let's a tiny number of people prevent any form of change. We have embraced the power of the veto in nearly all parts of our government. Which may be fine if you are trying to stop negative changes.
But we live in an era where we need lots and lots and lots of positive change in our system in California. And all those spots that allow vetos have blocked us from making those changes.
The one story that gives me hope is of the story of a NIMBH blocking thousands of students from being enrolled in Berkeley. It set off a media storm and the legislature finally took action to overturn this one specific case. Sure, it was only because it was the parents of thousands of over-achieving students reacting with rage. But it gave me hope that this sort of "we can't change anything" attitude can at least be confronted.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/uc-berkele...
Those NIMBYs you refer to are often lobbyists for special interests groups. For example, PG&E has been lobbying for years and in the meantime they inadequately cleared underbrush, didn't keep records on natural gas pipes falling into disrepair, etc... And in return we get falling power lines sparking wildfires and the San Bruno natural gas explosion.
We have had water shortages for years and years. Yet the far left environmentalists block desalination plants. The environmentalists are actually ideologically opposed to all attempts to increase water supply: dams, desalination plants, etc...
Meanwhile water rights are such that most of the water goes to agriculture. You can completely starve urban areas of water and the problem will still be there. The agricultural groups are loath to give up water rights.
Our politicians are serving these groups at the cost of most of the population.
This is quite distinct from, say, Texas's failure to respond to freezing events that were identical to the freezing events from a decade prior. The California blackouts were due to extreme events that had not been experienced. (In addition to failure of a large natural gas plant, IIRC, but the plan should take that into account too)
I think it's time to admit that the crusade to adopt only wind and solar is premature, despite all the good intentions. Hydro doesn't work where it's dry, and socal is feeling it. We need to be realistic.
In summer 2020, we had blackouts. In '21, we built 6 new gas-fired plants to mitigate that. There's something really off about burning gas, shipping energy over wires, and using it to charge our teslas and feeling good about it.
We've got at least one major nuclear plant scheduled to shut down in 3 years. What then?
There has got to be a better way to do this.
This would be an unsupported conclusion.
We had power outages not because of renewables, but because we hadn't planned for enough capacity.
And we hadn't planned for enough capacity because the planners had not taken into account the effect of climate change:
https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2021-01/caiso-cpuc-cec-issue-...
I agree we should stop utilities from building new gas facilities, but if we also combine that with your proposal of stopping renewables, and keeping nuclear, we will have rolling blackouts. The only way forward is lots more renewables and storage, whether or not Diablo Canyon stays open. Diablo Canyon is just 2.2GW, and we need to serve peak demand 25-30x that on hot days. We should choose the most cost efficient method of doing that. If DC can compete on cost, sure, keep it open.
But in general the problem in California is that we are not building enough new stuff. We need to dismantle the old, replace it with better newer and more efficient technology. The number of crappy tract homes from the 1970s that are sitting on $1-2M plots of land is an affront to basic common sense. We we'd far more energy efficient housing in the form of townhomes and apartment buildings on such expensive land. And that will greatly reduce our energy, water, and transit needs all at the same time.
This is not my proposal. It's the unfortunate side effect. What happened is that now that we're feeling the pinch, we're building fossil plants again.
I guess if I had a proposal at all, it would be to keep existing generation online while there continues to be supply shortages.
>only way forward is lots more renewables and storage
Now, I don't know that I'm 100% on board with that. How much land are we willing to ruin to wind and solar farms? Then there's the strip mining and slavery required for the lithium...
All these things combined makes it apparent to me that we're not quite there yet. Let's keep researching. In fact, let's make it the #1 priority. Already there seems to be a lot of promising development, e.g., NaO2 batteries.
So your proposal of not doing anything and waiting it out will not work. Especially since we need to phase out all that natural gas as soon as possible.
Stop mining is not performed for lithium. Slavery is not required for it either. There have been concerns about child labor for cobalt, but that's not a concern for LFP batteries that would be used for stationary storage.
And even though you say your proposal isn't to stop renewables, you say priority #1 is that we do research rather than deploy our current technology, and trot out easily solvable talking points to avoid taking action.
This sort of status-quo bias is the exact problem in California. Keeping existing infrastructure is causing the problems. Keeping the same infrastructure doesn't mean keeping the same quality of life when the climate is changing, it means worsening quality.
The magnification and amplification of any flaws in a new system, rather than properly weighing it against the massive massive harm kf the current system, is the very heat of California's bad decision making.
Are we keeping existing infrastructure? Tell me if I'm wrong, because I am under the impression that several plants have been decommissioned over the past 5 years.
We are not keeping the same infrastructure. But a proposal to keep it static would not meet our energy needs, because of extreme weather events. It also does not meet our needs for climate goals.
Thus the only way forward is lord more renewables and storage. We don't have any other options on the table.
I think we agree that decommissioning plants without viable replacements is, in fact, contributing to the energy supply problem.
It’s better than recruiting, oh let us say, homeless?
It would make far more sense as an advertisement to people in Kentucky to not move to California.
However, I suspect that it may be mostly about solidifying political dividing lines in the country, in an attempt to separate us from each other. I don't have any evidence for my suspicion though.