California is going through a heatwave this week and that has put enormous strain on the state’s power grid.
The reasons are not complicated. There is not enough power being generated to service all electricity consumers in the region. How can that be? California is the leading state for generating power from “renewable” sources. There are more wind farms, solar homes, and natural gas power-generating plants than anywhere else in America.
And yet, the people who operate the electrical grid in California are warning of “rolling blackouts” as they desperately try to supply as many households and businesses with electricity as the system will bear. There’s not enough.
They try to be fair about it by spreading the misery from neighborhood to neighborhood, blacking out one section of the city so that the other sections can get the power they need. If that isn’t a metaphor for Democratic Party governance, I don’t know what else is.
“Shared misery” is what we all can look forward to if the Democrats’ cockamamie “Green New Deal” becomes law. The bottom line is that unless you’re going to drastically and dramatically ramp up energy production from these “renewable” sources, we’re all going to suffer.
While California braced for another round of rolling blackouts Monday night, the state’s grid operator held off for a second straight night, citing cooler than expected weather and widespread conservation. It also came as Gov. Gavin Newsom questioned all of the state’s electricity players about why the outages occurred and faced blowback from frustrated residents. Still, the state says more blackouts affecting millions of residents could occur this week as a historic heat wave endures.
“Historic” heatwave? Do you mean to say it never gets hot in California? It’s in a damn desert, for crying out loud.
But blaming the heatwave and not the idiotic, short-sighted policies initiated by Democrats and enthusiastically supported by greens is manipulating the truth. And what’s truly pathetic and a moral outrage is the obliviousness of politicians and “experts” who got the state in this mess in the first place.
“What’s weird about what happened is they were adequate until they weren’t,” said Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s climate and energy program and a member of the state’s Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery Commission. “It seems as if certain power plants for some reason were not able to deliver on the commitments to supply reserves and also supply energy.”
“Certain power plants” missed their supply targets. I wonder which ones? It couldn’t be oil-fired power plants because the output is so predictable.
But it appears that California’s renewable energy industry overestimated or oversold how much power they could deliver.
Business groups, in turn, were quick to pin the blame on renewable energy suppliers; Saturday’s outage happened after 1,000 megawatts of wind power and a 470-megawatt gas plant briefly went offline.
“Hot weather and a cloudy day should not be able to shut down the fifth-largest economy in the world,” Lance Hastings, president of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, said in a statement. “While we support California’s renewable energy goals, we absolutely need system redundancy that allows us to continue to operate and manufacture products for our residents and the world.”
Former Governor Gray Davis was at least honest about the problem.
“The bottom line is, people don’t want lights to go down,” said former Gov. Gray Davis. “People also want a carbon-free future. Sometimes those two aspirations come into conflict. A smarter approach, in my judgment, is to have the power you need in reserve, even if it’s somewhat carbon-based, to keep the lights on.”
The “people” don’t want fossil fuels and they don’t want nuclear power, and they don’t want any power plants that use any fuel at all in their neighborhoods. And then they complain when the lights go out? Sheesh.
These are perfect Democratic voters. They want to be safe but they don’t want the police. They want blue skies, lollipops, green grass, and rainbows but don’t want to pay the price to get it.
But there can’t be a paradise without a hell. And you can’t have a modern industrialized society without fossil fuels.
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