California Needs More Power to Keep the Lights on This Summer

Incredibly, California is warning that unless it can find more power, the state will be unable to keep the lights on this summer if heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events happen.

It’s incredible when you consider that California, at one time, had five working nuclear power plants. Now they have one. The state used to have 242,000 oil wells. They now have a little more than half that number.

The state sits on a mountain of coal. It has effectively banned hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract oil from hard-to-drill places.  It has plenty of “renewable” energy sources — like wind and solar power— except officials wildly overestimated how much energy those “renewables” would generate. This has resulted in brownouts and blackouts in recent years.

The same thing is going to happen this year — only worse.

Reuters:

In an online briefing with reporters, the officials forecast a potential shortfall of 1,700 megawatts this year, a number that could go as high as 5,000 MW if the grid is taxed by multiple challenges that reduce available power while sending demand soaring, state officials said during an online briefing with reporters.

Supply gaps along those lines could leave between 1 million and 4 million people without power. Outages will only happen under extreme conditions, officials cautioned, and will depend in part on the success of conservation measures.

In 2025, the state will still have a capacity shortfall of about 1,800 MW, according to officials from the California Energy Commission, Public Utilities Commission, California Independent System Operator and Newsom’s office. They also projected annual electricity rate increases of between 4% and 9% between now and 2025.

So much for renewables saving the environment and leading to lower electric bills.

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It should be noted that only third-world countries have problems like this. Baghdad would have regular blackouts, despite them swimming in an ocean of oil. Electricity generation fell victim to greed and corruption.

In California, it’s simple stupidity.

At the same time, many solar farms and energy storage projects the state has commissioned over the last two years were delayed due to supply chain challenges during the pandemic and a recent federal trade probe into solar imports.

“We are in a place now where we have to factor in a new landscape in terms of the challenge in front of us with bringing the projects that we need online,” Karen Douglas, an adviser to Newsom, said during the briefing.

The announcement, which came a week after Newsom said the state was open to keeping its remaining nuclear power plant running to maintain reliability, appeared to lay the groundwork for an effort to keep older facilities — some of which are powered by natural gas — online.

Knowing that the switch to solar and wind power generation would lead to far less electricity being generated — and not caring about it — is criminal stupidity. California — one of the original NIMBY states — deserves every brownout, every blackout it gets.