It is very far outside West and California’s electricity grid is under enormous voltage. The state’s first deliberate rolling blackouts since its 2001 energy crisis hit Friday. Tuesday’s expected demand for electricity is likely to reach the record reached in 2006. Even if it were not for substantial imports of electricity from coal and gas fireplaces in other western states, it would be much worse.
California’s energy travels come at a reduced time for the Democratic national presidential card of former Vice President Joe Biden and California sen. Kamala Harris.
Biden’s past energy policy was fairly standard fare for old-school Democrats: massive government spending and regulation to pick winners and losers – the $ 535 million Solyndra collapse is illustrative. His current plan is more the same, he spends $ 2 trillion, some of which will go to buy the silent acceptance of Big Oil.
By comparison, Harris’s policies are a radical departure, and, as can be seen in California, fail when confronted with the real world. Harris collaborated with New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the multi-trillion-dollar Green New Deal, an energy plan so ambitious that it proposed a continental network of high-ranking government trains while setting up America’s commercial air fleet.
Similarly, the high-speed project in California from the 380-mile San Francisco to Los Angeles route has been cut to a 140-mile Bakersfield to Merced run that few will ever drive, because the cost of the project dropped from $ 33, 6 billion to $ 98.1 billion. The train would run on electricity – if it were available.
The electricity problem in California is simple. Energy policy requires ever-increasing amounts of wind and solar energy, but electricity must be generated at the moment it is consumed. The wind does not always blow – especially when it is hot – and the sun does not always shine. Therefore, California needs to import large amounts of power from the 13 other states (along with Canada and Mexico) into the Western Interconnection if necessary to keep the lights on and run the air conditioners.
In 2018, nearly a third of retail electricity was imported into California – with coal, gas and nuclear energy in the mix. California’s environmental virtues have a limit. But coal-fired power plants in Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming may not be much longer to sell power to California during a heat wave. There are two reasons for this.
First, the Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger passed a law in 2006 banning renewal of contracts to import coal-burning electricity. This law was later extended to cover municipal utilities, such as the behemoth LA Department of Water and Power.
Second, California’s aggressive subsidies and mandates for solar and wind energy have often led to a plethora of very cheap (but very unjustified) power flooding the Western grid. Under the rules of public utilities of most states, the lowest cost electricity must first be purchased, often low-threshold – but more expensive to operate – coal and gas plants.
This has put significant financial pressure on reliable fossil fuel plants, many of which have closed, often decades before their planned shutdown dates. While these reliable generator sets have shot up, it has complicated the ability of network operators to not balance it.
When an electric grid becomes unbalanced between energy supply and power demand, bad things happen quickly. Lifting rollers can be a way to prevent physical damage to the components of the network, such as transformers, powerlines, and even generators.
The Green New Deal has been criticized as an unworkable theoretical concept, long on marketing and thin on planning. California has actually come closer to the Green New Deal than anywhere else, and Harris has been a vocal supporter of both.
The environmental location holds California up as the avatar of America’s energy era. For decades, the elected officials and regulators of the Golden State have been giving a lasting energy boost. Targets for sustainable electricity have been accelerated, with the state targeting 33 percent of its power from sustainable sources, mostly solar and wind, this year, moving to 60 percent of its electricity from sustainable by 2030. By 2045, all electricity should be of California come from carbon-free sources.
This attempt does not come cheap. For having the privilege of electricity when it has been available in recent days, Californians pay 61 percent above the national average for electricity.
As an example of national energy policy in the Biden-Harris administration, California law makes it a crime to violate its Public Utility Act, while stipulating that the intent of the law is “… to ensure evolution. of the ISO (California’s Independent System Operator – the entity that manages the California grid) in a regional organization to promote the development of regional markets for electricity transmission in the western states. “
In plain English, this means that California will dictate how the Western network works, the other 13 states will be damned. While California’s electricity policy is metastasizing to its neighbors, networking will continue to be more difficult.
In an effort to solve this problem on its own, California is increasingly turning to batteries to conserve power. This is especially necessary for wine energy, which, in most places around the world, generally produces more overnight wine when demand is lower. But despite spending billions on batteries, the state can still only store enough power to keep California energized for a few minutes.
Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. But unlike computing, which is governed by Moore’s Law, with the capacity of computers doubling every two years, batteries are limited by chemistry and physics. They have to do physical work while computers only manipulate 1s and 0s.
For example, the 890,000 people of San Francisco would need an $ 8 billion battery farm weighing about 380,000 tons to prevent frequent blackouts if it were to go 100 percent renewable by 2045, as in California law. The cost would be about $ 16,000 per household. It is important to note that, after being drained for over 12 hours, on a windless, cold winter day, power would then not be available in subsequent days if the state relied on such batteries.
Meanwhile, California is making “cooling centers” available to vulnerable populations (so much for banning mass gatherings to prevent COVID transmission), while network operators are seeking all the watt power they can get their hands on to prevent more widespread blackouts .
This has led to push-backs from Harris’ environmentalists, who are complaining that older gas-powered plants need to stay offline because of the environmental damage they cause to fish and marine life. Yet people here are in danger. California’s last major heatwave, in 2006 before environmental policy really took off, resulted in about 140 deaths – without rolling blackouts.
For Harris and the environment left, fish are to be rescued and people are for ferrets.
Chuck DeVore is Vice President of National Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and served from 2004 to 2010 in the California State Legislature.
