Rolling blackouts have forced California to defend its ambitious plans for sustainable energy.
In recent days, Republican politicians have blamed California for its efforts to curb fossil fuel consumption and phase out nuclear energy. The outages were imposed on a rotating basis over the weekend, amid a severe heat wave that was lessened by climate change.
“This week in California there were rolling blackouts because the Radical Democrats have imposed impossible restrictions on energy production,” President Trump said Thursday during remarks in Old Forge, Pennsylvania.
Trump has, too tried to link the misery of California with the plans for climate policy of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Biden, in its revised climate plans unveiled in July, sets a goal to eliminate carbon emissions from the power sector by 2035. That’s even more ambitious than California’s goal of 100% carbon – free power by 2045.
However, California officials said renewable energy was not the cause of the state’s rolling blackouts.
“We have already taken many steps to integrate these resources, but we clearly need to do more,” the leaders of the California Public Utilities Commission, the California Independent System Operator, and the California Energy Commission wrote in a statement. letter Wednesday to Govin Newsom, a Democrat. “Clean energy and reliable energy are not conflicting goals.”
CAISO, the network operator, said it took advantage of the outages because it did not have enough power in the system – a combination of two natural gas installations going offline, a reduction in wind energy, and a sharp drop-off of solar power during the evenings, according to initial review.
Despite the bitter climate policy, it threatens to overlook the challenges facing energy experts, saying California will have to cope as it moves faster towards sustainability, including long-term plans to ensure the state does not have sufficient resources on its side.
“It’s absolutely politicized, and everyone on all sides of it is digging their heels a little too much,” said Alex Trembath, deputy director at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center that supports the development of clean energy technologies to tackle climate change. .
California officials, politicians and resource planners should not take sides as “insist and promise there will be no problems with the energy transition,” Trembath added. Instead, they should “be honest about the challenges that come with a significant statewide infrastructure turnover and the technological transition, and apply appropriately.”
One problem for California, however, is that power outages are jeopardizing the confidence of the people in the state.
‘It’s the fifth largest economy in the world, and otherwise it’s the most innovative economy in America. You just can’t have blackouts. It just can not happen, ”said the former California Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat who led the state the last time California underwent rotary blackouts in 2001, brought on by the Enron scandal.
“We need to err on the side of caution to ensure we have more than enough reserves” to protect life and existence, Davis told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
Davis, who as governor signed the first law of California and the nation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, said he was “totally committed” to the clean energy transition, but he warned California officials should keep electrical reliability in mind. .
“If we can get there by going all green, then I mean we can build a suitable backup capacity that is all green, I’m for that,” he said. “If we can’t all be green about it, we have to work with what we have.”
The California networking industry says the problem is not that the state has too much sustainability, but that it does not have enough. Steve Berberich, CEO of CAISO, has called for a greater build-up of sustainable and energy storage to not balance it out. An abundance of renewable energy, he said, can be used to charge batteries that can be used when the power supply is stressed.
“You need to add company energy to charge the storage,” Berberich told reporters Wednesday. “That should be part of the conversation in both the short and long term.”
He sees a role for all types of storage, including long-term and seasonal storage. The latter would allow California to avoid having the excess solar energy in the spring and instead store it for future use, he said.
However, that storage technology must first be viable and commercialized. In the meantime, energy experts say California officials need to plan for the long term – by bringing in much more capacity, especially to replace gas and nuclear plant pensions, and diversify its low-carbon off-solar portfolio. energy.
“What we really knew was missing was a plan on how to get the right mix of sustainable sources online,” said Danielle Mills Osborn, director of the California Wind Energy Association’s chapter in California.
California’s grid today is built around conventional sources, such as natural gas, hydropower, and imports from other states, Osborn said. Thus, the grid, energy policy and the design of electricity market must all be redesigned to support sustainable energy, she added.
The California Public Utilities Commission has already taken some small steps, directing 3,300 megawatts of new resources to enter the state online in 2023. The first of those resources will come online next year, according to the letter from the agencies.
Osborn expects these extra megawatts to all be sustainable, but she said it’s just a first step in terms of the capacity California needs to plan. The state would also need to build a more diverse set of sustainable resources outside of the sun, including onshore and offshore wind, as well as transmission lines to transport location-dependent sustainability to population centers, she added.
However, building up renewable energy and storage capacity could be more expensive than other zero-carbon sources that can generate power 24/7, such as nuclear energy and natural gas with carbon capture and storage, Trembath said. This is because a more than renewable expansion requires more money for resources that can sit low, and increase potential rates for customers.
Davis, the former governor of California, recommended Newsom bring together the three energy agencies, academia, Silicon Valley, and other energy experts in the state to formulate a plan, both to identify and address the state’s climate goals. ensuring that the state has adequate backup in emergency situations such as the intense heatwave it experienced over the weekend.
“People expect the lights to go on when they turn on the switch. They do not think the state is giving them an advantage when they supply electricity. They expect it, ”Davis said.
“Decision-makers have to deal with that,” the former California governor added. “You want to go out of your way to make sure you’ve thought it through in a worst-case scenario.”
