Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Pirate’s Cove, Whores and Ale and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!
Now then: Energy policy and environment commentator Michael Shellenberger has weighed in on the Democrat Party’s energy policies, and it’s worth reading. Excerpt:
In many respects, the Biden-Harris plan is even more aggressive than California’s. “The plan is very bold,” Leah Stokes of the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the Financial Times. “There is no [US] state right now that has a target this ambitious.”
But California’s big bet on renewables, and shunning of natural gas and nuclear, is directly responsible for the state’s blackouts and high electricity prices.
“We will be forced today to ask utilities to cut off power to millions today, and tomorrow, and beyond,” said Stephen Berberich, the President and CEO of California’s Independent System Operator, CAISO, on a Monday morning conference call. “Demand will greatly exceed supply.”
The immediate cause of California’s blackouts is a mismatch between electricity supply and demand. Higher temperatures have led to greater demand for air conditioning. And California has less electricity, including from wind energy, available.
And yet, while California is hot, weather conditions are well within the normal range for the state’s summer weather.
The underlying reason blackouts are occurring is because California lacks reliable, in-state supply. And the reason for that is California has been closing both natural gas and nuclear power plants.
“People wonder how we made it through the heat wave of 2006,” said Berberich. “The answer is that there was a lot more generating capacity in 2006 than in 2020…. We had San Onofre [nuclear plant] of 2,200 MW, and a number of other plants, totalling thousands of MW not there today.”
California has been descending into madness for at least a couple of decades now, but the Groper Joe/Roundheel Harris ticket intends to take this insanity nationwide, at least on energy policy. Along with all of their other insane, intrusive, statist policy proposals, of course; fortunately I still think their chances of actually winning the election are pretty low.
Even so. This insistence on wind/solar and so forth, even in the face of rolling blackouts, seems another facet of a problem the Left (and, honestly, more than a few on the Right) have – the idea that they can make some desired outcome a reality by believing in it really really hard. But physics is a harsh mistress; believing really really hard won’t help people who are in the middle of a rolling blackout, who lose their refrigerators and air conditioning in the middle of a heat wave.
I don’t doubt that many of the people that buy this “green energy” horseshit have good intentions. But we all know which road is paved with those.
