George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 August 2020.]
California’s irregular power blackouts remind us of visits to third world countries. As with our state’s recent and still ongoing water shortages, these power blackouts are totally manmade. We are needlessly doing it to ourselves to achieve political objectives neither known nor shared by most Californians. Our electrical grid is operated by the California Independent Systems Operator or CAISO, the organization that determines the amount of electricity available to the utilities and allocates it across the state. For years we have known that the politically proposed schedule of switching the state to renewables was untenable. Last September, CAISO warned that electricity shortages were possible during a normal heat wave in the near term due to our rapid shift to renewable and less reliable power sources like solar and wind.
The blackouts we’re talking about here are Power Shortage blackouts and not the Public Safety Power Shutoffs to prevent the start of disastrous wildfires by tree branches blown against power lines. The power shortage blackouts are due only to our premature removal of natural gas and nuclear generating stations, and their replacement by sometime wind and solar power. Gov Newsom responded to the increasing public outcry against blackouts by admitting, “We failed to predict and plan for these shortages”, and then followed that with a tautology and a sanguine conclusion – “Our capacity for storage in particular substantially needs to be improved, but I am confident in our capacity to deal with that”, since the state “cannot sacrifice reliability” going forward. And with those pronouncements delivered, we continue with business as usual.
Even Loretta Lynch, former US Attorney General and California Public Utilities Commission president, states that “CAISO doesn’t know how to manage the grid.” Such assessments from Democrat leaders further support that because government has been the incompetent and unreliable watchdog of the power industry, all kinds of games are being played by utilities, middle-men, and generators, as politicians have come up with poorly thought out policies for our state.
The bottom line here is that if we’re to continue progressing toward 100% renewables while providing reliable power to consumers and industry, then we must have fossil or nuclear back-up generating capacity of years, perhaps decades, to come. Pursuing any other policy today is to guarantee increasing power shortage blackouts and their collateral damage indefinitely.
Looking at today’s big picture for California adds power shortages to water shortages to highest fuel costs to regulatory overburdens, housing shortages, ever higher taxes, homeless encampments everywhere, and on and on. The result today is that only the large corporatist enterprises and the very rich are the benefactors of California’s still growing economy, as they are immune to the nation’s top tax and regulatory burdens that are visited primarily on the backs of the remaining middle class. The result is the great California exodus – we export productive workers and businesses, and import the indigent and illegals seeking the loudly promised government handouts that are the common currency for vote buying. The poor, sheltered from the heavy hand of government for all the obvious reasons, are the recipients of ever-increasing redistribution of largesse.
The most plausible and visible reason for this dismal state of affairs is our long-reigning political monopoly. Single party management of public affairs has allowed state regulatory agencies to become both indifferent and incompetent. In all spheres of human activity, competition is the only cure for incompetence, and that applies to single party control of a state’s politics, policies, and administrative oversight. Dominant socialist and communist regimes have demonstrated this truth for over a century now. For decades voters in California have succumbed to the siren song of ever more socialist policies promised and delivered by the Democratic Party. In the final analysis, what we have today we have done to ourselves by ensconcing single-party state and local governments that have effectively shut down all opposing political and policy alternatives.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] The major impediment to the availability of affordable renewable electrical power is the lack of affordable storage of excess power that cannot be ‘banked’ either in storage devices like batteries or heated fluids or pumped water, or sold to current users who would be reliable sources of power when California’s generating system cannot meet the state’s needs. The answer is $20 per kilowatt hour in energy capacity costs. That’s how cheap storage would have to get for renewables to get to 100 percent. That’s around a 90 percent drop from today’s costs. While that is entirely within the realm of the possible, there is wide disagreement over when it might happen; few expect it by 2030. (more here)
Today more people, including productive black families, are moving out of California than moving in. In recent years this net exodus phenomenon has occurred occasionally. For example “From 2015 to 2017, California saw a net loss of between 129,000 and 143,000 residents to domestic migration each year, according to census estimates. ... California has lost more people to other states than it has gained for much of the last two decades, census figures show.” And this year’s census is expected to show a net loss of at least 40K residents. Such losses will be an historical first, since California’s population annual growth rate has averaged a bit under 3% for generations. Nevertheless, the state’s population dynamics remain a subject of debate and disagreement that all depend on how one counts the immigrant and emigrant cohorts. But there is no reasonable debate about where on the productivity scale lie the aggregate of workers and businesses. (more here and here)
California Apocalypto
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/california-apocalypto/#slide-1
Posted by: Bill Tozer | 26 August 2020 at 06:56 PM