Tenchu's Thoughts: California's Greenouts
WSJ - Why California Keeps Having Blackouts
This article is behind a paywall, of course, but in short, California is repeating the same mistakes from 2001 when there were rolling blackouts, skyrocketing prices for wholesale energy, and market manipulation (remember Enron?).
Back then the culprit was deregulation gone horribly wrong.
Now it's the transition to "green energy" gone horribly wrong.
Specifically it's the transition from renewable energy that has to happen every evening as solar power fades away. From the article:
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On many days, California’s grid operator now has to find 10,000 to 15,000 megawatts of replacement power—sometimes 25% to 50% of what it needs to keep the lights on—during a three-hour period as solar, and to a lesser degree, wind power, falls off.
California often relies on imported power from other states to help fill its void. But when a historic heat wave gripped the Western U.S. this month, the state struggled to find a way to replace up to 8,000 megawatts of disappearing renewable energy each evening. It came up short on some days by as much as half that amount and had to call for rolling blackouts on Aug. 14 and 15.
The events, which have occurred as the state is also fighting a multitude of wildfires, and millions are hunkering at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, have coined a new word in California, used by critics of the state’s renewable energy emphasis: “greenout.”
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Just goes to show you how often California leads the way in solutions that either don't work or are implemented the wrong way.
Yet the renewable energy advocates remain in denial and are hoping that battery technology will help fill the void. Fine, but until someone invents a better coppertop, you don't shut down fossil fuel generation in state just to meet arbitrary carbon emission goals. That's pointless except to virtue-signal to the entire world how "green" California is.
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