Blackouts Matter

The Green New Deal is not just a fantasy bouncing around the empty head of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In California it is everyday life. Given that our states are laboratories for policy, the great state of California has enacted laws that will show us what it’s like to live in our renewable energy future. As of now, the evidence tells us that reducing fossil fuels and eliminating nuclear power leads to rolling blackouts. 

California wants us all to return to the state of nature. It wants to fulfill the leftist wet dream: of repealing the Industrial Revolution. In that it is joined by idiot leaders in Western Europe. Didn’t German Chancellor Angela Merkel decide to shut down her nation’s nuclear power plants, in order to become more dependent on Russian gas? 

This would all be sad if it wasn’t pathetic. As the Western world is involved in a civilizational clash with the nations of Asia, its leftist idiocracy is hard at work on self-sabotage.

Francis Menton explains what is causing California blackouts on his Manhattan Contrarian blog (via Maggie’s Farm):

Yes, there is a strong heat wave going on, at least in certain areas of the state, but it is not unusual in historical context. In fact what is occurring is that California has begun to face the consequences of replacing reliable fossil fuel and nuclear powered electricity with the intermittent renewables, wind and solar. In the evening, approximately 7 to 9 PM, when the sun has set and the heat lingers, and when the demand for electricity for air conditioning reaches a peak, the intermittent wind and solar sources have been producing just about nothing. With insufficient fossil fuel backup, there is not enough power to meet the demand.

In short, we are witnessing the results of almost unbelievable incompetence by the authorities in California. As usual, the equally incompetent and corrupt media are completely giving the authorities a pass in the name of supposedly addressing “climate change.”

For the zealot class it doesn’t matter whether homes have electricity. It doesn’t matter if you are baking in the heat when the air conditioning goes off. What matters is that you believe in climate change.

You see, it’s all about renewables, regardless of whether they can do the job. It’s a little like diversity quotas: you hire people who fulfill the quota regardless of whether they can do the job:

So with temperatures at or above the current levels a regularly recurring phenomenon, why haven’t the authorities planned accordingly and put in place resources to meet the demand? The answer is that under a law enacted in 2018, California has embarked on a crazed program to generate 50% of its electricity from “renewable” sources by 2025, 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2045. Both before and after enactment of that law, California has been ambitiously expanding its capacity for wind and solar generation of electricity.

Given the need to virtue signal, it’s a problem without a solution:

Take out all of the solar and wind capacity, and California has only about 43 GW of capacity to meet demand that could well exceed that on any hot summer day.  And to get to that 43 GW, you would need all other facilities up and running at absolutely full capacity with no scheduled or unscheduled outages, which is not realistic.  Yes, you could try to import some power from the neighboring states, but at times of peak usage they probably need all of their own power.  In short, you have put yourself in a position where regular intentional blackouts are inevitable.  And, as more and more reliable fossil fuel and nuclear facilities get closed in favor of wind and solar, the problem looks set to worsen dramatically over the next several years.

If and when Democrats vote for the Green New Deal, this is our future.