See, I would usually tag “or something” on to a headline like that, but, I actually agree with the climate change part, just in a different way
What caused California’s rolling blackouts? Climate change and poor planning
California suffered its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years because energy planners didn’t take climate change into account and didn’t line up the right power sources to keep the lights on after sundown, according to a damning self-evaluation released Tuesday by three state agencies.
The rotating power outages didn’t last long and affected only a small fraction of the state’s 40 million people. Just under half a million homes and businesses lost power for as little as 15 minutes and as long as two and a half hours on Aug. 14, with another 321,000 utility customers going dark for anywhere from eight to 90 minutes the following evening.
But officials should have been prepared for the climate-driven extreme heat that caused electricity demand to soar and briefly left the nation’s largest state without sufficient power supplies, the state’s Energy Commission, Independent System Operator and Public Utilities Commission acknowledged in a preliminary “root cause analysisâ€Â demanded by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The immediate cause of the power shortages was the heat storm, which saw California experience four of its five hottest August days in the last 35 years, the analysis found. Temperature records were shattered across the American West, limiting the Golden State’s ability to make up for its energy deficit by importing electrons from other states.
See, this was all caused by climate change, or, more specifically, the climate cultists who believe in anthropogenic climate change who are slapping up all sorts of alternative energy sources while shuttering coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear, leaving the state with the inability to generate enough power when it’s needed, and even having to import power from surrounding states.
Further, why were Californian’s using energy anyhow? If they believe in ‘climate change’ then they should have forgone the use of air conditioning and other energy intensive appliances. Look, there’s no doubt we are in a warm period, something that happens off and on during the Holocene. Averages are made by having cooler times and warmer times. This is a warmer year for the west coast. Not as warm as the 1930’s, though. If Californian’s want to be climate cultists, let them deal with the results of their beliefs.
State agencies failed to adequately plan for that type of heat event despite knowing how quickly the world is heating up, the report concluded. They also failed to direct electricity providers to buy sufficient power supplies to cover the evening hours when solar panels go offline. And they created complex energy market mechanisms that masked the inadequacies.
If you have to purchase energy because you cannot get enough from your solar panels, well, that just proves that solar is not ready for prime time.
Officials have consistently said that intermittent power sources such as solar panels and wind turbines didn’t cause the rolling blackouts. But gas-burning power plants that can fire up when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing have been shutting down in recent years, and California has largely failed to replace them with cleaner alternatives such as lithium-ion batteries.
In other words, they know that solar and wind cannot provide enough power. Nuff said.
Hurricane Delta (Category 3-4) is likely to slam Louisiana on Friday.
Wow, a hurricane…during HURRICANE SEASON!
Sounds suspicious, all right.
Yet the Pyrite State is trying to go ahead with plans to require that all new personal vehicles sold after 2035 be plug in electric cars, which will lead to around a 35% increase in electric power consumption, all in a state which puts severe restrictions on power plant construction.
In California, 2 + 2 = 4¾, apparently.
Whether
global warmingclimate change is man made or not, all of the proposals to fightglobal warmingclimate change are (supposedly) designed not to cool the planet, but limitglobal warmingclimate change to a 1.5º C increase in the temperature. Even if all of the claims of the warmunists are completely accurate, the demand for sparktricity for air conditioning will increase, just as demands for electricity for other things is increasing as well, because the left coasters also want to ban things like gas furnaces and water heaters and stoves.Maybe I got California math wrong; maybe it’s really 2 + 2 = 5½.
The state of my birth — yes, I was born in Oakland — is a state built for long distance travel. With a lot of geographic room, the population have expanded outward in ways with which the eastern parts of the country are simply unfamiliar, leading to the huge highway systems around Los Angeles, San Diego, and really all of the cities up and down the coast.
More, urban development has sprawled eastward, toward the desert, and the state has Bakersfield and Stockton and Palm Springs and others in places where air conditioning is needed in January. I lived in Antioch, in the San Joaquin Valley, through the second grade, and the place — which was a relatively small town in the 1950s but is ridiculous now — never saw snow, and was boiling hot in the summer. It’s about the same latitude as San Francisco, but too far inland to enjoy the cooling breezes from the Pacific.
I never saw snow until we moved to Portland, Maine, and boy that was one heck of a transition!
“State agencies failed to adequately plan for that type of heat event despite knowing how quickly the world is heating up, the report concluded. ”
Exactly. If it is your contention that Global Warming / Climate Change / (Insert Scary Name here) is happening, you are obligated to plan for it, not whine about it.
Interesting how rechargeable batteries are touted as a source of power. Maybe GoalZero is to blame since they call their battery packs generators. Naturally, they say the batteries will be recharged when power usage is low, like overnight. Wait, solar can’t recharge them in the dark. I guess the wind will take care of it. Of course there’s no chance that power dependent business will shift their operations to non-peak times to both save money and decrease the chances of a brown out eating up that “excess” battery charging capacity. What if the wind doesn’t blow?