Green California Faces Dark Future
By Paul Homewood
The blackouts that hit California over the past few days exposed the fragility of one of the most-expensive and least-reliable electric grids in North America. They also show that California’s grid can’t handle the load it has now, much less accommodate the enormous amount of new demand that would have to be met if the state attempts to “electrify everything.”
The push to electrify everything would prohibit the use of natural gas in buildings, electrify transportation, and require the grid to run solely on renewables (and maybe, a dash of nuclear). But attempting to electrify the entire California economy will further increase the cost of energy at the very same time that the state’s electricity rates are soaring. That will result in yet-higher energy costs for low- and middle-income Californians.
Over the last year or so, the Sierra Club, along with the Rocky Mountain Institute and other groups, have been pushing local governments to prohibit natural gas use and force consumers to rely solely on electricity. In July 2019, Berkeley became the first city in the United States to pass a ban on natural gas hookups in new buildings. Since then, about 31 other local governments in California have passed restrictions or bans on the use of natural gas. Last month, the Sierra Club gleefully announced that the city of Piedmont had committed “to going gas-free.”Recommended For You
These restrictions are being labeled as an essential part of California’s efforts to slash its greenhouse gas emissions. But in practice, they are regressive energy taxes that will hurt low- and middle-income consumers and in doing so, exacerbate California’s poverty problem.
California may be known for Silicon Valley and the beauty of its mountains and beaches, but it also has the highest poverty rate of any state in America. When accounting for the cost of living, 18.1% of the state’s residents are living in poverty. For perspective, that means that roughly 7 million Californians — a population about the size of Arizona’s — are living in poverty.
As I show in a recent report for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Californians are also paying some of America’s highest energy prices. For instance, the average cost of residential electricity in California last year was 19.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is 47% higher than the national average of about 13 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Restrictions on natural gas are popular in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. Municipalities in Silicon Valley that have passed restrictions include Cupertino, the home of Apple; Mountain View (Alphabet); and Menlo Park (Facebook). Those restrictions may be politically popular, but the regressive effects of the electrify everything push cannot be ignored. Banning the direct use of natural gas for cooking, home heating, water heaters, and clothes dryers, will force Californians to instead use electricity which, on an energy-equivalent basis, costs four times as much as natural gas.
Proponents of all-electric buildings claim that natural gas can be replaced by electricity. But when … [+] ROBERT BRYCE, FROM EIA DATA.
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In addition to the high electricity prices, California’s low-income ratepayers could be on the hook for costs related to shuttering the natural gas grid. An April report by the California Energy Commission called “The Challenge of Retail Gas in California’s Low-Carbon Future,” found that banning natural gas in homes and businesses will result in “large reductions in gas demand” that could result in “unsustainable increases in gas rates and customer energy bills.” That, in turn, would have the biggest impact on “customers who are least able to switch away from gas, including renters and low-income residents.”
The bans and restrictions on natural gas are being implemented at the same time California’s electricity rates are soaring. Last year, the California Public Advocates Office published a study on electricity rate trends. It found that due to “energy efficiency and distributed generation, [electricity] sales have been stagnant or decreasing statewide for the past several years…with lower sales, the same revenue requirement is collected over fewer kilowatt-hours, resulting in higher per kilowatt-hour rates.” In other words, as wealthier ratepayers add solar panels to their roofs and use more efficient appliances, the utilities are selling less energy. However, the utilities must still cover all of their ongoing costs, which must be allocated on fewer kilowatt-hours. That means they have to charge more for each kilowatt-hour since they are selling fewer of them.
The same report found that between 2009 and 2019, baseline rates—that is, the minimum charge assessed to each customer for basic electricity service—“increased at an alarming rate.” Over that decade, San Diego Gas & Electric’s baseline rate jumped by 106%, or more than five times as fast as the Consumer Price Index. PG&E’s baseline rate jumped by 85%, and Southern California Edison’s rate increased by 48%.
Those electric rates are certain to continue rising. In 2018, California lawmakers imposed a mandate that requires the state’s electric utilities to procure at least 60% of their electricity from renewables by 2030, and to be producing 100% “zero-carbon” electricity by 2045. Achieving those targets will require the utilities to spend tens of billions of dollars on new high-voltage transmission lines. The state’s utilities must also billions more to upgrade their distribution system. Two years ago, the state was hit by a series of deadly wildfires, some of which were ignited by power lines.
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As an aside, it has been widely claimed that climate change driven heatwaves have increased demand for electricity beyond capacity.
Last week, demand was peaking at around 44 GW. However, the official data shows that this was well below the historical high of 50 GW needed in 2006:
http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html
Yesterday, with demand peaking at 43 GW, California’s grid was still heavily reliant on natural gas and imports:
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
California is laying itself open to predatory raids by adjoining states -or further afield — to persuade industry to leave the California for places offering cheaper utilities. Not unlike ourselves and the Chinese who offer cheaper labour and raw materials. .
NetZero + CovidZero=WealthZero
Good old Marxism working its magic spell again.
The greentards say that the problem was a shortage of gas generation, having closed 5000 MgW of gas generation since 2013. You can’t fix stupid.
The unavailability of power from the decomissioned gas generation systems is only a secondary cause; the primary cause is that the renewable production that “replaced” it can’t be relied on to be available at any given time, and there’s nothing to back it up when it isn’t there.
Re: “The push to electrify everything”:
Also emotional anti fossil fuel activism forced a rushed conversion to new energy technologies that were still in development and not yet ready for the market.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/18/energy-storage/
Smithsonian channel has a series looking at the UK from the air which also comes to the ground to show features and is quite interesting. Covering the North on an episode I watched a couple of nights back it looked at a coal mining museum and then as it panned up to show some windmills behind the old mine buildings, the voiceover (done by a Brit) talked of moving forward with energy production. I couldn’t help but laugh as we regress to windmills that were rendered obsolete by coal over 200 years ago.
I have no sympathy for Californians but I do feel sorry for surrounding Republican states that are being polluted by communist democrats fleeing the shitpile they have created in California. And worse, because they are morons they are trying to inflict the same thing in these states. Donald needs to build a wall around California to stop them escaping.
Great comment. Strong language maybe but that is what is needed in this situation.
They used to say about Oregon: “A great State to visit but please go home, don’t stay.” Now it seems that underpopulated, wild, Oregon has a surplus of even wilder Democrats demonstrating, rioting, looting and setting fire to it’s buildings. Or are they just Bolshie tourists?
Or maybe just a great state to drive through on your way to somewhere else. Did that 4 times. There’s a lot of there there.
This is what happens when you put ideology before pragmatism.
California has the ideal climate, politically it seems, for producing watermelons.
As an aside, I stay in California every year for a month or 2 and I have noted some differences with the UK inevitably. One of the things I noticed is that washing is always dried by driers despite California having a very dry climate. I can’t recall ever seeing washing being out on a line.
You also can’t escape the fact that Californians, and maybe the rest of the States for all I know, use energy much more than we see in Europe. Everything is electric and nobody seems to turn lights off. Just how they will cope when the electricity fails, as it will, stretches my imagination.
Drying your laundry outdoors is hi-tech use of solar and wind. It should be highly recommended by the green community. Californians also waste water when they use garden hoses to blow leaves off of their well-kept lawns in the LA area.
I believe there are byelaws against clotheslines in some parts of California. This seems ludicrous, so I can’t be sure I didn’t dream it.
“washing is always dried by driers despite California having a very dry climate ”
Very dry climates often have much fine dust (soil particles) in the air.
I think you answered your own question.
CA likely has a rule that regulates clotheslines out of existence. Prop. 65, cancer causing?
If you’re going to use natural gas for energy, it is more efficient to burn it in the house directly – than inefficiently converting it into electricity, inefficiently transmitting by wires, and then inefficiently converting it into heat.
“The push to electrify everything would prohibit the use of natural gas in buildings, electrify transportation…”
The transport industry was the first to take the big hit imposed by the coronavirus lockdown. Lowering emissions ASAP by prohibiting the use of carbon fuels can only make the social and economic distress even worse. PV vehicles for world-wide transportation are a long way off.
All that should be obvious but it isn’t.
Perhaps I can refer readers to Jeremy Warner’s excellent article in wednesday’s Telegraph? Although written with a broadly economic focus, it nevertheless seems entirely relevant:
“Ruin beckons, but our ship of fools does not seem to know it”
“In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates describes a ship on which the sailors mutiny and try to pilot the vessel with no knowledge of “the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his [a pilot’s] art”. Success on this “Ship of Fools” is defined not by having the skills to navigate the vessel but only by the ability to persuade others that such skills aren’t actually necessary and that the job can be done regardless.
The story is intended as an allegory on the downsides of democracy, of the danger that in such a system of government, ignorant fools elect persuasive fools and are then led to ruin. After the Government’s latest shambolic, Covid-related failing, it seems an appropriate description of today’s political leadership.
I’ve used it before, admittedly, but make no apology for repetition; each day brings further confirmation of its legitimacy. No doubt much of the blame for the myriad misjudgments lies with the incompetence of the public sector and its accompanying quangocracy, the latter seemingly deliberately created to absolve the politicians from responsibility for day-to-day management. However, the fish rots from the head. Buck-passing is itself a symptom of poor leadership.”
The lack of engineering knowledge among our political masters on both sides of the Atlantic is telling. Heaven help all of us if the so-called Democrats are elected and the USA and EU conspire to blackmail China and others over their use of fossil fuels. What chance will climate sceptics have then?
On a visit to California in 2007, I experienced my first rolling ‘Brown Out’. That’s the name the locals give to power cuts due to air conditioning and refrigeration use during a hot day that the power company cannot cope with. The utility cuts the power district by district for a couple of hours at a time in order to preserve food safety.
Residents in parts of the State have been geared up for these ‘Brown Outs’ for some time with stocks of candles, torches and personal generators, even, to protect the contents of home or business refrigerators and freezers.
I’m not sure of the current situation (no pun intended), in 2016 there was a push to ban fossil-fuelled back-up generators (BUGS):
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/big-changes-proposed-for-demand-response-in-california
The article refers to “demand response”, a euphemism for blackout, as if it were an unavoidable fact of life in California like the weather which it is when power generation is mostly weather dependent.
*We’re gonna need some bigger batteries”…
https://www.power-technology.com/news/vistra-battery-moss-landing-capacity-us-california-solar-energy-storage/
Maybe, but they don’t charge up by themselves, they need power input — as everyone knows, except when it comes to ‘climate change’.
That why we need nuclear – to charge up the batteries! 🙂
Done by the indoctrinated generation.
Indoctrinated in a scam since Gore and Hanson.
During the miner’s strike in the UK in 1984, at least one coal-fired power station had stockpiled 18 months of coal. Sizewell B nuclear power station is refueled once every 18 months. Robust and reliable.
We now have a professor of Political Science offering an opinion on how climate change has created the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth in Death Valley: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/californias-disasters-are-a-warning-climate-change-is-here/615610/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-weekly-newsletter&utm_content=20200823&silverid-ref=NjU4NTUxODM0NTI0S0
Green energy. Pick one.