Apparently, Brown learned nothing from the 100% renewable failures of Apple and Google. Both companies said they tried but can’t run on 100% renewable energy. California, known as the “Golden State” will likely become less and less desirable to live in and do business in as electricity prices soar, and grid reliability dwindles. Already, there’s a whole generation of people planning an exodus. I’ll probably be one of them – Anthony
By Valerie Richardson
Citing the “existential threat of climate change,” Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Monday making California the first state to set a goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, despite concerns about increased electricity costs.
“California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change,” Mr. Brown said in his signing message. “This bill, and others I will sign this week, help us go in that direction. But have no illusions, California and the rest of the world have miles to go before we achieve zero-carbon emissions.”
The governor, who was joined at a press conference by Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer, said the measure was needed in order for California to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which the United States exited earlier this year at President Trump’s direction.
“This bill and the executive order put California on a path to meet the goals of Paris and beyond. It will not be easy. It will not be immediate. But it must be done,” said Mr. Brown, a Democrat who leaves office after the November election.
The legislation, Senate Bill 100, speeds up the state’s renewable-energy benchmarks, setting goals of 50 percent electrical-power generation from energy sources such as wind and solar by 2025, and 60 percent by 2030.
The path to 100 percent renewables by 2045 was described as “the most ambitious carbon neutrality commitment of any major economic jurisdiction in the world — of more than 20 countries and at least 40 cities, states and provinces planning to go carbon neutral by mid-century or sooner.”
.@TomSteyer at #SB100 bill signing: This bill is about California’s global leadership…and environmental justice pic.twitter.com/oGFVZJthB0
— Will Simons (@WillSimons_94) September 10, 2018
Mr. Brown signed the measure over the objections of the state’s utility and agricultural sectors, including the Agricultural Council of California, Pacific Gas and Electric, San Diego Gas and Electric, and the Western States Petroleum Association.
Critics have argued that the bill is unrealistic and will compound the state’s problems with rolling brownouts and high energy prices. Natural-gas plants are used to make up for gaps when the sun fails to shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
At the same time, California has grappled with an oversupply of renewable energy, especially at noon when the sun is at its highest, leading the state to offload solar energy to other states.
“We pass all these goals for renewables, but at the same time our families back home will pay the cost with an increase in the electric bills every year as we try to achieve this,” Assemblyman Devon Mathis, a Republican, told the Sacramento Bee.
Meanwhile, environmentalists cheered the bill, with Environment America calling it “the crowning achievement of Governor Brown’s legacy of embracing clean energy and fighting climate change.”
“In California, Democrats and Republicans know climate change is real, it’s affecting our lives right now, and unless we take action immediately — it may become irreversible,” said Democratic state Sen. Kevin de León, the bill’s sponsor, who’s challenging Sen. Dianne Feinstein in November.
“Today, with Governor Brown’s support, California sent a message to the rest of the world that we are taking the future into our own hands — refusing to be the victims of its uncertainty,” he said in a statement.
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Senator Merkely of Oregon is leading the attempt to take this crap national. It seems for him it is not just political, he actually believes in it.
To the people all in other states, don’t let the dems take control of anything … Merkely as chair of any committee would be very scary.
There’s nothing left but to split the State into 8 parts. The problem is nobody else wants LA+OC or SF+SC counties in their fresh start.
I say no to that. That would likely give the Dims up to six more seats in the senate.
The illegals are giving them seats in the House.
Depends on how you [split] it. There’s a lot of red to be found outside of LA and SF. If you split the state in two such that most of the blue area (ie most of the city folk) is in one and most of the red (mainly the rural areas of the state) in the other, that would leave the number of Dems in the senate unchanged but add an additional two Republican Senators.
Good idea, but those big cities will never allow such a division.
SR
sad, but true.
As far as packing up from Cali goes, the best time to leave is when the times are best.
That makes it hard to motivate to do it.
But,
You can sell your house easier for top dollar.
You can get moving services scheduled when you need them.
You can find a job in your new state easier.
Waiting until the national economy is in recession and you’ve lost your job, along with many others, is the worst time to sell a house and move to a new state.
Get out while the gettin’s good.
I also am “committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.”
Fortunately, this requires me to do absolutely nothing, since climate change is not an existential threat.
I hear you, I too am “committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” since “whatever is necessary” is absolutely nothing.
A warming world is a good thing. Life thrives in a warmer world! So if we are contributing greatly to the warming, why would we want to stop what we are doing? and if we aren’t contributing as claimed, then the proposals to change our contribution would be useless, so why bother.
“A warming world is a good thing. Life thrives in a warmer world!”
Tell that to the folks in India. Tell that to the folks in Africa. I don’t think they’ll agree with the blanket statement “warmer is always better!” Oh, and there’s the minor issue of drought. Warmer + less water = NOT better. It’s worse.
The original theory of global warming was that warming = wetter. That theory wasn’t wrong, was it?
Agropedia, speaking of drought in India, says ” severe drought like conditions are the result of climatic imbalances caused by the failure of the monsoon and the meteorologists link this failure to a phenomenon known as El-Nino Southern Oscillation abbreviated as ENSO.”
SR
Steve, as you would know if you read the research, not every single place will respond the same way to AGW. For example, I doubt very much if you could find research, even older papers, that predicted that the interior of Australia will see increasing precipitation as a result of AGW.
As far as ENSO, AGW is having an impact on it. http://web.science.unsw.edu.au/~matthew/Perry_et_al-2017-GRL.pdf
Chris,
Apparently you didn’t read the research before you chose India to talk about, just 3 posts upstream.
SR
Head you lose tails I win , is hardly a valid scientific approach even if it is a favourite of climate ‘science ‘
KNR, I don’t understand your point. Who was it directed to?
SR
Brown and his conspirators are on the take, and well looked after with a generous stream of graft. Which
is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, supplied by the green mafia, so they can bleed the taxpayers and rate payers for billions in subsidies.
Notice how these “public servants” come out of government much wealthier than they went in.
Obummer?
One of many.
Traverse City, Michigan says it is going to be 100% renewable by 2020. They have some large energy uses that cannot run on wind or solar. In the winter when it is cold and there is not wind and the sun is down they will still need fossil fuel from somewhere. They are either lying or deluded.
http://radio.wcmu.org/post/traverse-city-track-be-completely-renewable-2020#stream/0
Firewood is renewable.
Seems they’re at 21 percent renewable now with less than 15 months to go. Godspeed
Nothing stopping them being both.
In fact all progressives lie because they are delusional.
The ACT (Oz equivalent of DC) spouts the same nonsense. They rationalise it by spending money on windfarms generally even if they dont supply the ACT directly. Then they can sort off just imagine that they produce enough green electrons to justify the statement, even if they draw power from the surrounding mostly coal fired State as and when needed.
That’s 100% renewable in City Buildings.
I heard today on the radio that Kevin de Leon said the private sector (meaning eventually, it’ll be paid for by us) is going to pay for this.
James Hansen is on record saying that wind and solar at best will give us a few percent.
Somebody should save any and all quotes where these dems (and Steyer?) say or will say that we’ll have cheaper energy at 100% renewable. My suspicion says they’ll be way wrong.
Since you can’t make money selling them fossil fuels from adjacent states, you could profit instead by selling batteries with a 5-year life and inverters that get 7 years.
Resource Guy
You could make even more profit instead by selling batteries made in China’s polluted fields and air by slave labor with a 1/2-year life and inverters that get 2 years.
When there is no one left in California making $30,000/yr or more the stupidity of this move might finally hit home for some still there.
I bet not…
On the old continent, we have Germany. You friends cope with California. Both future in-vivo scholastic references of failed from extended political corruption social systems. Wonder how those who benefit from the imposed changes, and otherwise it could not be with all vanishing taxpayers money, reward their decision making friends? Bitcoins?
California, like Germany is apparently doing, will just buy the electricity they need to manage their grid from other states. The idiots that elected idiots now in Sacramento will never understand what is really going on. Meanwhile none of the people in the picture will either be around or available to be held accountable.
Germany is a net exporter of electricity.
But its emissions are higher than even the UK. Despite having more nuclear power./ largely because they have to balance renewable energy with brown coal …
Doesnt matter what you nett if
a) you are exporting when others dont want the power (interconnectors get throttled to stop dumping)
b) you dont have the power when you need it (winter doldrums)
You need energy when its need, not when the generators are fortuitously able to generate.
There is some fancy emissions counting on those electricity exports as well. Ready for this the plants aren’t owned by German companies they are owned by Polish companies and as all the electricity is exported the emissions aren’t credited to Germany. The funny thing is when you try to get to the bottom of does Poland get the emissions added to it well it appears not, so we have phantom emissions.
What is even funnier is almost none of these coal fired power stations comply with the EU air pollution emissions standards. It’s like this dark little secret no-one wants to discuss.
You got it – Phantom emissions. Someone aught to have a hard look at the CO2 trading.
How about thoroughly terrifying the warmunists with the fear of PCO2?
Just as with Gold, certificates are not actual possession and are used to control gold prices. Looks like the same fin-logic is at work with PhantomCO2…
WAS once a net energy exporter, enough Bravo-Sierra sandwiches already!
We are often chartered to transport major German industry kingpins and their assistants.
And we learn things in the process, first hand.
Like where and why they indend to move their factories.
Look at this with the view that California will demonstrate to the the Church of Climatologists that fallacy of their dogma. Many people can ONLY learn by their mistakes. They should be far enough along in a few years that many other state legislators will have second thoughts about following the dreamers into bankruptcy.
CA already is paying about $0.20 per kWh, this program will place them ahead of Hawaii. Then the residents will see in their pocketbook and state taxes the effect of paying all of those owning renewable energy rebates, tax relief and subsidies. Never could understand to logic of paying higher taxes to pay more for electricity for a meager tax-break. Then there is the fact that home prices will go up (till there’s no one buying them), Home insurance will go up, property taxes will go up and the state will still be in the red.
I wonder if they will require that of the electricity they import from Idaho and Wyoming.
I can’t imagine the costs getting the power to California, much less the markup for being “green”.
I know sometime between 2005 – 2010 residents of Green River WY were told they would be charged the same amount as CA because the power companies were selling to CA at a premium and tried to get the same premium from the locals. The local power companies were essentially told, gouge CA all you want based on supply and demand, but local customers come first and had to come up with a tiered pricing system for local customer versus CA customers. At least that is what I recall from a conversation with my father in law who sat on several company boards in western WY, including the Community College.
What does it take to override a Governor’s veto in California. Not at all clear that Gavin will be elected to continue the states demise.
Given that we cannot count hydro above 30 MW:
http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-hydropower-renewable-energy.html
And 85% of all hydroelectric dams in CA are above 30 MW:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_California#Hydro-electric
Looks like Moonbeam just took 6100 MW of generation off the table. Way to go, Moonbeam!
In the Bill’s text, utilities can count large hydro in their mix, unlike the old renewable standards. I would like to know how those utilities with a large dam mix plan to handle the ups and downs of wet and dry years. There is almost a factor of 2 between large hydro generation in dry vs wet years.
Whatever happened to that old principle that a President should not support legislation which would bind a successor? Even my Rotary club would ensure that the next club president did not inherit handcuffs, but that sensible principle seems not to apply to Jerry.
Via con dios, amigos.
You realize what this means, don’t you.
The houses of the holy in Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley will be required to install diesel generators with huge reserve tanks for the power the grid will not be able to deliver.
Fossil fuel consumption will go up, air quality will go down, and noise levels will increase.
A lose lose proposition all around, and another trophy for the law of unintended consequences.
Ol’ Brownout looking to sustain his legacy as the biggest idiot in CA.
Mr Brown will be 107 in 2045, so my assumption is that he is not planning on actually delivering this
Just cut them off from the national grid. Let them find a way to dump their excess renewables, and leave them as dark as North Korea at night.
Doesn’t matter; virtue signaled.
This is more virtue signaling than real. SB 100 has a clause about costs to consumers:
“(2) Prevent unreasonable impacts to electricity, gas, and water customer rates and bills resulting from implementation of this section, taking into full consideration the economic and environmental costs and benefits of renewable energy and zero-carbon resources.”
Governor Brown should be asked how many square miles of land he intends to assign to Wind, solar and biomass energy production in order to provide California with its 100% CO2 free energy needs. Additionally what level of energy storage in “Mega Watt Days” will be required to ensure continuity of supply.
2045 — that should be about the time the high-speed train between San Francisco and Los Angeles is completed. It’s currently “projected” to be operational in 2033, but that projection has not been found to be “robust with high confidence” in peer-reviewed literature. On the assumption that California construction projections are about as accurate as the climate models (but on the low side), I am counting on an actual construction time of just about double the official estimate.
So, will the new train run totally on renewable energy? Will Elon Musk build a battery big enough to keep those trains on schedule in the face of extended low wind/solar production? Or will California count on the Smart Grid to cut off everyone else in the state so the trains can run?
Or maybe by 2045 there won’t be anyone using the train, since it won’t take them out of the state.
The only way to get those US trains built is call China. Just look at the soon completed I-95 interstate, 60 years late because of an 8-mile stretch!
One site engineer noted they had plenty time to develop whole new technologies!