Chris White Tech Reporter August 17, 2020 8:57 PM ET
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday that the state’s transition away from fossil fuels is a contributing factor to the state’s rolling blackouts.
The elimination of fossil fuel products as a major form of energy production and the shift to solar power and other forms of green energy has led to what Newsom called “gaps” in the energy grid’s reliability, the Democratic governor said during a press conference Monday.
Newsom addressed the sudden loss of power many Californians experienced Saturday and Sunday during high temperatures.
“We are not backing off on that commitment,” Newsom said, referring to California’s push to transition away from oil and gas.
“In the process of the transition, in the process of shutting down, understandably, the desire and need to shut down polluting gas plants … comes the need to have more insurance, comes the need to recognize that there have been — by definition, demonstrably, in the last few days and what we expect over the next few days — gaps in terms of that reliability,” Newsom said.
The state’s energy system operator — California Independent System Operator (CAISO) — issued a Stage 3 emergency for the first time in 20 years, per a press statement CAISO posted Friday. Many citizens were required to conserve as much energy as possible while others were subject to rotating power outages due to heavy strain on the energy grid, CNN reported Monday.
“Collectively, energy regulators failed to anticipate this event and to take necessary actions to ensure reliable power to Californians,” Newsom wrote in a letter Monday to CAISO, CNN reported. “This cannot stand.” (RELATED: Here’s How State Regulators Played A Role In California’s Rolling Blackouts, Wildfires)
CAISO attributed the blackouts to the unexpected loss of a 470 megawatt power plant, as well as a loss of nearly 1,000 megawatts from wind power. The nonprofit’s emergency order allowed utilities to use backup energy to relieve pressure on a grid that relies primarily on a mixture of wind and solar power, along with hydro power.https://aff529feed2f91a49f5b59a2778570f0.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
“Near certain we’ll be forced to ask the utilities to cut off power to millions today to balance supply and demand. Today and tomorrow and perhaps beyond,” Steve Berberich, president and CEO of CAISO, said in a statement Monday before noting that the nonprofit corporation has repeatedly warned of a reliability gap and that the state will have to increase energy production.
Newsom said Monday that the transition from fossil fuels is a “moral and ethical imperative as it relates to the kind of world we’re going to leave, the kind of state and nation we’re going to leave for our kids and grandkids.”
Sierra Club and other activists met informally with Newsom’s administration in 2019 to discuss dramatically slashing the state’s oil production, The Los Angeles Times reported in April of that year.
“I’m taking a very pragmatic look at it, in scoping this,” Newsom told The LA Times in a 2019 interview. “It’s also an inclusive scoping because it includes people in the industry, that have jobs; communities that are impacted from an environmental justice prism but also from an economic justice prism.”
California has 72,000 oil wells and the oil industry supports 368,000 jobs in the Golden State, according to the Western States Petroleum Association.
Aren’t there any politicians in CA pushing back against these failing energy policies?
No. CA is controlled by the Dems and Dem politicians dare not contradict the Party line on something like this they’re done for.
BTW the smart money, both private and Corporate, is getting out of Dodge. Tech isn’t so smart so they haven’t started moving yet but I would bet that sooner or later even they’ll catch on. Toyota pulled up stakes and Elon Musk is in the process of doing so. More, many more, to follow.
Hollywood is now a slum. The parks and beaches of LA are unsafe.
“Tech isn’t so smart so they haven’t started moving yet but I would bet that sooner or later even they’ll catch on.”
Facebook and Google put their server farms in Oregon, not California.
Silicon Valley, Alphabet, Google HA, etc, etc, etc..
Google, Alphabet, Apple, Hewlett Packard, etc, have their global HQs in California and then of course there is Silicon Valley. I didn’t say anything about servers.
Gov. Newsom is a fairly good speaker, using political correct and woke words, as most successful politicians do. During Q&A session in the video, he mastered very well to answer the soft short questions, in a distractible way, with a repeat of his speech moments ago. This is what most politicians do. They arrange meetings with their like-minded and, as a solution they run the blame-game on those not at the round-table and those who has to do the actual footwork (the technicians and engineers). The result is a solution that will not resolve the issues at hand.
The equation they want to solve is:
1GW(nuclear+fossil) + 0.1GW(wind+solar) + 0.1GW(import) = 2GW(consumption)
The above could be solved by increasing import to 0.9GW, as Newsom pointed out in his speech.
This may work as long as your neighbors can and will export the needed quantities at the correct time. But, for how long can you rely on that?
I hope not, but fear the possibility of an electricity resource war, when the politicians run out of excuses and the general population looses economically due to Titanic prices, extra cost to private diesel generators and UPSes, etc.
It is worse than we thought. The Californian Green way is also the way of many other states, countries and continents.
The solution:
Publicly show your love for the American Way, your love for diversity in weather, landscape and the people around you. Learn the basics in physics, math, English, culture and history. Then you recognize empty political talk as you encounter it.
NPR has been reduced to bald-faced, flat-out lying.
They’re trying to persuade the dimbulbs who believe NPR that the whole fiasco is the result of “climate change.”
True to their Orwellian roots they just left out the real term “political/social climate change”. It’s related to climate change in an oblique way.
Sooner or later green woke energy theory smacks against the laws of physics….
That popping noise you can hear is the sound of liberal heads exploding!
What a total load of garbage. California’s typical demand peaks at around 30GW with about 6GW of wind farms and 13GW of utility solar (rounding up in both cases) but that’s nameplate capacity so in reality, renewable contribution is around 6GW
http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
https://www.calwea.org/fast-facts
https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/renewables_data/solar/index_cms.php
So nice of California to provide a real life demonstration that Renewables Do Not Work. Since the early 2000’s I and many readers of WUWT have been explaining why and now CAis showing us that it isTRUE.
“Sierra Club and other activists met informally with Newsom’s administration in 2019 to discuss dramatically slashing the state’s oil production, The Los Angeles Times reported in April of that year.”
Oooh! The SCOTUS’s next big Takings case!
It’s amazing as each global warming prediction is made and never eventuates , as every theory gets disproved, as cheap Free renewable energy gets more and more expensive as even environmentalists from their own side start to realise there’s something not right here ( like Michael Moore and Shellingberger) they don’t stop think and reflect and suppose maybe they could be wrong.
No they double down!
These guys are nuts and it’s up to the silent majority to vote them out.
The cheapest storage is “Pumped Storage” at about $200/MWh to $260/MWh. Battery costs range from $350/MWh to nearly $1000/MWh. Left out of those numbers is the fact that delivery time for PS power is measured in hours and Batteries is measured in minutes. Facility life time is also decades for PS and years for Batteries. Better plan of attack is for ALL Large electrical energy users to be saddled with the cost of storage of their energy. The corporate HQ for the utility had an Ice Storage “vault’ in one of the sub basements. At night low cost, unneeded electricity was used to make ice, then during the day the heat-pumps reversed and cooled the building. On a smaller scale, the area below your garage/home could have a foam insulated tank filled with water for a closed cycle heat sink for your heat pump. In the winter, water solar collectors would transfer heat from the sun during the day to warm the tank and increase the efficiency of the HP. Solar collectors would not be needed in the summer, but the HW heater could continue using it to heat your hot water.
Pumped storage is the ultimate low cost ‘battery’ and should be implemented where geography warrants. California should have built more pumped storage if it was going to install all this troublesome wind and solar. The basic infrastructure that is built for such can be designed to last centuries with the right equipment, maybe having to re-wind your motor/generator every 40-50 years. Some of the old turbines from early 20th century are still in operation, maybe just changing the thrust bearings every 10-15 years. But the pipe, various reservoirs and dams can be designed to last centuries making this a permanent solution. Sure there are some losses, but using excess surplus cheaper electricity in the middle of the night makes sense to do so and sell it back at twice the rate at peak demand. Saves building new capacity and fuelling it and allows for load levelling at peak demands for 3-4 hours twice a day. Or for peak A/C season it can assist with last second on demand electrons to avoid grid collapse.
There is some interesting things going on with efficiencies. There has been some commercial installation of installing frozen water storage from the winter cold freezing the water, and harvesting all that cold water melting in summer for A/C (and fresh water use), and similar for storing heat from summer heat for winter use. If it is economic to do so, it should be done where it is feasible to do so. I am all for better efficient technologies and figuring out how to do things better. Sometimes we just have to think outside the box.
As a kid back in the 40’s I asked my grandpa where they got the ice for the ice box in the summer. He explained to me how it was stored in a large warehouse. Of course the next question was how do they keep it cold. He said “With bales of straw.” So of course I talked him into showing me the warehouse. He was right, a massive barn-size building completely lined with bales of straw.
I would think that with the advancements in foam insulation that not much heat is lost with a few feet of foam.
The problem with all of this “renewable” power is that it needs new lines from the “boondocks” to a substation, where it can be delivered. That costs money. As a result the lines that were designed to deliver power out the spiderwebs for existing plants with massive substations are NOT at the center where they are erecting the wind turbines. Also, the lines that run from the substation in an approximate direction of the wind turbine location are not capable of handling the MAX power they generate. So now you have a system designed like a star or a spider web designed to take the power from the center and send it out to the peripheries of the service area turned upside down and backwards.
Power now comes from where the wind blows, goes to the center and then out on another leg of the star to where it is being used. During average loads all works “acceptably” (not great, not good, but works.) When a weather front moves across a service area then the source point and usage point can reverse over a period of minutes, hours or days. When you cover the area inside that star with homes that have solar panels on their roof you complicate the grid protection problem even more. You also have the problem of power lines getting overloaded, lightning in the path from the source, Higher voltage near the Wind turbines and Lower voltage on the opposite side of the star. The grid is not designed to handle this.
The present grid was designed more or less as a cluster of stars with interconnections from star to star, typically with large power sources at the center of the star. To design it for distributed wind farms and distributes solar panels requires NEW distributions systems designed for this problem and a computer to control it. Presently it is now as difficult as flying a Jet Fighter. You can bet your life that none of these colleges making computer program predictions telling you that the present system will work has gone out in the field and determined all of the power limitations on each and every line these renewables are delivered on and factoring these limitations in their program. Then considering the effects of a weather front moving across the service grid.
I’d call Elon to stick in one of his unicorn Big Batteries while you rollout the plethora of transitioning diesel generators if I were you Guvna. LOL.
It was always their lunar prescriptions that would bring the climate changers undone.
What happens when an energy company providing emergency backup power from fossil fuel powered plants causes the company to lose more money in carbon offsets and cap and trade markets? It’s an entirely plausible scenario, they might stand to benefit more leaving customers with no power.
Seems like switching off the air conditioning at all the offices in the California Legislature buildings would be a good start for them to demonstrate their commitment to green policy. Turn off the power to their PC’s, lights, etc. At the very least it would limit their ability to damage their state’s economy for a bit. I give them a week, then they’d be crying like babies.
Just a smattering of the GND for the folks to chew on. I wonder how much of this the people will take before saying “enough of this nonsense”? And just think….. you pay extra for this type of service!
Statism is what led to blackouts for millions of Californians.
He is philosophical in explaining a power disaster. Justice and economic prism, a way of showing concern for those impacted by the green agenda he supports.
Fill in the gaps with more of the same, the wind will be blowing somewhere and somewhere the sun will shine, it always has. And when all the money and misery has been squeezed out of green energy declare an emergency for conventional energy and a resurgence of life.
“Collectively, energy regulators failed to anticipate this event and to take necessary actions to ensure reliable power to Californians,” Newsom wrote in a letter Monday to CAISO, CNN reported. “This cannot stand.” It wasn’t the energy regulators, it was the governor and legislature that thought they could violate the laws of nature and still keep the lights on and the AC running. As seen above, California has to have at least 1.5 gigawatts of reserves spinning to keep up with this latest little blip. What will happen when the wind is even lower or the day is cloudy. Meanwhile the governor continues to shut down clean gas-powered turbines. This is insanity, but typical of totalitarian socialist and communists world-over.
It can be very ugly when reality eventually does catch up to dogmatic policy crusades.
I recall the torture and death of a CIA agent after being identified by Senator Frank Church in his committee fiefdom. There are many near misses in history by the miscreants that are not talked about and those that do blow up are often described as random “who could have known” events while the advocates slink away.
One of the biggest problems with CA is that they are mandating conversion of all things Natural Gas to All-Electric; home ovens, home heating, etc., even cars are on that agenda. When mandating replaces Market Forces – letting people choose what is best for themselves, you are almost certainly running off the road into the ditch, a deep muck filled ditch. And while demand for electricity is going up, per mandate, supply is going down, per mandate. HELLO DITCH…
If everyone with outage sensitive anything has to buy, maintain and run a backup generator, it seems as if the outages have even more cost than just a lack of air conditioning.
Best power outage story (Quebec of course). I had a nurse doing a masters degree in my lab a few years ago. Her day job was in the NICU. She came in one morning looking real rough to carry out a time sensitive experiment. When I asked if she was coming down with something, she said the power had gone off last night in the hospital. The backup had not started, despite starting fine on the weekly test. They had 5 babies on respirators and 6 nurses. Five of them pumped these babies and the other nurse handled the rest of the ward for 4 hours. They did not lose a baby! I was lucky with outages, because my lab was on a hospital substation, the last to be dropped when the grrid went down.
https://babylonbee.com/news/state-hailed-as-progressive-utopia-of-advanced-technology-cant-figure-out-how-to-keep-the-lights-on
Silence from BBC and CNN on California blackouts.
The BBC says
“Because so much of the region’s power relies on solar and wind energy, and because people use their electricity for air conditioning, during heatwaves the power grid becomes strained and is at risk of completely malfunctioning.,”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53788018
Though that paragraph is near the end of a story about alleged record high temp in Death Valley.
Any neutral observer would give more weight to wealthy high tec CA having a broken power grid.
“Gaps” in solar power, AKA “nighttime”.
“Gaps” in wind power, AKA “calm” days or “very windy” days.
meanwhile, Conservative-run South Australia is doubling down:
20 Aug: Renew Economy: Neoen files plans for $3bn wind and solar farm with battery 10 times bigger than Hornsdale
by Giles Parkinson
French renewable energy developer Neoen has filed its development application for the huge $3 billion Goyder South wind, solar and storage project in South Australia which includes a proposed big battery than it nearly 10 times bigger than the expanded “Tesla big battery” at Hornsdale.
The plan proposes a total of 1,200MW of wind energy, 600MW of solar PV, and 900MW/1800MWh of battery storage, an “extremely large” battery as Neoen describes it that will dwarf the 150MW/194MWh “Tesla” battery known officially as the Hornsdale Power Reserve…
Neoen insists that the first stage is likely to go ahead regardless of any significant grid upgrades, but admits that the second and third stages would be contingent on the new transmission line between South Australia and NSW, known as Project EnergyConnect, going ahead…
https://reneweconomy.com.au/neoen-files-plans-for-3bn-wind-and-solar-farm-with-battery-10-times-bigger-than-hornsdale-67395/