Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In my recent post yclept Bright Green Impossibilities, I showed that it is not humanly possible to eliminate fossil fuel CO2 emissions by 2050. I live in California, the heart of the green lunacy. Here, there’s a group called Climate-Safe California. Given that there is no sign of the much-hyped “CLIMATE EMERGENCY” I’m not sure what they’re trying to keep us “safe” from … but I digress. Their genius plan is to reduce fossil-fuel emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by the year 2030.
Now, energy use will continue to increase in California, but that will largely be offset by increases in efficiency and changes in manufacturing, with less CO2 per unit of fossil fuel used. In fact, current California emissions are only about 1% higher than they were 30 years ago in 1990. So to reach their goal, if we leave out magical fairy dust and giant imaginary vacuums sucking CO2 out of the air, we’d have to reduce fossil fuel use by 80% by 2030.
The green folks think this can be done with wind and solar … but the sad fact is, you need something close to 100% backup for the times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. We’re already suffering occasional blackouts due to our insane dependence on expensive, intermittent wind and solar. Given the existence of that ugly thing called “reality” that green folks like to ignore, that means we have to replace fossil fuels with nuclear-generated electricity.
So how much fossil fuel does California currently use? Turns out its about 1.7 petawatt-hours (PWh, or 1015 watt-hours) per year. And to replace 80% of this with nuclear, allowing for peak power and downtime, we have to increase our generation capacity by about 307 gigawatts (GW, or 109 watts). By comparison, Diablo Canyon, the only remaining nuclear power plant in California after green activists have had their say, generates 2.3 GW of electricity … 307 GW needed, 2.3 GW per big nuke plant, 8-1/2 years to do it … can you see a problem developing here?
Now, they want to do this by 2030. So we need to find sites, do feasibility studies, purchase land, get permits and licenses, manufacture, excavate, install, test and hook up to the grid a 2 GW nuclear plant, a bit smaller than Diablo Canyon, each and every three weeks from now to 2030. And that’s starting tomorrow …
It’s worth noting that in the US, the timespan from feasibility study to grid hookup is longer than ten years … so if we started tomorrow, by 2030 we’d have exactly zero new nuclear plants online. Here’s an overview of the US process:
And people with industry experience say that timeline is optimistic, it can be 15-20 years … not to mention the intense opposition from California greens to anything nuclear.
Still want wind? To do it with wind, we’d have to find sites, do feasibility studies, purchase land, get permits and licenses, manufacture, excavate, install, test and hook up to the grid no less than 1,000 two-megawatt (MW, or 106 watts) wind turbines, each and every single week from now to 2030. And that’s starting tomorrow … a thousand per week.
Solar sound better? NREL says the actual delivery 24/7/365 of of grid-scale solar farms averages 8.3 W/m2 of ground area (not panel area). That’s 8.3 MW per square kilometer of ground area. So to do it with solar, we’d have to find sites, do feasibility studies, purchase land, get permits and licenses, manufacture, excavate, install, test and hook up to the grid no less than 83 square kilometers (32 square miles) of solar farms, each and every single week from now to 2030. And again, that’s starting tomorrow …
Just finding suitable land for that scale of development is nearly impossible. Here’s some information from California regarding how hard it is to find suitable land for solar power.
Land
… Another issue is the fact that such solar ‘farms’ require huge tracts of land. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been tasked with finding 24 tracts of public land of three square miles each with good solar exposure, favorable slopes, road and transmission line availability. Additionally, the land set aside for utility-scale solar farms must not disturb native wildlife or endangered species such as the desert tortoise, the desert bighorn sheep, and others. The wildlife issue has proved to be a contentious one. Projects in California have been halted due to the threat caused to endangered species resulting in a backlog of 158 commercial projects with which the BLM is currently contending.
Note that the BLM is having trouble finding a mere 75 square miles of land for solar power generation that doesn’t have too much impact on the environment, and we’re talking about building 31 square miles of new solar power per week … for the next 446 weeks … yeah, that’s totally legit.
Then, of course, there is the stupendous cost of this whole enterprise. In addition to the decommissioning costs of our existing generating facilities, the cost to build a hundred plus new nuclear plants, plus putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work, and getting rid of hundreds of thousands of automotive gas stations, the entire electrical grid would have to be hugely upgraded to allow it to carry all the power for newly electric homes, businesses, industries, and cars.
And that’s not just replacing the wires, including rewiring every home like mine that uses gas for cooking and for water and space heating. It’s replacing the transformers, switches, substations, control systems, overload protection, breaker boxes, and every other part of the grid as well.
In fact, to do that the California grid would have to handle no less than 3.75 times the power it is currently carrying … that’s what “hugely upgraded means”. Not just upsized by 10%, or even 100%. It will require three and three-quarters times the volume of wiring, switches, substations, and all the rest.
According to the California Public Utilities Commission, California has 25,526 miles of higher voltage transmission lines and 239,557 miles of distribution lines, two-thirds of which are overhead and one-third underground. So we’d need to install another 94,000 miles of high-voltage line and 886,000 miles of distribution lines. At a rate of 440 miles every workday. From now until 2030. Starting tomorrow.
Or we could pull out all ~ quarter-million miles of lines, above and below-ground, and replace them with much, much bigger wires.
Billions and billions and billions of dollars in pursuit of an unattainable chimera, on a quest that will do nothing to change the climate.
I gotta say … the fact that impassioned but totally innumerate folks like the “Climate-Safe California” people get listened to at all gives me nightmares about how many people have fallen for the Great Green Climate Scam … let me be clear:
It. Cannot. Be. Accomplished. This is just another bright green impossible fantasy.
Sigh …
w.
AS ALWAYS: I can defend and explain my words and am happy to do so. I cannot defend or explain your interpretation of my words. So please, QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING.
DATA:
- California CO2 Emissions By Year: EIA
- California Primary Energy Consumption: EIA
- California Total System Electrical Generation By Fuel: California Energy Commission
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS: I gotta give huge props to Anthony Watts, who conceived of and created WUWT, and to Charles The Moderator and all of the volunteer moderators around the world. My thanks to you all.
Charles saw the draft of what I was writing and sent me the following, one issued an hour ago and one a few minutes ago today (Wednesday, June 16) by CAISO, the California Independent Systems Operator responsible for the operation of the California electrical grid. Top one is the most recent.
An hour ago … “no anticipation of outages”. One minute ago … “Flexalert”, and “conserve electricity” … the lunacy of unreliable, intermittent, mostly useless renewable energy never ends.
DISCLAIMER: Don’t be misled by my contempt for the modern “environmental” groups. I am and have been since my youth what I would describe as a true environmentalist, as opposed to today’s “watermelon environmentalists”, who are green on the outside and solid Marxist red on the inside … here’s a post on that.
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Lawrence,
Grasping basic energy and emissions facts I take it are not your strong point.
You seem to miss the point on the futility of the climate scam’s renewable energy push even if one believes the climate models.
Wind and solar are unreliable, always will be. They have to be backed up by something else that is dispatchable and reliable. And wind turbines, blades, and towers along with and solar panel farms’ life cycle end-to-end emissions elated to their manufacture, construction, siting, and tear-down and life time maintenance means they will barely break even on emissions in exchange for the huge environmental damage that mining for the raw materials needed at the scale for the amount fossil fuel replacement envisioned.
And the Greentards steadfast refusal to accept nuclear power as the emissions-free alternative solution to wind and solar lunacy clearly exposes the climate change scam for the intentional destruction of Western captialism and democracies that it is.
Go do some homework.
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If a cloud passes over the panels, the output of the panels plummet.
If dust or bird poop build up on the panels, the output of the panels plummet.
As you mention, the output of the panels drop to zero at night.
Solar panels are the very definition of unreliable.
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And everybody lives in the desert to plant solar panels on the roof 😀
Not many live in the desert , but it does get dark ,whats your cost annalise of current transportation out of the desert, what cost to the environment?
Ignorant comment. Much of the Southwest has monsoons in the summer. I lived in a high desert town that built a solar farm to see if would save money. The first thing they learned is it didn’t cut the peak power use because peak power demand happens in the late afternoon after solar drops in power. Look up “duck curve”. The utility had to contract for the same peak power supply at the same cost multiplier. The second thing they learned is it often dropped off in the afternoon when clouds would build up. They sought volunteers to install “smart” meters that shut off air conditioning when the solar plant dropped output. I know, because my employer signed up my building. It would get so hot in the building (85+ F) so often (two to three times per week) that I was unwilling to suffer any longer and quit my job and took a different job in an office with a wall-mounted air conditioner that I could control. You know not what you’re blathering about.
No sun at night and cloudiness varies during the day.
Solar Energy was heavily invested in my area back in the 1970’s 1980’s, on Banks and Federal buildings, swimming pools heating, today they are long disused when it became clear they were not worth the problems and insufficient power production the whole time.
It failed badly in a semi desert area where from October to March is clouded in a lot and of course no sun at night.
Even a few is enough to make solar to unreliable. One thing the desert does have in abundance is dust, which is even worse than clouds and bird poop.
Are you tired of making a fool of yourself, or are you going to stick around so that we can laugh at you some more.
But many a tortoise thrives there as does Joshua Trees which, by law, you can’t damage.
Most of the desert foliage has evolved to thrive in the climate including sparse water and abundance of sunlight and heat. Placing Hectares of Solar Farms there will negatively affect flora (and fauna) dependant on direct sun
Lawrence,
You confuse the Sun with a solar panel sitting on Earth’s surface. The only place solar PV even begins to make sense in the SW deserts in So Cal and So Arizona. Everywhere else, overcast skies are too common to make them nothing but Government-taxpayer subsidies and tax break harvesters for their owners.
Again, you need to do your homework and stop watching pablum spewing, brain-eroding Liberal cable network tv and the Democrat’s media lackeys.
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So what? Are you actually stupid enough to not know the difference between anecdote and data?
What’s the point of being a progressive if you’re not stupid
Sure Lawrence…I have solar at my off grid properties, and now I just bought a Rav4 hybrid with a super efficient 2.5 L Atkinson gasoline engine, with a 18 kW/h Li-On battery, and use it all to power a 1500 watt inverter which is all I need to run my digital and occasional higher power loads. I also use the hybrid to drive a lot of miles very efficiently, but I bought it principally for the generator/battery as it is super efficient for my purposes. I needed a new vehicle anyway.
But that doesn’t mean I believe that CO2 is the control knob for the climate and why we need to do these things. Natural Gas is about as clean as it gets, and we have plenty of it to last a century if we want. But CO2 levels will never be a problem under 1000 ppmv and even if we double to 560 ppmv at some point, it is still a trace atmospheric gas that has less utility as a GHG per doubling, and more upside for plant life for the entire planet. Carbon-CO2 is life. We should be celebrating the liberation of more CO2. Future generations will be glad we did.
PV works really good outside of the atmosphere.
Go do some homework, Larry.
What an utterly reductive argument.
As for your “global cooling” allusion, what we have right now is a classic meridonal pattern (probably related to being a more common phenomenon in the several years around solar cycle minimum) in the jet stream bringing in waves of hot and cold to mid-latitudes to the edge of the Arctic circle, i.e a wavy jet stream.
In about 2-3 weeks, the pattern will likely be reversed, and all we’ll be hearing about from the biased media is how hot it is in the Eastern US, where today it is running cooler than normal.
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Quite easily. If you knew anything about meteorology, you would have known that.
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In other words, even you know that you’ve been caught saying something really stupid, but you have too much pride to admit it.
Yes we know. Record high temperature measurement means catastrophic global warming, end of world event. Record low temperature measurement means catastrophic climate emergency, end of world event. Either case requires the immediate adoption of worldwide communism, or else face the end of the world.
I’ve seen this somewhere before. Oh yes, every day on the mainstream media for the last 50 years.
Yawn.
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No matter how many times you reference a stupid comment, it remains a stupid comment.
How about all those cold records broken this winter?
CA’s state heat record remains 1913.
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This is the kind of apocalyptic nonsense website the mainstream media gets it’s “news” from.
The truth is that by, literally, every measure, the world is a better place to live than a century ago, and the improvements, when graphed, exactly match the increase in Co2. Not a causal relationship, but rather they all are a result of fossil fuel use.
You should avail yourself of a little critical thought, before you push for the destruction of all that is good.
I guess you don’t hang around here a lot.
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Yes, we do get quite a kick out of you. Thanks.
I was showing concern that your post would elicit multiple, withering refutations. How you consider that to be “trolling” or a “personal attack” is just silly.
Oops. I think I misunderstood that the edit about trolling was the author’s and referred to LS’s comment.
Lawrence, there have been fifty to one hundred year droughts in the US southwest the last two millennia, in the 3rd and 12th centuries. These were orders of magnitude worse than modern droughts.
SOURCE
Please explain how these were caused by eeevil human actions … Indians driving prehistoric Jeep Cherokees?
w.
Odd! No response from Larry
I’m optimistic he learned something. If so, it would take a long time before he admits it, at least on this web site.
Or his comments are now being moderated, and not being approved.
Yep and California’s dependence on unreliable solar and wind combined with an inherent maverick attitude towards reliable gas and nuclear threatens to curtail distribution yet again as demand potentially reaches capacity yet again
“Park Williams, a University of California, Los Angeles, climate and fire scientist who has calculated that soil in the western half of the nation is the driest it has been since 1895.”
“climate and fire scientist”?
“driest it has been since 1895”? Why?
OK Larry, you have convinced me of something other than what you intended,
You are bursting with climate ambition. That’s all.
Well, I am sorry to say this but apparently we Texans have decided to give you nut-job Californians a run for “who is the biggest idiot state?” We are behind at the moment, but but our wonderful ERCOT agency is plowing ahead with more wind turbines even after Freezagedon.
We just received another “rolling blackout warning” notice this week and it’s still early June. What is late July and August going to be like? I know – more wind turbines…never mind the wind doesn’t blow that hard in the Summer here.
Someone is getting really rich off of this.
Whenever CAISO issues an alert to save electricity, I dry my laundry and turn on the air conditioner.
Saving electricity is a fools errand. The California grid needs to crash routinely and often so people actually experience the policies of the idiots they elected to office.
Bumper sticker meme to make Green heads explode:
griff will be along shortly to explain how this is all doable with the new technologies that are just around the corner, namely:
Night-time solar
Static air turbines
Grid scale batteries.
No, really!
Hey, night-time solar is perfectly feasable. Just put cells on the underside of the panels so they’re still pointing at the sun!
Another problem unique to California is that siting nuclear plants on the coast exposes them to potential damage from a tsunami, as happened with Fukushima. Northern California is also uniquely vulnerable to earthquakes near the coast. That risk shut down the construction of a plant north of San Francisco when it was found that a splinter fault from the San Andreas went right through the excavation for the reactor.
Siting them inland, away from the major population centers that need the power, would eliminate the risk from tsunamis, and reduce the risk from earthquakes [The Auburn Dam project was aborted when, preparing the site on the American River for the actual dam, apparently active faults were exposed.], but then there are issues of cooling water for the reactor and steam turbines. The waste heat would be detrimental to the biota in the local rivers, which are already so contentious that recreational gold dredging has been outlawed. Availability of cooling water from rivers and reservoirs might be problematic in drought years, which are, and always have been, frequent in California.
Nuclear plants do, however, have the advantage that fewer sites and less acreage required means there is more likelihood of getting the construction approved, anywhere but California!
The faults in CA are strike slip, not subduction. Tsunami’s in CA are usually measured in inches, not meters.
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From Wikipedia:
The Cascadia subduction zone is a convergent plate boundary that stretches from northern Vancouver Island in Canada to Northern California in the United States.
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From Wikipedia:
The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that extends roughly 1,200 kilometers (750 mi) through California. It forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, and its motion is right-lateral strike-slip (horizontal).
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I did much better than you did should I laugh at you?
Yes, the Pacific North West is more prone to tsunamis produced by dip-slip faults. However, there are numerous deep canyons along the California coast, such as the Monterey Canyon in Monterey Bay, that are subject to underwater landslides during violent shaking resulting from strike slip motion. Large vertical displacements of sediments can induce tsunamis.
There are some coastal communities in Northern California that are sufficiently enlightened to have actually taken measures to survive a large tsunami.
A fleet of floating nuclear power plants!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station
The Russian model produces only 70 MW on a 21,500 T. unpowered barge, estimated sufficient for a city of 200,000. In Siberia, heat is as important as electricity, which wouldn’t be the case in CA.
The AB1 reactor of the Ford class CVNs generates around 700 MW (heat) energy, so ten times that of the Russian floating power stations. Ford CVNs have two. The Nimitz class had four less powerful reactors and Enterprize eight.
Carriers have a lot of displacement not needed for a floating power station, so an AB1-equipped barge might come in under 40,000 T. Maybe a lot less. Put one each offshore of San Diego, LA, SF and maybe Eureka.
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They really wouldn’t like the electric bill even more then. That would be some pretty expensive residential and commercial electricity as a commercial power venture just to break even.
This is true. Naval reactor fuel is hideously more expensive than commercial reactor fuel. Commercial reactors use fuel that is around 5% enriched, whereas Navy reactors use 95%+ enrichment, vastly more expensive.
Some naval reactors use LEU rather than 93% (weapons grade) enrichment of US CVN and submarine plants.
But, in any case, the US has lots of HEU.
John,
Nimitz class carriers only have 2 reactors on board unless they did a damn fine job of hiding the two backup reactors when I served on the Nimitz (-> nuclear machinist mate so I was operating and maintaining the reactors),
Naval reactors work and work damn well but are not designed to be a civilian power plant. Run one at 100% and you have ~4 years of life out of it then it’s down for a long darn time to refuel along with a lot of $$ spent. Navy can run them as long as they do because a) they mostly run at a very low power % for normal ops. (i.e. one reactor can run the entire ship with plenty of power to spare but two are run for redundancy) b) they spend a lot of time shutdown in port while on shore power. c) government doesn’t give a damn about costs.
Oops! Should have checked than rely on memory. Two reactors, four steam turbines and four shafts.
I think that has some potential. However, being a former California resident of some decades, I doubt that the ‘woke’ intelligentsia would allow that either.
Our own navy already has a bunch of floating nuke plants. The problem isn’t the plants. It’s getting the power on-shore!
I’m not actually advocating this approach for vast megalopolises in CA vs. isolated settlements in Siberia. However on shore isn’t really that much of an issue, basically no different from powerlines from nuke and fossil fuel plants into cities. Just with cables on the seafloor, and generally shorter distances.
Yes, the problem isn’t much different from getting power from offshore windturbines or tidal generation schemes.
“A fleet of floating nuclear power plants!”
This might be true if the “floating” platforms can be either structurally anchored to the sea floor or are located in always calm waters. Anything else requires a floating connection with the slack needed to accommodate horizontal, vertical, and torsional movement.
How many wind towers or tidal generators are free-floating? Like on a ship?
Yes, they’d have to be anchored.
John TIllman,
Actually, not Russian, but Danish — Seaborg announced something of the sort in the past 14 days in IEEE Spectrum (who panned it) and several other sites and outlets.
But it isn’t even a new, or “furrinoor’s idear,” Robert Heinlein (shout out to Kip) proposed it in an essay in the 70’s or early 80’s, based on his personal respect for Hyman Rickover (who he included as an unnamed character in a short story as part of the essay). The rationale being that U.S. Navy nuclear reactors, designed, built, run, and operated by a self-made expert and disciplinarian, had never melted down.
Heinlein and Rickover were at the U.S. Naval academy at around the same time, and both were engineers.
I’m sure the Danish solution wouldn’t come in cheap, either.
Rickover entered the USNA in 1918; Heinlien 1925.
Thank you for clear, factual, open truth. I hope this goes viral immediately.
To paraphrase the great Tina Turner,
“What’s logic got to do with it, got to do with it, got to do with it?”
The UK government intends to phase out ICE cars starting in 2030. My thoughts on this policy are set out below:
ASSESSMENT OF THE PRACTICALITY OF REPLACING ICE CARS WITH ELECTRICALLY POWERED CARS IN THE UK
Basic Facts:
1. A battery with a capacity of 75kWh is needed to provide a car with a range of 250 miles.
2. The maximum charging capacity available in most UK homes is 7kW (single phase supply).
3. The time needed to charge a 75kWh battery from a home supply overnight is, therefore,
around 11 hours.
4. Currently, there are around 32 million private cars registered for use on the UK’s roads.
5. Therefore, the electrical generation capacity needed for car battery charging alone would be
32 x 10^6 x 7 x 10^3 = 224 x 10^9 Watts, or 224 GW.
6. The average electricity demand in the UK is currently around 39 GW produced by an
installed capacity of around 65 GW.
7. Total electricity demand would increase to 39 + 224 = 263 GW, which implies installed
capacity would need to rise to around 400 GW, plus a corresponding uprating of the
transmission grid.
Conclusions:
1. The UK’s electrical generation capacity will need increase by about 600% to cope with an
all-electric car fleet.
2. Alternatively, the entire fleet of private cars will have to be reduced to about 5M.
Open Question:
When legislating for an all-electric private car fleet, were the UK government and parliament aware that they would need to increase the UK’s electrical generation capacity six-fold or deny car ownership to a majority of its citizens?
The EV is ofcourse a solution for a non-existing problem. That said, the charging would have to accommodate actual daily use, not 250 miles.
My daily commute for a dozen years was 206miles (103 miles one-way). For another five years I commuted weekly between Topeka, KS and Tulsa, OK – about 220 miles one-way. How many EV’s get 220 miles in freezing weather or 100F hot weather? Not uncommon occurrences here on the plains.
Far too many people think of urban commutes of 20 miles or so when they think of EV’s.
In step 5 you are using all of the home’s available electric power to charge the car.
Nothing left for lights, TV, etc.
Oh, and the electric heating that has now been mandated. Biggest power user in any household – water heating, followed by space heating.
And the average UK home will need a massive wiring upgrade to double capacity.
Its always been about denying, also your excellent example of the under capacity of the UK power grid if we were (32million) to switch to electric cars does not take into account the extra electricity needed for home heat,( no new gas boilers by 2025) at the same time out right banning of domestic coal burning and server restrictions on what wood and where you can burn it.which leads to a new group of comsumers reliant on more electricity.
Roads will close,this is already happening, during covid we already have seen a trial run. The pushing of public transport, cycling ect ect, as if one size fits all .
A huge society shift without a by your leave, essentially forced upon us by deception and lies, no msm asking the right questions ,no offence but if you can do the maths so can any investigational journalist, who simply won’t ask the questions and won’t report on any who do.
You will own nothing, and be happy, or else. Our ‘leaders’ are morons.
Have a look at what’s required to replace domestic gas boilers. An additional 170GW of peak electrical capacity is needed. That’s 77 Hinkley Point C nuclear power stations.
Thank you Willis. Sadly, huge numbers of Californians just don’t want to accept this basic math. Half of them seem to believe that Elon Musk is going to pull a few hundred GW out of a place where solar panels won’t work 🙂
Interestingly, CAISO have disappeared all of their their current demand/supply data. Either that or something broke due to the (not very) excessive heat:
http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
First time I’ve seen all the data vanish from those pages. I wonder what it is they don’t want us to know?
“…allowing for peak power and downtime, we have to increase our generation capacity by about 307 gigawatts (GW, or 109 watts).”
How did you come up with 307 GW? Did you account for 50% generation capacity?
Is there a source for that or is it general practice?
Does government keep track of how much CO2 it emits.
So for State of California all Federal, local and State and all their employees- and anyone the government to pays salaries to, so including private contractors- or if government paying more 1/2 a parties salary [all their CO2 emission]. Maybe govt could lower this by 80%.
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Rarely discussed are the social costs associated with expensive green energy. Historically, slaves were the source of cheap energy for human civilizations. You see that even today in a large emerging civilization, i.e., China. The industrial revolution using abundant hydrocarbon fuels made machines the slaves, largely replacing much of the economic incentive for cheap human labor. As the subsides for green energy end, which they will one way or the other, there will emerge increasing economic incentives for an underclass. You can see that today in the north San Francisco wine country, where I lived for nearly forty years before exiting to a more freedom-embracing state. You can see in the flat vineyards of the valley floor increased us of machinery, not so on the steep hillside vineyards where hand work and hard labor done by peasants from other countries are required. I have often wonder why the linkage between energy costs, machinery and the economic incentives for an underclass is not more of a topic.
Willis,
In its own terms this is a splendidly convincing piece. But I am afraid that what it shows is that the program is excellent, well conceived and just right, and that if you are a Green you should continue to press for its immediate adoption.
Why?
Because its impossible to do. So obviously impossible that California will not attempt to do it. And that means it will be around as an issue to organize about for the indefinite future. And when it fails to materialize in 2030 or whenever, that will give the opportunity for endless vituperation, celebration of a target missed.
The basic rules, which the California Greens are following conscientiously, are:
1) Never demand anything that its possible you will get
2) If by some horrible chance its conceded, have nothing to do with its implementation. Change your demand to make it impossible to deliver.
So, if they concede on 2030, demand 2025. If they concede 90% demand 100%.
Why?
Because your aim is not to get anything done. You do not care one way or the other about energy or climate. These are just today’s convenient topics to organize around. Your aim is radicalization and organization. You take a long view, and your aim is complete power. Power sufficient to allow you to dispense with normal political horse trading.
Today the issue is AGW and energy. Next time it will be race. The time after that gender.
So your success in the piece is also its great error. It supposes that the merits of the case are a factor in its adoption by the Greens. No, they are not. And what you have unwittingly done is prove that the case they have picked is superb and supremely fit for the purpose they have in mind.
Its totally impossible to implement. And that is what they need it to be.
I understand your point, but tend to disagree, at least with respect to climate. My reasons are two:
First, they are responding to a non-problem. Evidence is that none of the dire predictions of the last 40 years have come true. Not even close. Trashes the ‘science’.
Second, as shown here by WE, none of their proposed GND solutions are even remotely practical. Let alone in the proposed timeframes.
Both will cause the movement to eventually collapse on them.
Yes, eventually.
But read ‘When Prophecy Fails’. It can take a long time, particularly when the movement’s key forecasts are of events that are quite some years away. And the initial reaction of the faithful to failures of prophecies is, paradoxically, to strengthen their faith and to increase their hostility to skeptics. I think this is what we are seeing now.
There are two things going on: the measures being impractical or impossible is a feature, not a bug. That is not only not a problem for them, its a key advantage.
The forecasts failing is a bug all right. But its going to take a very long time to come home to roost.
I think we haven’t seen half of the mad nastiness that is coming down the road on the climate question. Its going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
There may be hope here in the UK with the arrival of GBNEWS, a new right leaning, news channel (515 on Sky). A number of their guest experts are starting to put a gloss of reality for the general public. Who knows they might actually be able to wake up the average Joe as to what he is going to have to spend.
There is no point writing tracts about the impossibility of powering our society from green visions. As you say, it can’t happen. And I think the greens know this.
The interesting points to make involve what is NOT being said. I strongly suspect that the green game plan is to provide as much ‘green’ energy as they can, and then force people to accept that as the total energy we have to live off.
The new world will have enervy as a luxury. Most energy will go to the rich, and the rest will be used on essential state services. People will need to get used to living in an unheated house, not travelling, charging their Chinese laptops from the sun and eating local produce. There will be a lot of bicycling down to the nearest farm to pick your own….
I told my son that only the rich will be able to travel and everyone else gets a VR headset.
The “Net Demand” graph on this page seems to be heading in that direction. When net demand riches zero, green nirvana is achieved.
http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
I’ve always thought this is correct. The only way to reach the supposed Green energy goals is to move everyone into dense housing within walking or biking or mass transit distance of workplaces. Suburbs will have to be usable from mass transit links, shopping malls will have to go. Car ownership will have to fall to about 10% of today. Consumerism will have to shrink, it will be only buy what you need and use it a lot longer. Think the country as it was in about 1900, but with modern technology.
Dodgy, I think your assessment is exactly right.
It’s funny how Hollywood creates dystopian Science Fiction with almost exactly those themes, yet still pushes for policies that will bring about the very dystopia they portray. Almost like they think they’ll be the ones inside the “safe” cities – and their stories will remain fiction.
Willis,
Thanks for another foray into the fantasy world of GangGreen!
It seems like the climate kooks of my late, great home state come in three different varieties; the useful idiots, the corrupt scammers and the clinically insane! The first remind me of a morbidly obese toddler, throwing a tantrum on the store floor to get an ice cream cone! Too bad there aren’t enough responsible adults left in CA politics that are willing to say “No!”
I hope all is well along the Left Coast! I’m spending a lot of time watching my tomatoes basking in our usual, early summer heat; wondering how soon the summer monsoon will kick in. Be well!
What perfect timing for those living in SoCal or just those that want to know. State and local experts will be available to answer questions about the clean energy future for SoCal during a virtual event on 24 June from 2-3:30 p.m. PDT. The Zoom session registration link is: https://ucr.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SgcD7nNgSFKC7qFciFWitg. Questions or comments can be sent to: events@scng.com. The forum is a Southern California News Group event BTW.
This is a good opportunity to put the so called experts on the spot and to see just how well the green energy future is going to work.
And has someone already figured how much more copper wire would be needed for the net expansion? Which, at the current cost of copper, would be an amazing amount of money needed for just the purchase of the conductors? Crickets???
Willis you have very ably tackled the solutions that don’t and can’t work. What about an overlooked solution that is a sure bet: do without! Let’s start with the Climate-Safe California crowd and anyone else in a similar intellectual stratum. Once they see the logic of your arguments (I am a shameless optimist) they will gladly have their gas and electric shut off and send their ICE vehicles to the car museum. And when the rest of us see the care free and fulfilling lives they live scrabbling about for seeds and nuts in the dark we will all be persuaded to jump on board.
The only way to deal with this, is to move to Nova Scotia, or some similar place, far from where the government can screw with you.
Plus you have to live off the grid with solar panels, batteries, a generator, and a 1000-gal hot water storage tank. Use a heat pump for cooling in summer, if needed.
What, me worry?
Ha, Ha.
California will be using FLOATING wind turbines, at $8 million per MW installed, plus grid work. Electricity will be sold to utilities at 25 c/kWh, which is about 5 times annual grid wholesale prices of 5 c/kWh, plus they will need RELIABLE back-up generators for when the flirtatious/capricious wind ain’t sufficiently blowing.
Something to look forward to.
How in hell are we going to power all those EVs and heat pumps?
We will need entirely new transmission and distribution grids
The disruption would be similar to starting to put in Eisenhower’s National Defense Highway System in the 50s.
California will be sooooo competitive!
Willis E. wrote about the land needed for solar:
“Just finding suitable land for that scale of development is nearly impossible. Here’s some information from California regarding how hard it is to find suitable land for solar power.”
On the recent thread about California emptying the reservoirs when the farmers were in need of water, I asked a sort of cui bono question; who might pick up the land for a song as the farmers go bankrupt?
This current article tends to make me go, “hmmmm…”
There just might soon be a lot of suitable, flat, sunny farmland available to the State of California in lieu of unpaid back taxes… perhaps.
Still just spitballing.
Well put Willis. FYI, I’m here in silicon valley and received that alert also. And…….the streetlights have been on all day and yesterday!!??
I think it’s time for neighboring states to pass legislation for impact fees on power plants that export to California. This free rider relationship needs to be stopped.