California Blackouts Have Begun. Thank ‘Green Energy’

By Andrew Follett

Thursday, September 08, 2022

 

A punishing heat wave in California has triggered rolling blackouts and brownouts. But don’t blame climate change. This crisis is largely due to the state electric grid’s overreliance on unreliable green energy in a time of record energy demand.

 

Rolling blackouts have begun in the state, with thousands of customers having their power shut off.  “We’re looking at a lot of records today,” Bob Oravec, a senior branch forecaster at the U.S. Weather Prediction Center, told Bloomberg earlier this week regarding the heat wave. “They are having a lot of issues with power out there, and this isn’t going to help.”

 

The heat wave has greatly increased power usage. California’s power-grid operator estimates that demand will shatter previous records and has taken to begging consumers to reduce their energy use in the early evening.

 

“This is an extraordinary heat event we are experiencing, and the efforts by consumers to lean in and reduce their energy use after 4 p.m. are absolutely essential,” Elliot Mainzer, the California Independent System Operator’s president and CEO, said in a press statement.  “Over the last several days we have seen a positive impact on lowering demand because of everyone’s help, but now we need a reduction in energy use that is two or three times greater than what we’ve seen so far as this historic heat wave continues to intensify.”

 

This week, the operating agency of state’s power grid  advised Californians to “be ready for potential rotating power outages” as electricity demand spiked while power supplied by wind and solar went offline.

 

That timing isn’t a coincidence. California has aggressively shut down more reliable nuclear, coal, and natural-gas power plants to boost demand for solar and wind farms, which naturally stop working later in the day just as electricity demand tends to peak. This policy to promote green energy has tremendously damaged California’s electrical grid, placing the state at serious risk of unintentional mass blackouts to go with the current rolling ones.

 

Things have gotten so bad that California governor Gavin Newsom had to proclaim a state of emergency and temporarily reactivate the very conventional power plants he’d previously worked so hard to shut down. Naturally, Newsom put the blame for this on global warming, rather than his own policies that created the problem.

 

Newsom pushed for a tidal wave of government regulations heavily favoring wind and solar power. He ignored green energy’s major drawbacks, or tried to paper over them with increased subsidies and schemes to force the purchase of it. Until recently, he had even gone along with plans to shutter the state’s last operating nuclear reactor under heavy pressure from environmentalists.

 

“The closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was largely due to the uncertainty of obtaining a license amendment for running at lower power due to steam generator damage,” Jeff Terry, an energy-research professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, told National Review. “This would have been necessary to continue operation while replacements were fabricated. This cost California 2.2 gigawatts of clean nuclear power.” That’s enough power for 1.65 million homes. Terry adds that the power this plant once supplied “was replaced mainly with natural gas, which hampered climate goals.” Terry added that “more recently, California has elected to continue to allow Pacific Gas and Electric to operate the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant because the grid is already stretched to the breaking point. Closing Diablo Canyon could not have been accommodated by the grid without blackouts.”

 

This basically means that California’s shutdown of a major nuclear power plant and environmentalist pressure to close the state’s last remaining reactors have made it a lot harder to keep the lights on.

 

And this disaster was absolutely predicted.

 

“If you continue going down this route, you’re going to have significant challenges in managing disturbances,” John Moura, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corp, told EnergyWire in February 2016.

 

The state has been repeatedly forced to shut down solar and wind power since at least 2016 because green-energy sources have been damaging the power grid and causing blackouts. Since forecasts cannot predict the output of solar and wind plants with high accuracy, grid operators have to keep excess reserves running just in case, as they cannot be easily adjusted due to the unpredictability of weather. This also places extra stress on the grid, leading to brownouts or blackouts.

 

A U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) investigation found that there is a “significant risk” of electricity in the United States becoming unreliable because wind and solar simply aren’t reliable. To function, power grids require demand to exactly match supply, which is an enormous problem for variable wind and solar power. Power demand is relatively predictable, and conventional power plants, such as nuclear and natural gas plants, can adjust output accordingly, as they put out a steady and predictable supply of electricity.

 

Many on the left have compared the blackouts in California to the February 2021 Texas power crisis. But that’s an awful comparison. The Texas blackout was caused by three back-to-back winter ice storms and very cold weather for weeks. Texas doesn’t get much cold weather, so it isn’t surprising the system failed when confronted with a threat it wasn’t designed for. It’s impossible to secure a grid against every potential threat, so the most probable threats are prioritized, which in Texas means heat and hurricanes.

 

In contrast, the current California crisis was caused by a drought and a heat wave, which are both exceedingly common problems in that state. California’s electrical system was absolutely designed to deal with precisely this kind of threat . . . and it failed anyway.

 

Progressives make excuses for these blackouts as being necessary to pursue a cooperative and international solution to global warming. Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s energy secretary, said just last weekend that “California is in the lead” on energy and “can show the rest of the nation how it is done.” The only solution they’ll accept is focusing specifically on solar and wind.

 

In contrast, conservatives favor allowing the market to decide which energy you use. The U.S. has followed a fairly conservative policy in this area, over the screaming objectives of progressives, yet U.S. energy-related carbon emissions are falling rapidly. They’re now 14 percent lower than they were in 2005, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). This happened because of the transition from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas — a free-market solution.

 

Let’s compare this with a more-progressive policy. Germany is building solar and wind power as fast as possible while closing nuclear reactors and attempting to wean itself off Russian gas. Yet emissions are still rising. And all of Germany’s subsidies and support for green energy have sharply increased power prices, with the average German paying $312 per megawatt hour of electricity in July 2022. In contrast, the average American will spend less than half of that, paying $146 per megawatt hour in 2022, according to the EIA.

 

Moreover, wind and solar have already damaged the power grids of Germany and California. Germany paid wind farms $548 million in 2016 to switch off production in order to prevent damage to the country’s electric grid.

 

So despite Germany spending hundreds of billions of dollars boosting solar and wind, its emissions are rising while power gets more expensive.

 

The problem is that centrally planned progressive solutions such as solar- and wind-power systems are not reliable. As a result of this, Germany has been forced to recommission coal-power plants to simply keep the lights on and the power grid reliable — not ideal if fighting climate change is your aim. Unless California embraces common sense when it comes to its electric grid, it should expect more of the crisis it is experiencing right now.