California Needs More Power to Prevent Blackouts and Brownouts This Summer

Californians will feel the sting of the choices they have made on election days over the last couple of decades. The Republican party is as rare in California today as the sabertooth tiger. California used to have five nuclear power plants. Today they have one. They used to have 242,00 oil wells. Today they have barely just over half of that amount. The liberals have banned fracking and much of the area where there are great deposits of oil is off-limits to drilling.

It is now being said that this summer, when air conditioners run the most, California could see massive blackouts and brownouts unless they can find new energy supplies from another state. California has ample wind and solar farms, which they used as an excuse to limit other forms, such as fossil fuels. But, in the process, they wildly overestimated the amount of energy they would produce.

Reuters:

In an online briefing with reporters, the officials forecast a potential shortfall of 1,700 megawatts this year, a number that could go as high as 5,000 MW if the grid is taxed by multiple challenges that reduce available power while sending demand soaring, state officials said during an online briefing with reporters.

Supply gaps along those lines could leave between 1 million and 4 million people without power. Outages will only happen under extreme conditions, officials cautioned, and will depend in part on the success of conservation measures.

In 2025, the state will still have a capacity shortfall of about 1,800 MW, according to officials from the California Energy Commission, Public Utilities Commission, California Independent System Operator and Newsom’s office. They also projected annual electricity rate increases of between 4% and 9% between now and 2025.

In countries such as Iraq, they would have frequent blackouts even though they are swimming in oil. This year California will join them.

In California, it’s simple stupidity.

At the same time, many solar farms and energy storage projects the state has commissioned over the last two years were delayed due to supply chain challenges during the pandemic and a recent federal trade probe into solar imports.

“We are in a place now where we have to factor in a new landscape in terms of the challenge in front of us with bringing the projects that we need online,” Karen Douglas, an adviser to Newsom, said during the briefing.

The announcement, which came a week after Newsom said the state was open to keeping its remaining nuclear power plant running to maintain reliability, appeared to lay the groundwork for an effort to keep older facilities — some of which are powered by natural gas — online.