If insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, then California’s a clear candidate for the asylum.
Over the last 20 years, its maniacal wind and solar obsession has cost Californians dearly: they suffer America’s highest power prices and, when the mercury soars, are lucky to get any power, at all. Energy poverty is an entrenched part of daily life now for millions of its poor and underprivileged.
But, that’s the price to be paid for the unsubstantiated belief that all your power needs can be delivered exclusively by sunshine and breezes.
California’s wind and sun cult reckon that the solution to its power pricing and supply calamity is simple: endless banks of giant batteries – which will store wind and solar power on those occasions when it’s purportedly being produced in excess, to account for sunset and/or calm weather.
It’s never worked anywhere on Earth, but California has always been known for defying the odds.
If (and it’s a mighty big ‘if’) lithium batteries were able to be scaled up to the degree required, the cost of building that capacity would outstrip the economic value of the electricity produced by California’s wind and solar generators for generations.
In other words what the American calls a ‘costly and pointless boondoggle’.
Donn Dears runs the numbers and reaches that very conclusion below.
California Orchestrates Disaster
Power for USA
Donn Dears
24 August 2021
California, in the face of considerable skepticism, continues to go down the road to grid disaster.
It recently issued a multi-agency report, 2021 SB 100 Joint Agency Report Achieving 100 Percent Clean Electricity in California: An Initial Assessment.
The report claims California will be able to achieve zero-carbon energy resources of 100 percent electric retail sales to customers by 2045.
California Energy Commission (CEC) chair, David Hochschild, said,
“The results of this preliminary analysis show that it is indeed possible to achieve a 100 percent clean electricity future. The threat posed by climate change requires us to think and act boldly today.”
Among the report’s findings are:
- California will need to roughly triple its current electricity grid capacity.
- California will need to sustain its expansion of clean electricity generation capacity at a record-breaking rate for the next 25 years. On average, the state may need to build up to 6 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable and storage resources annually. By comparison over the last decade, the state has built on average 1 GW of utility solar and 300 megawatts (MW) of wind per year.
What the report doesn’t mention in detail, is the cost associated with this scheme, nor does it recognize the scheme is, in fact, impossible to achieve, despite the results of their computer-generated forecast.
Another blogger took the time to calculate the cost, while noting that the batteries required to achieve the scheme don’t exist.
He calculated, “They [CA] would need roughly something in the range of 54,000 GWH of grid-scale battery storage, which at current prices would run around $10 trillion.”
Note that this is nearly half the size of the entire debt of the United States.
Previously, in my report, Green Nightmare for Americans, it was determined that it would cost the United States $7.1 trillion to merely build the wind and solar plant needed to supply the country with electricity, without trying to determine the cost of storage because the necessary storage technology hadn’t yet been invented.
It should be noted that Secretary of Energy, Moniz, an Obama appointee, said,
“Batteries will never be the solution for long-term storage.”
The estimate of $10 trillion to provide the necessary storage for California will bankrupt the state.
The California report appears to recognize there is a reliability problem, where it says:
“The final root cause analysis [of the several blackouts in 2020 identified the need to reflect the uncertainty of weather, operational characteristics of clean energy resources, and market dynamics into the state’s reliability planning processes and studies.”
Any prudent person or government would study these issues before implementing actions that can lead to disaster.
California is no role model for the rest of the United States.
Once again, California is going down the path of self-destruction, even though it has already experienced blackouts from the lack of fossil fuel power generation.
Power For USA
STOP THESE THINGS 
North Carolina may join this wind / solar / battery disaster thanks to some of our liberal Republicans like House Speaker Tim Moore who have a Green New Deal bill going through the legislature.
https://www.beaufortcountynow.com/post/48100/hb951-threatens-serious-political-damage-to-the-gop.html
OK ‘bean counters’ within the brain-dead supporters of so called ‘renewable’ energy have decided no matter the cost the only way is forward.
Yet not one of them has come up with the ‘bean count’ of how much it will cost for repairs and replacements of these monster fields of turbines, solar panels and batteries. This omission is understandable if you want to smother people with lies and misinformation as the industry is want to do.
These costs are important and should be included in ANY forward costing of these forms of energy production and storage.
I doubt if any one single field of turbines or solar panels can last as long as a conventional coalfired power station and I would expect a new ‘clean coal’ one would probably last even longer before it would need to be replaced or receive a major overhaul.
Those supporting ‘renewables’ are not interested in how the turbines, panel and batteries are manufactured and disposed off – they certainly ignore that fact these are NOT RENEWABLE.
It should be remembered none of the energy from these things are actually ‘renewable’, they do not recycle the wind or the sun, both are present or not present when needed, with the wind moving around the earth and the presence of the sun in any-one place depends on time of day and the presence of cloud and wind strength and temperature – as we know it can be very sunny but a very cold wind can cool the fields of panels just as it does to your roof panels.
The term ‘renewable energy’ is a fallacy, it does not exist.
The cost of going forward in any country with this form of energy production is problematic as it costs more than conventional energy production to both install and produce, the items utilised for the meagre production are costly to manufacture, install and replace and in addition they cannot be safely disposed off – so why are so many countries going down this environmentally damaging and expensive path?
It’s false claims from the industries money spinners and of little use as a major contributor to the energy production the world requires.
Lets look at sensible, reliable and environmentally safer ways to produce the energy needed for a modern society, there are systems available and no doubt more could be made of these if only people would get on board for a truly environmentally cost effective way of producing what is needed. To start with clean coal plants and nuclear should be at the forefront of energy production.
Here in Australia we are principally wind for the moment our solar is mainly rooftop and is quite large. I have a website on it you will find calculations done for energy storage for wind in our conditions against actual data. There is also an article which was published on WUWT https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/08/12/energy-storage-an-estimate-using-actual-data/. For every terawatt hour of electricity 500 MW of wind and 22 GW hours of storage is needed. Practically it would be much worse than that my prediction is that it is just not achievable. One must ask particularly when you see that the only answer nuclear to reducing emissions significantly is rejected by COP 26 is energy suicide the real agenda. Or are we governed by the ignorant and the stupid.
California needs a replacement backup plan to successfully eliminate fossil fuels, as breezes and sunshine can only generate electricity, but solar panels and wind turbines cannot manufacture any of the products from crude oil that are the basis of lifestyles and economies.
This scheme is like that of the high speed rail. Bankrupting the state or the country is never the priority of any of California’s sleazy self-absorbed politicians as they all will make gobs of money off whatever they do to it.
I would not exactly characterize it as a path of self destruction it’s more a path of cult behavior and the members of the cult not knowing better as they are hypnotized. If you have ever watched commercial television here and compare to small town America you know what I am talking about as the PROGRAMMING is so slick and so intense unlike no where else in the world.
Tripling the grid capacity is a joke, it’s the same problem with why the high speed rail never made it to big cities where it would have made it worthwhile, land rights. We all saw that and many warned of that HUGE PROBLEM that would be insurmountable, did any California politician care? No of course not. So that thing remains a waste of mostly federal money, and it goes nowhere, from small country farmland to small country township. Who will ever use it?
Communism would blast thu that blockade which is why China builds things so fast and this is what most of the political elite want. There’s so much money for them if they could just trample over property rights where ever they please “for the greater good”. Not likely to happen though unless the cult mentality remains stuck in this new phenomena of one man rule of Gruesom Navin leadership and Faucist dictates of self harm.
In the first decade of Y2K Desert Hot Springs officials waged war on California’s attempt then of expansion of the grid, so this is not new. They fought hard and smart and very persistent and won against new high tension lines installed over their pristine desertscapes that would have run up to Pioneertown and across the high desert all the way to Los Angeles for 150 miles. Councilman Russel Betts headed that effort and worked with the communities affected to stop it. He would be an ideal person to get involved with if anyone in this area wishes to forge new plans of how to stop the spread.
Have a look at the pickle that California would be in if they did not have extension cords running to several other states. They import 30% of their power, indeed no other US state imports as much.
https://www.riteon.org.au/netzero-casualties/#203
They will be in real trouble when the other states run down their conventional power capacity under the impact of the Green New Deal because then they will have less spare power to help out the Golden State.
Have a look at the dependence of European states like Denmark on their neighbours when the wind is down, like the last week!
Their newest extension cord would travel to Northeast Arizona just south of Winslow at Chevelon Canyon where the plan is to build 170 Los Angeles skyscraper size turbines over a whopping view destroying 49 square miles. Likely much of what little energy that produces will be sold to California while all the schemes of subsidies and billing will flow freely and regularly into the politicians portfolios. Navajo County and Coconino County approved plans with little to no opposition. Coconino is even allowing these monstrocities at the entrance to Grand Canyon National Park which is pretty disgusting to mess with the viewscapes there. STOP Chevelon Butte Wind.
And the UK, even Germany. The wind isn’t blowing somewhere all the time.
But California will be “saved’ – they are talking of building open cycle gas turbine plants although there may be some difficulty getting natural gas.