Green Power Fails California

Six months after a winter cold snap caused the failure of the 'green energy' grid in Texas, the onset of summer is doing the same in California.

California - that liberal utopia powered by renewable power - has made an urgent request for additional power supplies to avoid blackouts this summer, an extraordinary step after suffering from rolling outages less than a year ago.

State energy officials asked the California Independent System Operator, which runs most of the grid, to contract for additional power capacity for July and August. They are desperately worried that the state won’t be able to meet demand during the evening when solar production fades, according to a joint statement issued on Thursday from grid, utility and energy agencies. They didn’t say how much more power is needed but one can guess it will be a lot.

Of course, there was a convenient scapegoat on which to blame the collective lack of competence: global warming.

“California is using all available tools to increase electricity reliability this summer,” the heads of the California Energy Commission, California Public Utilities Commission, and grid operator said citing “unprecedented climate change-driven heat events, which are occurring throughout the West in combination with drought conditions that reduce hydroelectric capacity.”

Supply challenges are mounting less than a year after a heat wave forced the state’s first rolling outages in two decades, and meeting demand is likely to be even harder this year because long-range forecasts call for above-average temperatures through September.

Of course, if they still had coal-fired, gas or nuclear plants, the weather would be irrelevant.

What is remarkable is that even Bloomberg, which has been on a crusade to crush non-green sources of power, admits that California's problem is the state’s aggressive push to cut carbon emissions by shifting to renewable energy.

Many gas-burning plants have closed, which means electricity supplies tighten at sunset as the production from solar generation fades around sundown. What’s more, big batteries being built to store solar power during the day and resupply the grid in the evening won’t be available by August and September, the state’s hottest months.

In short, it's time to admit that California's "green" push has been a complete disaster, and is about to leave millions of people in the dark during hot, sweaty days, leading to countless deaths.

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