California Orchestrates Electric Grid Disaster, by Donn Dears

Source:

https://ddears.com/2021/08/24/california-orchestrates-disaster/

"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 reports 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."