Gov. Gavin Newsom admits it: Green energy mandates are driving California's blackouts

American Thinker ^ | 08/18/2020 | Monica Showalter

[SFConservative]

... actual answer is that there was more than enough power to keep everything on, just no way to get it to the dense urban areas.

Not so - if that were true it would be an on-going problem.

The real story is that Democrats have been pushing for more and more "renewable" energy and it is now at 33 GW (27 solar, 6 wind) out of the total 76 GW installed generating capacity in California. But late afternoon all the solar and easily half of the wind is not producing. So now all you have is ~46 GW of which maybe 10% is out of service for maintenance, leaving ~41 GW. Peak demand in late afternoon is running 43-46 GW during this heatwave, so we're 2-5 GW short, hence rolling blackouts.

These are known, reported numbers and the situation was entirely predictable and is on its way to getting worse as the state is lurching to 40 GW renewables by 2025 while decommissioning the last nuclear plant and other conventional capacity. Newsom will bravely say he is going to do something about this, but that is all bravado as with the high-speed rail fiasco that he was going to cancel years ago but is still being built, wasting billions each year.

[kingu]

Where did you get the idea distribution was the issue?

Well, distribution has been an ongoing issue for 23 years. It was the impetus behind the creation of CalISO. To upgrade the interlinks between northern & southern California. PG&E, SoCal Edison and PG&ESD (as well as) SMUD and other local utilities weren't maintaining the towers.

The rolling blackouts of 19 years ago was also because of the same issue. There was enough power out of state to power California, just not enough capacity to get the electricity to where it needed to be.

Since that time, large wildfires have damaged high tension lines running from Oregon to the Bay Area (the Medencino Complex, which sparked a lawsuit to demand a full environmental impact report before those towers could be replaced), the coastal interlink was severely damaged by the Thomas fire (Central Valley to Santa Barbara, Oxnard, Ventura), again a won lawsuit for a full environmental impact report, and the fires in San Diego county which damaged the interlink between the massive coal plants on the Navajo reservation and San Diego, Orange counties (and the last won lawsuit.)

Further, CalISO's own website demonstrated the existing generation capacity at the time of the declared flex alert and following rolling blackouts, 44800 megawatts vs the expected need of 38600 megawatts.

But hey, it's got Newsome on the defensive, so let's go with renewables being the fault here.