By Bryan Williams
Welcome to the club, Texas! California has been mismanaging its electrical power grid for going on 20 years. How can the two largest states in the nation by population, both with vast natural resources and human ingenuity fail their residents like this? It is 2021. Citizens should not be without electricity in the United States because of political and managerial problems.
That Texas is red and California is blue is also a conundrum. How can both political parties (California has been run by Democrats for nearly a generation -- Governator Schwarzenegger acted like a Republican for all of two years or so -- but that’s for another column -- and Texas, dominated by Republicans) get this so wrong?
I can’t speak to Texas’ woes, but I can to California’s. Democratic Gov. Gray Davis rushed in where only fools dare tread back in 2001, and actually put the state into the electricity buying business using taxpayer dollars, in order to stave off erroneous shortages of electricity due to market manipulation of California’s electricity supply. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, California’s electricity problem developed different causes with the same results: Millions left without power in the state that gave us the iPhone, PayPal, Tesla, and is home to Alphabet/Google, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Stanford University (that is to say -- places with LOTS of smart people.
Why? Because for years our politicians have replaced reliable electrical production with renewable resources like solar and wind to save us from the evils of CO2 pollution. When the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, California is a net exporter of electricity. But the sun sometimes is hidden behind clouds, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Meanwhile, the state’s nearly 40 million residents need more and more electricity to power those iPhones, Teslas, and all those Chromebooks (made by Google – one of which I am typing on now) that millions of kids need to be taught at home due to COVID school shutdowns. A brilliant, potential solution to California’s unstable energy supply is to use old electric car batteries to store excess electricity from solar and wind farms, but those “battery farms” are still years away. Really, how will that look to have stacks and stacks of greasy old car batteries next to those gleaming solar panels?
At the same time, baseline electricity production like (brace yourselves - I’m going to say something controversial) clean nuclear power is being shut down all over the state. Why? Because anything nuclear must be bad (right?), and because of short-sighted politicians in Washington, our nuclear power plants aren’t allowed to recycle their fuel like those in Europe, so we have to store spent nuclear fuel rods in pools of water in open air. Brilliant!
As for natural gas power plants, they emit too much CO2, and use fossil fuels to make electricity, though the California plants make more than enough energy from this to feed the entire state. What about hydro-electric power? Here’s another clean, renewable source of electricity, right? More and more of these century-old plants are being decommissioned because California’s left-leaning politicians are worried about their effect on fish. Meanwhile, California ratepayers (who pay the highest rates in the nation) get to sit in the dark and the heat, and now, the smoke. Now, California utilities are allowed to shut off power for wildfires sparked on land that state and federal political officials have for years failed to clear out. Meanwhile, those same politicians have failed to hold our electric utilities accountable for running the shoddy equipment that can spark fires, in the first place.
So to repeat, welcome, Texas! One question: When can we shut down the politicians and get back to the basics of providing electricity in the richest state in the richest nation in the world?
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•Read Stephen Macaulay’s commentary on President Biden’s supply chain review — Click on Forum above.